rory

Ok I understand now. As you mention it must be a software issue then. Another thing would be to try contact the DVR manufacturer for a firmware update to see if that fixes the issue, or at least ask them about it. Also you might be able to sell it to someone that doesn't need that feature (its actually rarely used) and then buy a DVR that has that working feature.

Do you have a car alarm yet?

Well this is the city, but think of it like South Central LA. There is only here, or the out islands. No crime in the out islands, but nothing to do and even more expensive due to the extra shipping.

I like to physically confront that type of criminal (while armed to the teeth). Last one came here trying my doors I chased him down the beach, he was apparently hiding in the bushes for hours - he never came back.

Its not native in XP but there are tons of 3rd party software for it. Also it wont be restored from "within" XP as the image is a copy of the original partition, it will overwrite the existing disk partition so that has to be done from another disk or partition running its own minimal OS (eg. Dos, Linux, etc). Actually I was creating images for Recovery CDs back in the Windows ME days. Name brand computers used to always come with one of those, now they either put the restore on the disk on a different partition (useless when the drive fails, which are most of my service calls for laptops), or with win7 expect you to follow the instructions to image it - most users dont. Also XP has System Restore, though personally I always disable that - I feel images and regular data backup is best. Business computers still give alot of options, its the cheaper laptops that tend to cripple the user.

Yeah my XP images range from 200mb to 1GB for a complete XP setup. Throw them on a small SD card or USB flash drive and good to go. Considering the IDE drives were 30mbs read, the 2-3 year old Satas were 55, the slow SSDs on the first netbooks were in the 20s, SD cards around 10 .... now new Satas around 135mbs, and most fast consumer SSDs around 300mbs+ ... along with fast CPUs the install would only take a few minutes compared to 20-30 minutes on old machines like celerons (Atoms still take a while though, just glorified celerons is all). I installed XP the other day on a Win7 i3 laptop with a slower 5400rpm HDD and it took maybe 10 minutes but the overall speed is like night and day from Win7 - literally it feels like you are superman. The drivers were the problem (eventually solved) as they only list the win7 drivers on their site in most cases. Also now some manufacturers cripple you by using a custom unknown BIOS with no settings for anything besides boot order and password. So with XP you need to make a custom XP setup disk with the sata drivers already slip streamed using something like Nlite - only takes a minute though, but still an inconvenience. My Acer netbook came with 7 too, forget about it that thing was soooooooo slow and that was 7 starter edition (stripped down crippled win7) ... I mean its slow with XP so imagine with Win7 ... but with XP its so much faster by comparison, again night and day. Eventually like everything they will cripple us with lack of driver support, laptops/netbooks being the most difficult, HP already started, even though they claim they are getting out the hardware biz. And eventually the same will happen with Win7, as they cater to the orders handed down to them from the manufacturers like Intel, who they likely have giant shares in. Want a new OS, buy a new super computer ... more money for all of them. What is nice is Ubuntu seems to just work on everything, including netbooks and even the iMac. Although the video drivers tend to be an issue.

If you are getting video loss at night only then its likely the IR drawing too much current - check power requirements of camera, and the power supply amps. However as it is coming and going, it sounds like it might be an Iris issue, although again the AI may not be getting enough power. If its random video loss day or night, and you already changed the camera, and changed the power supply or switched to a known good power supply - then it could be a bad cable, meaning replacing the entire video/power cable. Ive seen the fading out from bad cable, its rare but it happened. So questions: -what kind of power and video wire is being used? -what type of power supply is being used? -what are the power requirements of the camera.

everyone has a different need and opinion on the matter one place I know has a huge sign, even a picture of a camera .. the criminals still walk right past it and jump the fence. I even put up some dummy cameras at my place (real cameras that were broken) at face height on a couple trees so that some daytime intruders would basically hit them head on .. they walked right past them .. it took a physical confrontation and some choice words to make them never come back again. Sometimes it helps to deter, the way I stop the nighttime burglars around here was when they jump into the property and I see them on camera live (beams alert me someone is there, or I simply hear the thud as they jump over the wall), I set off the siren .. they rarely ever come back. Ofcourse now my neighbors have armed security with machine guns patrolling all night so ..

BTW its important to use what you want to use and what works for you. Thats all that really matters .. Although IMO if you are going to reinstall all the drivers anyway, I would suggest a fresh install of the OS, especially if you have a fast system and not tons of data to backup. Remember hard drives are more than twice as fast now than they were 2-3 years ago (fast SSDs can be 6 times faster), so that coupled with the much faster CPUs many systems come with today, and tons of ram, makes installing the OS a breeze these days.

there are dozens of brilliant free imaging software. Yes XP has built in Backup software, and can be scheduled to backup whenever you like. Sysprep was around for years. XP takes alot less time to install than Windows 7, its like 10 times less the size, less files, less everything.

XP is still king for imaging, its more than 10 times smaller than win 7 so the image can fit on anything, you can pretty much use anything to image and restore it with including DOS, and takes just a couple minutes to restore because its so small. You dont need a Microsoft tool to image with, there are may other free tools out there that work great.

Blue screen still exists in 7 as much as in XP. http://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+7+blue+screen&hl=en

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302577

You can do that with XP also. Thats not really the solution though. The idea is to have a complete image ready to go to restore a computer in 5 minutes or less. Otherwise almost the same as just installing the OS then installing the drivers.

OK, it is your opinion. Ofcourse, everything is just opinion. I do my tests in the field though, as thats what people spending money on a product really care about. Not what looks good on paper.

Here is Dahua's Excel file: http://www.mediafire.com/?bwl9wy2e80it4fr Here is my modified PDF file http://www.mediafire.com/?0a32dt4pz8hfjhy Although just because they dont recommend it, doesnt always mean it wont work. They recommend against WD Blue Drives for example but those work fine.

Useful tests are done out in the field.

These are the only 1TB Samsung HDDs that Dahua recommends as of October 14, 2011 HA101UJ/CE HD103SI/CEC

And that is why those tests are inaccurate for real world apps.

If these cameras have the same sensor and the same lens, same exposure time and these cameras have no problems, their sensitivity must be the same. I carefully tested tens of cameras of different price and I assert that the Image sensor and lens have much more influense on real sensitivity than camera price. Actually the price have no influence on the sensitivity . But may be you used cheap imitation and your $80 camera has no really Sony Super HAD CCD? Or it has some problems? Other question is that threshold parameter did you accept for estimation of sensitivity? It must be Signal/Noise ratio, NO IRE! If you use IRE, you fall into a trap. IRE depends on maximal AGC gain, which can be different. I highly recommend my article to understand this, see Page 10 "Parameters, limiting image quality at defining sensitivity". I don't deny real testing. Moreover I developed procedures and software for real testing. But we can't test all possible combinations of lens aperture, exposure time, light sources etc. We can test only one mode then calculate other situation using know physics laws. DVR can be examined too, but it is out of question of camera sensitivity. Well if all cameras were the same then we only need to test one

I should clarify, testing for real world apps should be done outside, unless ofcourse the app is only indoors

Testing IR cameras indoors is next to useless (or any low light camera). You need a long wide area to test to really put the camera to task. I test in my car park, 70x60', and also test in a small area, and in the garage, and on a long narrow balcony - the difference between the car park and the other areas is like night and day with how the cameras perform, most suck in the car park, it really tells what camera is the better camera. To test cameras there is no other way but out in the field, thats one reason why the specs for cameras are so incorrect, most manufacturers themselves dont even go outside to test.

I agree with Soundy. For example, when the specs for an $80 camera says it has a Sony Super HAD CCD and 100' IR, and a $200 camera has a Sony Super HAD CCD and 100' IR .. it matters little what the specs say and that they both claim to have the same CCD. Real world testing would prove the $200 camera to be much better in many ways - not just the IR either. There really is no way to calculate the light capabilities of cameras these days without actually testing the camera - if the specs were correct to the T then sure, but they are not. And then one also has to take into consideration how cameras are displayed differently on various DVRs.

the only way to know the sensitivity of a camera is to test it out, specs for cameras are all over the place, you get some that claim 100' IR when it only does 30', one that claims 80' Ir when it only does 40'. Bottom line is one cant rely 100% on specs to tell them how a camera will perform. One needs to actually get out in the field and test them.

2 possible reasons: 1-They were the same chipset 2-You were lucky take the following laptop for example: Compaq Presario V6700TX CTO Notebook PC Yes it uses an Intel Chipset, so likely if you imaged it to a netbook it will work, kind of. However I have an Acer netbook and was using an Intel Mobile chipset driver, but it still felt sluggish. After researching some more and finding out it does NOT use an Intel mobile chipset like the Laptop above does, but rather an Intel embedded chipset, I loaded the correct one and now it is nearly twice as fast - this also installed the correct SATA drivers BTW. And oh yeah, try restore an image from a Laptop with an AMD chipset and see how far that goes Chipset drivers also affect USB by the way, cant get USB to work, cant get anything to load as you dont have wireless or lan due to lack of the right driver, and like one laptop I was working on recently it means burning DVDs, which still tends to work regardless as its built into the OS - wait, with the netbook there is no DVD Thats when the IDE/Sata to USB adapter comes in handy, but not everyone has one of those. Lets look at this HP laptop http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?os=4062&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&sw_lang=&product=4221492#N377 You have a choice of Several completely different wireless drivers .. so if you have Broadcom and thats imaged and you load it on another laptop, thats if it even boots up, well the wireless wont work unless it too has Broadcom wireless. And you mentioned hotkeys, again you were the luckiest human on earth, or all these computers were the same brand or chipsets and or same date range, and oh yeah, same bios. Take HP, they use the HP Quick Launch app, obviously that wont work on a Dell. Take the Compaq DV5, it uses a custom bios, which is completely different from the Bios on an Acer, with some netbooks the function keys wont work at all without their custom software. Some computers dont even have a Bios, they use a custom firmware instead (eg. Mac, and some Dells). And for example for the touchpad, you have Alps or Synaptics, only one will work not both. Next, what if the customer had the OS installed without ACHI turned on in the Bios? Now if you image that to a computer with ACHI enabled, most wont boot at all in that case. If you have some of the entertainment laptops for example, you cant even disable ACHI to get into the OS to install the SATA drivers (eg. XP). Sometimes yes it will work, but most times it doesn't or when it does, it doesnt work properly. Computers from different time lines, eg, one from 2 months ago to one from 1 year ago, again can be completely different. Being the same brand chipset helps, but not always. Besides I see maybe 50% AMD and 50% Intel, and then you have a mix of Mobile and Embedded chipsets, this bios and that bios, etc etc.. so yeah .. always have the OS install disk ready to go.