Thomas

You want to have a second partion (or better yet a second drive) so that you move from one critcal point of failure that takes out the system and your video to two possible points of failure that only kill the system or the video but not both. Using a seperate partion weakens that a little but can help. Another reason is that if the software goes nuts in cleaning up it doesn't take the OS out. Third reason is so you can have a swap file of good size.

From my personal tests Kingston holds up pretty well and compares favorably. I've used them alot and I have yet to have a stick fail a memtest.

You can push 2.4 quite a bit further then that (current wi-fi record distance is 210 km) but that's something that the FCC frowns on (alot, it tends to piss of Hams and they tend to be vocal when pissed). How is the transmission rates for things like that? Are they real time capable or limited bandwith?

The cable fits into the wrist band of the watch.

A few things to keep in mind when using Ghost and other programs like it: 1. Thier licencess are per machine. One copy of ghost for each machine you use it on. If you send out bootable CD images, you have to send a copy of ghost. For internal use the corprate edition is a bit more flexiable, but you can't distrubt bootable CD's to your customers (each bootable CD has a copy of ghost and making multiple copies and distrubting them without licences is piracy.) 2. You have to be constant in building your machines. That means the same parts, the same companies each time, or you have to build a ghost image for each machine seperately. Not being careful is a good way to get driver conflicts. 3. MS makes a tool called sysprep. This lets you strip out info from an XP or 2000 image. Things like CD keys, network indentifiers, ect. 4. Test your image carefully. Make sure that you do a burn in period with a few machines with the image. Not every problem pops up imeaditly, and it will piss off the end user if thier machines go down because you didn't check that the hotfix you included conflicts with thier video server. 5. Linux support. Not much, Ghost can handle ext2 and ext3 and that's it. 6. Ghost is pretty much all or nothing. You can't restore a single program from a backed up install. You can restore a single file, but not the registry settings of a program. 7. Ghost will destroy any partition it writes to. So keeping video on a seperate drive is important. Not to discourage use of Ghost, or other programs like it, but remeber that it's not a magic bullet, it does have limits. There are some other options that may be better from a licencing standpoint and from a end user stand point. Making your own OEM version of windows is a good idea. It takes longer for the end user but gives more flexibility. You can restore a single program, you get access to the repair consol, and SFC. The downside is that it's not the simplest thing in the world. Slipstreaming drivers in is a pain, and some programs fight being installed this way. It also takes a little longer to install.

How are they doing 10 miles of transmitting? 2.4 ghz or 900 mhz don't have the distance, and any other frequency needs a licence. I know you can punch a signal longer then that, but the FCC takes a dim view of that.

Eh, the criminals already know. And remember a slegdehammer is a useful break in tool, it beats most cases. (Except maybe the HP P3 Vectra cases, suckers could stop a small bullet. Thing weighs a ton, but easy as hell to work in and has enough steel in it to build a car.)

Steve, case locks are nice, but a good fire axe can open it up, and those locks are pretty simple to pick. A prybar can get the back off, or unscrewing the power supply will give you enough room to reach for the drive on most chassies. Case locks just keep workers from casually trying to liberate the parts from the machine.

One man's protection is another man's police state.

Can't beat the paintball gun, but you can set up a PC to use NAS/or RSync to backup your data, it would take a thief time to figure that out and if they take the drive the best they get is a drive with windows or linux on it.

Under those situations that's probley a really good idea. One thing alot of resellers don't think about is UPS Power supplies. When you need as much uptime as you can get, they can be a life saver.

As far as the compact flash, my understanding is that it is expensive as hell at that size. Fairly stable, but like any PC part, get the good stuff. The cheap USB key-chains tend to crap out. The truely 133t use one of these http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/5eec/ The reason you're seeing so much slower speeds out of that Celeron is because they have half the cache on the chip. The cache is the ram built onboard to the chip itself. This ram is tiny but extremely fast due to the almost non-exstant latancy. So the chip has to farm more of work onto the ram, and that slows things down. DDR is faster and helps with the latancy, but you're loosing alot of it's advantages with the celeron's lower bus speeds, and the fact that you have alot less of it. Alot of people make a comman mistake and spend as much money as they can on the chip, and very little on the motherboard. When you upgrade, get the best Mobo you can. Not nessarly the one with the most bells and whistles but the one that will embrace the future the best. Then get the cheapest chip that will work with the chipset. You can always upgrade the chip and ram, but replacing the Mobo generally means replacing everything and it's more expensive in the long run. In general, if budget holds up for it, then spend your money in three places: Good Mobo Good ram, the name brand stuff, Cruical, or Kingston. If you don't belive me, run a system with the good stuff for a month then swap it for the cheap stuff. You'll be able to tell when it's acting "weird". Good power supply. A good power supply can make a world of differance. Antec makes some good ones. Generally you want a good power supply for a PC for the same reason you want one for you camera's. It makes a differance.

With heat there are a couple of tricks. One are front mounted fans. Or for the hardcore, water cooling. For the truely overboard, liquid Nitrous cooling. But in all seriousness, you can do alot to help with heat and air flow, but it takes some preplanning. Use rounded or sata cables to help with airflow. Add fans. Add more fans. Get better and more powerful fans.

Well a P4 has alot more raw CPU cycles to use for it. The AMD chips are on par right now, and the 64 bit chips are going to be a dream for this kind of stuff (if only for being able to have more threads.) Now if I could just liberate my boss's box...dual Opertons, 5 gigs of ram, one of the Nivida quatra cards, can burn a CD faster at 24x then my box at 52x....

My understanding is that displaying images is fairly simple, but capturing them, and storing them takes alot more horsepower. It's a CPU limit rather then anything with the OS.

If the repair doesn't work right, or misses files, it's generally because you didn't slipstream the service packs on to the disk. SFC can some times do a better job because it will prompt for service packs.

Use a hardware router, set it up with the info and connect the DVR, you may have to do some port forwarding but it should work.

Instead of doing a complete reinstall, try doing a repair install. And reinstall the Geovision software. That dll handles some of the 16 bit compatability stuff. There isn't too much you can do to w2k to speed it up. Increasing the swap file, and limiting the services on startup is about it. Getting rid of Norton is a good idea, get a hardware firewall. And make sure you have SP4, it will help with speed.

Which limits you to IE/Windows only. My way doesn't make that limit.

I'm assuming that would require the client software? My solution just needs a web browser.

I think your stability point is a little over blown Rory. We leave our demo server up and running 24-7. It only comes down if we're moving the server (like moving it to W2k3 web ed), upgrading, or a long enough power loss to take out our UPS. As much as I dislike XP, it is less prone to random death then Win98. Even when it does crash, the card can reboot the machine, or the BIOS can be set to autopower on. Some of it is building your box out of good parts, they really make a differance. Good ram can cut random crashes down by quite a bit. And can you have your stand-alone drop it's files into an FTP server so you can grab them over the web?

The first PCI slot generally has a shared IRQ with the AGP and is ment for video card use.

Hey, DVR_Expert, you you mean PCI-E (PCI-Express) cause if you're just getting PCI-X then you're lagging behind a little.

W2k has that repair option as well, and Win98 supports it in a differant way (SFC /scannow ). W2k3 is more of a server system, not so much a desktop system. And you'll note that ME hasn't been a target of the last major group of worms.

Then you are truely a blessed man. But instead of ME, why not go with w2k? Speedier then XP, more robust then ME...and if you touch one of my machines with ME...well you don't need that hand right?