Thomas

From Nuclear Subs (Electric Boat) to TV (CBS) GE makes darn near everything.

Just to toss in my two cents...size doesn't affect tech support. Commitment to tech support affects it. Take dell for example. I have to call them later on a bad mobo (got beat in shipping, ram slot bent at an 80 degree angle.) The people I'm going to talk to are differant then the ones joe average would get. Why? Because we shelled out for the better gear so we get better support. There are pros and cons to small vs large. We're a small shop, and if I have a question about how something works, I can go ask our programers. Large shops can have 50 people doing nothing but stress testing.

You're in luck, for a long time AOL was the only people who would give me DSL. Good news, what you want can be done, but they are going to have to give up a screen name to do it. Just set it up like any other router for DSL. PPPoE, username (aolscreen name plus @aol.com) and the password. After that it works like any other DSL line. No AOL crap. You get the normal always on connection. But some notes. AOL blocks port 80 and 21 and 25 and any other useful port. And no, you don't need to load the AOL software.

SATA: The latest drive standard. Probley going to replace both IDE and SCSI. Right now it's on par with IDE and just behind SCSI in performance. It's got excellent speed and has some of the lessons learned from the past built into it. One wire to one connector, usually four connectors to a mother board. IDE: The long time standard for desktop drives. It's hit the end of life, the speeds been maxed out and it's starting to show it's age. Within the next few years they will be gone. Two drives to a cable, two connectors to a board. SCSI: Server grade drives. For when 99.99% uptime isn't good enough. These drives cost quite a bit, but you're getting what you pay for. Seems to have hit the limits of it's speed and capacity. SATA and IDE are catching up in quaility and speed. SCSI can connect any number and types of devices in a daisy chain, much like PTZ cameras. (Typing this made me realise it's almost exactly the same.) Promise cards, RAID in general: RAID stands for Redunant arrary of inexpensive disks. It's a way of combining multiple drives to look like one drive to the OS. RAID can be setup in a lot of differant ways but RAID 0 and RAID 5 are the most comman. RAID 0 does what's called striping, it takes advantage of the PCI bus's faster speeds to write chunks of data to differant disks. So part of file A is on disk 1 and 2. This allows for faster read/writes. RAID 5 sets aside chunks of disk to act as backups of the other disks. So four 250 GB drives show up as 750 GB to the computer. But that lost storage space allows for swapping out dead drives. So if drive 1 fails, pull it, put in a new one, give the card a few moments and voilia, no loss of data. RAID cards run from $30 up to $10,000 (for prebuilt 2.5 TB boxes in RAID 5). The more you spend, the better the card is. The cheap ones are fine for RAID 0 but won't do RAID 5. RAID 5 can be a wonderful tool, and probley an excellent selling point for PC based DVRs. You can tell a client "yep, it costs a little more, but you never have to worry about losing data."

Most Mobos do, not all power supplies do.

Using good parts makes a big differance. I'm pretty differant from alot of the people here, at least in my role in the industry, so I get a little differant perspective then the installers. I'm one of the guys that installers (and thier customers) call when something goes wrong and it doesn't take much to spot the installers who take the time, build the machine right and those who cut corners. When one of the good one's (or thier customers) call me it's going to be a simple call, usually something along the lines of "How do I turn on this feature?". With the bad ones the calls tend to be "the system doesn't work...45 mins...problem fixed but it wouldn't have happened if the installer didn't cut a corner". A prime example: Our software uses IIS to host the web page. This requires XP Pro, W2k or W2k3. An installer cut a corner and used XP Home. XP Home won't run IIS without some massive hacks that are more pain then a root canal. He was told that we needed XP Pro, not home but built the machine with home anyway. His customer calls up the next week and is trying to get the web client working. Well after 20 mins or so, I figured out that he's on Home. This situation sucks. It makes us look bad, it pisses off the customer and builds bad will between us, the installer, and the customer. All to save $50. I understand running a small bussiness, I ran my own for two years, my dad ran his for eight, and I know keeping costs low is important, but it's where you cut costs that matter. I don't want anyone to think I'm flaming anyone because I'm not, it's just a subject I tend to take seriously. As far as I can tell, all of the regs on this board are the type that would be pleasant to support. I'm just trying to illustrate a point.

Spend the money on Antec. In the end you're actully saving money with them. If they rate a power supply at 400 watts, it puts out 400 watts sustainable. Alot of the cheaper supplies will put out 400 watts from the transformer but due to cheaper parts, the PC is only getting 350, or it will put out 400 watts for a few weeks then die.. So you end up needing a more powerful power supply which ends up costing the same amount. The Antec will last a long time and that means less trips/phone calls/emails/time wasted fixing it. Now what can help is getting your parts from a cheaper source. www.newegg.com for instance has some of the best prices anywhere but they don't ship outside the US.

Yep, you use a differant cable for both power and connection. The voltage is the same and you can get power adapters for IDE to SATA and back. The SATA drive controler is generally in the same place and hooks up in the same way.

It's an interface differance. SATA allows for much faster transer speeds then IDE. Right now they both max out at about 133mb/s for IDE and 150 mb/s for SATA. The differance is that that speed is the absolute limit of IDE and the first generation of limits for SATA. The next gen (backwards compatable) will probley be 200 mb/s. This means faster loading times for programs and faster write times. SATA is also suppose to bridge the last bit of the gap between IDE and SCSI. SATA also elimanates a few minor headaches with the configuring of drives. SATA doesn't have the master/slave/cable select settings of IDE. Since you're putting one drive to one cable you don't need it. The internals of the SATA controlers on the drives themselves are a bit more flexiable then IDE controlers and some of the lessions from the past have been added. It will be easier for SATA to adapt to new tech and not have some of the hacks that IDE had to accept (LBA, drive limits, ect.) SATA will also have a better version of the SMART (Self Monitoring Analisys Reporting Tool) that hopefully will allow techs is see failing drives earlier with less chance of data loss. You also get the minor benfit of better air flow with the smaller cables, and they claim they will be a bit more effcent in the power the drives use. Alright, that is all of the theory stuff, and I'm sure what matters most to the people reading is the hard reality. Right now almost all of the drives you buy as SATA drives are just IDE drives with an adaptor built on to accept the SATA cables. So you aren't getting a huge amount of benfit from the drives except that you can use more advanced motherboards and keep those drives in place till then.

I should have looked harder. http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/video/65ee/ Now how you'll get it to AU...I don't know. It looks like it has a VGA input, so just use a vga/dvi converter. It's powered and looks like it's intended to go from TV to Monitor so it does some signal boosting stuff. You could try the RCA input too.

I did some checking and all I can find is the cheap stuff. Your best bet to find the higher end stuff is to try some of the local A/V shops that specialise in the good stuff. The other options seem to be the really expensive plasma screens which will take DVI natively. I can't find a CRT that will accept it.

There are PC based alternitives. Us, Digaflower and a large number of other companies. I would avoid buying the card and software over E-Bay however. You won't get any tech support and you run the (rather high) risk of getting a pirate card.

Google.

If the PC is XP Home/Pro, all you have to do is put in the blank CD, open it, drag the files in, then go to file and write these files to CD. Nero is great (it's what I use) but it's for power users rather then novices. The XP method is simple but limited. It will just write the file and thats it. Nero is great if you need a bootable CD, or something exotic like a VCD.

It's also not that hard to add PTZ protcalls on the DVR side. Most of them use an ASCII, and most manufacturers will allow companies access to the protcolls. You do run into some odd things from time to time. Katel for instance has an open protcol which then runs to their converter box then to the camera.

Two advantages. Power and wear and tear. Power is probley the biggest benfit, with three drives sleeping you will see some lower power use. It won't be a huge savings (the CPU is about 60% of the total power use of a PC.) but over time it will add up. Wear and tear is less of a factor, alot of drives use thier own kind of sleep mode now, indepentant of the PC. I'm not sure you'll see alot of extra life from the drives by sleeping them (as long as the swap is on another drive) but unless GEO has a problem with it then you might as well do it for the power savings.

One of the subtle bits of cooling is something everyone here should be good with: Proper cabling. Unless you're doing something exotic like water cooling, you want to take a look at how your cables affect airflow. If you have one drive, a cd burner, and that's it, then you don't have to worry much. But some of the systems I've put together here have up to five drives (System plus 4 in RAID 5) and a burner. IDE cables are horrible, try replacing them with some of the rounded ones, or make your own rounded cables (three plastic ties forcing the cable into a circle). SATA is great with it's small cables, but if you have a lot of them, tie them together. Tie powercables together. Little things and the extra time can mean the differance between stock cooling and having to spend extra money on cooling.

On those linux DVR's, do you know if they are using X as their display?

A few quick questions. On the lock down windows feature, is it just disabling alt-cntr-delete or is it disabling all of the keys that can control/open a window like the windows key? When it's running in invisable mode, does it show up in the processes list?

Duct tape? Kidding....

I've seen picture tearing in our software and it comes from setting the camera (not the PC/standalone) resolution higher then what the camera is actually out putting. Could it be the same problem?

Some things to ponder: What do you need it for? Are you just observing normal motion? Are you watching something where you need to catch slight of hand, or do you need to just be able to say that Bob was in the room at 3:14? That will help figure out how many FPS you need. How many cameras will there be? Will you need more then one system? If so do you need to monitor those cameras from a central place? Will you need techincal support? Will you have PTZ camera's, what protcals do they use? Is remote access important?

That P3 isn't going to cut it for most DVR type uses.

Axis isn't so propritary....they host a website and stream the image. Not hard to grab the images and restream them. The tricky part is changing the settings.

Skip the MSCE, waste of money and time. A+ is good for the basics. But you want the best way to learn? Put together a machine, play with the settings till you break something, then use Google. I learned more from breaking PC's then I ever did from any class. Some other good and cheap methods of learning is try Gentoo Linux. It's built from the raw code up and will make you learn alot about the hardware.