CSG

Using an electrician to pull cables is going to increase the cost of the job too much, at least here in NY, and make your bid uncompetitive. Plus, finding a subcontractor to be available when you need him is also a challenge. Really no need to use an electrician, who is licensed for line or hi voltage, to pull low voltage wiring.

I wouldn't quote cable "by the foot." It's going to lead to disputes, where after you run the cable the customer is going to say "if you did it my way" we would have only used 300 feet instead of the 400 feet you charged me. Just give a flat price, and leave enough cushion for error. Typical commercial install is going to use 250 - 500 feet per camera. Remember the short leftover piece on the reel is waste, as are overpulls.

I'm not a big fan of motion based recording. It can lead to missed video, and I think it makes an incomplete record for evidence purposes, in case the video needs to be introduced at trial. I'll give you an example that happened to me. Once a neighbor's car was hit while parked in front of my building. A week prior to this incident I was playing around with motion recording on the DVR and left it enabled to see how it would do. I left it set for "Outdoors, medium sensitivity" with no masking. Well, I told the guy not to worry, we should be able to see the vehicle that hit his parked car, as there was a hi-res Sanyo D/N box cam positioned on the building close to the car. I would burn a CD and he could take it to the police. We suspected it was a truck that caused the damage, therefore we had a good chance of seeing the name on the side. The car was pushed up on the curb from the impact, making the "before" and "after" easy to located in playback. Well you can imagine my embarrassment when during playback, with my neighbor watching, the motion detection had stopped the recording at that critical moment. There was video before and after the accident, but not during, and we could not see the truck. I told them I was sorry, but we could not find the video they needed. Since then, no more motion detection for me. When I setup for a client I leave motion off, if they decide to turn it on they do so at their own risk.

That shows you how much Forbes knows

I'm sure plugging the drive in is easy, getting it properly formatted, initialized, and OS installed is something else.

I don't think it's going to be possible for you to replace the HD. The factory has to do it. And they won't upgrade the drive to a larger size from what I understand, they rather you buy a new DVR at a higher price. IF someone has field replaced a HD on a DM DVR, I'd love to hear it. There are some guys on eBay from time to time that replace drives on DM DVRs. My guess is they are former employee's. You might wanna contact them. http://cgi.ebay.com/BN-160GB-DEDICATED-MICROS-REPLACEMENT-UPGRADE-HARD-DISK_W0QQitemZ200063668951QQihZ010QQcategoryZ48632QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

defective DVR or power supply

What about the cost of the PC for the geo-card, is that in the budget?

Why does it have to be wireless? You need to run power anyway, so bury a siamese coax cable and forget about wireless.

Great, welcome aboard

I want a camera like that !!!

Maybe thats a good reason to use domes, the pidgeons can't perch on them.

I installed several Sony SSC-DC593 Day/Night box cams about 3 years ago. This location had several power failures, probably which resulted in the power flickering on and off. Anyhow after power was restored, the video was messed up on all these cams. Went up on the ladder to take a look, all the settings were defaulted (the default is manual iris and no day-night.). I had to re-configure the iris settings and the D/N settings. Never had this happen before as the settings are stored in non-volatile memory. Well the worst part was the pidgeons like to perch on the Pelco housings and the housings were a bloody mess.

Doesn't really make sense cause if it's an inside job they can just as easy shut off the router, dvr, power, cut cam wires, paper bag on the cam, paint gun,, off-site storage wouldn't make a difference. More effective would be to place the DVR in lockbox or safe.

Haven't heard of that before. How long do they want the off-site archive stored for?

I'm using a Samsung digital monitor DVI (26" widescreen), and the main Geovision window is stuck on the upper left handle side of the desktop. I can minimize it to the taskbar, but I can't get to the title bar because it's off the screen. I tried different resolutions but it's always in the same spot. Any suggestions?

thanks Rory i'll take a look at that

Don't write VB, (even forgot most of my C/C+ at at this point) so I guess I'll wait till the new software release is out, I have 8.0 now. Still working the kinks out of this thing, finally got rid of the annoying XP login prompt at bootup, which will allow the auto reboot feature to work. I used the Microsoft Tweak tool, which is a free download that allows tweaking of the OS.

I've also seen that before with coax,, it's not ground loop. I've always thought them to be 60hz lines from AC interference. It can also be a bad connector.

ASUS!!

I think I can also use shutdown.exe as a scheduled task with the reboot flag. My win2k servers don't come with this utility but XP does I think.

I hope it doesn't hang up in the middle of a robbery

It's not the camera your trying to save, it's the DVR. To that end they have surge protectors for coax cable, pricey but cheaper than replacing the DVR. And of course have a quality surge protector like APC for your 110 current supply to the DVR.

Rory, Look at the Asus mobo's, they have on-boad Sata raid. Saves you the cost of a seperate card. Raid 1 just mirrors 2 disks. Raid 5 allows for greater capacity because you can use 3 or more disks, although the usable space is less than the sum. I don't think from a practical standpoint read/write speed is much different. However, once you setup a raid, you can't undo it with reformatting the drives. I've always stuck with Adaptec cards for drive controller or raid when not implemented on the mobo, but they prolly cost a few dollars more.

yeah, XP doesn't go blue screen, it's the send/dont send http://img82.imageshack.us/img82/7021/senderror0oi.jpg windoze phone home message Most DVR users are not going to check up on their DVR until they need to review video, and that's when they want the DVR working, not a Microsoft phone home message. When I refer to an embedded DVR, I mean a quality unit like GE, DM, Bosch,Pano, Sanyo, or Samsung GVI, not a cheapo alibaba.com OEM. yeah I know DM is not a true embedded, but they rank right up there in reliabilty. I have an old 16 channel DM Sprite 5+ years old that keeps on ticking like a Timex. Took a lightening strike this summer that knocked out one channel, but it soldiers on.