COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[PanBiker]

Glad to be the seed of your nostalgia trip Wendy, It's amazing what turns up on the Internet. Somewhere out there is an image of me waving from the back of a cartoon train from the end credits of a video game written by a couple of guys I used to work with. I ran the service department and kept all the programming departments computers running. The train at the end of the game carried all the programmers hanging out of the windows with me occupying the guard van. That was about 1987 I think, came across it once when on a Googling session.

[Stanley]

I love nostalgia trips! They are the raw material of history.
Orange speed issue may have been resolved, I checked this morning and I have 16ms, 15.6mps down and .92 up. This is what I had before, it will be interesting to see if it climbs any higher.
I have a question. During one of my broadband upgrades many years ago I had to fit dongles to my phone connections to get rid of interference from the internet connection on the voice telephone. It dawned on me that these are still in the lines and perhaps they are now redundant and choking the speed. I could just take them out and see what happens but I have an in-built aversion to mucking about with something that's working. Any advice? Are they redundant now with modern connections?

[David Whipp]

The filters for fitting on landlines were supplied with the wifi router we installed last back end, so I assume they are still needed.

[PanBiker]

Leave them where they are Stanley. They are filters to separate the digital and analogue components of your line. Every device connected to your telephone line should have one. They can occassionaly go faulty which can give rise to dodgy internet but in the main they are fit and forget.

[Stanley]

Thanks for the info lads. Just goes to show that my policy of leave it alone can work!

[Tizer]

They are filters to separate the digital and analogue components of your line. Every device connected to your telephone line should have one. They can occassionaly go faulty which can give rise to dodgy internet but in the main they are fit and forget.

Can they also give rise to dodgy phone lines? We sometimes have a problem phoning my father-in-law - we get no dial tone but a recorded voice asking us to leave a message, but it isn't his answerphone and must be at the service provider. He can't access messages if we leave them and doesn't get any notification of there being a message. The service provider denies any knowledge of what's going on.

[Tripps]

Update on the El Cheapo tablet if anyone's interested. They must have read what I've put on here since they have gone up in price by £6. I've transferred a lot of photos of the new baby for Mrs Tripps to see - and anyone else I can inflict them on. , found a great free music application called Aupeo, have rejoined Skype and done a video call, and can now listen live to the NYPD in downtown Manhattan on a remote scanner application. They really do say 10/4 all the time.
I see today that John Lewis have sold out of the latest Apple iPad at prices up to £450. Go figure. (Never thought I'd ever say that, but it seems to fit well here.)

[PanBiker]

They are filters to separate the digital and analogue components of your line. Every device connected to your telephone line should have one. They can occassionaly go faulty which can give rise to dodgy internet but in the main they are fit and forget.

Can they also give rise to dodgy phone lines? We sometimes have a problem phoning my father-in-law - we get no dial tone but a recorded voice asking us to leave a message, but it isn't his answerphone and must be at the service provider. He can't access messages if we leave them and doesn't get any notification of there being a message. The service provider denies any knowledge of what's going on.

Never heard of anything like that before Tiz, certainly can't see a dodgy filter having anything to do with it either although I suppose anything is possible. Thinking logically about the problem I can only think that the message is an engineering one, i.e. from the actual network owner (BT?) and not the service provider who you say denies all knowledge anyway. No dial tone would normally denote a faulty line or some other problem between you and the exchange.

[Wendyf]

Talking about interference, our freeview signal has been breaking up recently. Col has been up on the roof adjusting the aerial but with no joy...he was just beginning to talk about getting a new aerial when he remembered that the same thing had happened last year at about the same time. It's when I put the electric fence out underneath the "line of sight" of the tv aerial. I hope we remember what the cause is when it happens again next year!

[Tripps]

You may recall I said earlier this year that Sky news had vanished from my freeview, and Sky confirmed it had been taken off. Well -it's come back, albeit a poor signal, with much breaking up. However after the latest retune about a month ago is a far more stable signal, and fit to watch again. Hooray.

[PanBiker]

Your electric fence is acting as a transmitter Wendy, it must have some spurious emission up above 600Mhz to be affecting your signal. Are you on Marton or Pendle Forest?

[Wendyf]

Pendle Forest, despite Kelbrook Moor being in the way.

[Wendyf]

Col has explained to me why it happens, but I can't take it in. The fence creates a loop, with the energiser emitting a high energy pulse over a whole range of frequencies, and that is powerful enough to destroy the RF signal.

[PanBiker]

Sounds about right Wendy, funny stuff is RF and why it has always been so fascinating for me. I have some good tales to relate from the days when the Post Office interference man used to be available for such incidents. Gerry was a bloke you had to keep on the right side of when you had an Amateur licence and were operating your station. He had the power to revoke if you were proved to be radiating RFI. I will probably get round to relating some of these over in the Amateur Radio threads.
I'm just about to post over in there as I have had a setback with the little project I have finally got round to.

[Tizer]

Thanks Ian for the comments on the line filter and thanks to you and Wendy for mentioning the potential effect of electric fences on TV signals. There are lots of electric fences hereabouts and they might explain some of the strange variations in reception.

[Stanley]

Not necessarily pertinent but I have heard reports of the 4G signal affecting Freeview and terrestrial reception.
Orange speed continues to improve. I'm running on 15ms ping, 17.17mps down and .9mps up. Best performance I have ever had. Keep improving lads!

[Whyperion]

Tizer , are you sure that BT 1570 ansa ( or whatever it is ) has not been enabled on the phone line ( and you are calling when phone is engaged ? ). Although normally if there is a message waiting the dial tone the service user gets is a different one to the normal , and the phone line owner dials I think 1571 to access .

[PanBiker]

We have that service and message to be retrieved is signified by a pulsing dial tone when lifting the receiver. You can ignore it and dial out as normal if you wish.

[Stanley]

It looks as though the Orange service has settled down now at 17.25mps steady which is better than I had before. As good as it gets?

[Stanley]

I've never forgotten my uncle Ernest who was considered a bit eccentric in the early days of TV. He used to take the back off the set and give it a good clean out once a year. I do this with computers and this morning, after an annoying little tick out of the box I went in and had a good clean up and vacuum. I pulled the little edges of gunge off the processor fan blades as well. Didn't find anything wrong but on re-assembling and starting up the tick was still there but faded away. It's now running silently... At least I feel better, all the dust shifted out of the cooling holes.

[Stanley]

Ticking has returned but isn't excessive. I have a 65gig pen drive so just as a precaution I copied the whole of this year's work onto it. Better safe than sorry and I don't want to put it on the external hard drive until I have renamed it as Archive12. Keeps everything tidy.

[Pluggy]

I'd hazard a guess its the fan in the PSU. Its not generally temperature controlled like the CPU fan and gets more bearing wear and dust stuck in it.

[Stanley]

What's a PSU Pluggy......Power supply unit?

[Pluggy]

Yep, Power supply unit, its the metal box inside the case above the CPU fan. Traditionally the fan, mounted on the back, pulls air through the unit and exhausts through the back of the PC. Some modern ones have a larger fan mounted in the bottom of the PSU and blows air through the unit, still exhausting through the back. The bigger fans in the base usually rotate slower and make less noise.

[Stanley]

Have you seen the report from the 'one lap top per child' organisation which gave tablets to children in two villages in Ethiopia. They didn't speak English, many were illiterate and there were no instructions. The kids took to them like ducks to water, teaching each other how to use them. They disabled the ability to take pictures but the kids worked out how to get round that! (LINK)