This post came from an assumption that the standard “generic” bulbs I was buying meant I was possibly sacrificing visibility, and therefore safety in my bulb choice. Particularly having seen the claims of market leader Osram with their “up to 90% more light” “up to 10% whiter light”, and up to 35 metres more visibility, for the Night Breaker Plus bulb. I thought I had to give these a go, particularly as they are a direct replacement for standard bulbs i.e. they require NO modificaton to your headlamps to install.

Pricing for high performance bulbs

I bought mine from EuroCarParts initially, and then took then straight back, when I got home and found them for half that price online! Current Amazon pricing is below.

Note: When buying, be sure to check what fitting you need (H1, H4, H7…). My Peugeot 206 needed the H7 version. The fitting type is generic across bulb manufacturers, so find out what fitting type your car takes at this Phillips website, then search Amazon for suitable bulbs:http://www.pal-guide.com

(See below Amazon info for my experience of using Osram Nightbreaker Plus Bulbs)

My experience

Pros:

Cons:

So theorically more pros than cons, but the cons are major, i.e. I bought these for increased visibility, and I don’t appear to have gained that at all! I’ve sent an email to Osram to ask them to backup their claim. I assume they will state that the increase is most noticeable in full beam… but frankly, so 35 metres extra on full beam I would expect to notice *something* on dipped beam!

This all said, I probably will buy again if price remains good, and lifetime is at least 1 year. As this will make them comparable life to cheap bulbs, but with a smarter look!

With some maintenance going on one of my local TV masts over the last week, I’ve only been able to get “group 1″ digital TV (mainly BBC channels, no ITV, Channel 4, E4, Channel 5…). After some frustration at this, and several attempts to tune into other masts (using manual search based on UHF channel info from ukfree.tv), to no avail, I went hunting online for a streaming option.

Be very careful with free online streaming, as there are some very dodgy TV sites out there from which my neighbour has caught several viruses.

TVCatchup.com however isn’t dodgy, and so far as I can tell, is completely legal (for use only by those living within the UK and paying for a TV license). It enables streaming of live TV, and having checked it out, I’m very impressed, an advert at the start, and then straight into “live” TV, which appears to be about 10 seconds behind my digital signal here. I should mention that it supports most of the free freeview channels – full list.

What’s more, with a bit of playing around, I put it through my TV, so it was as though the mast issues weren’t there!

How I did it

1. Connected laptop to TV via audio cable (headphones out on laptop to Red and White audio inputs on TV)
2. Connected laptop to TV via S-Video cable (S-Video out on laptop to S-Video input on TV) – Note: There are other options, I’ve done S-Video on laptop to Yellow Video socket before too.
3. Changed laptop display settings to display on laptop and via S-Video using IBM Presentation Director (for IBM/Lenovo laptops)
4. Opened TVCatchup.com – signed in with free id, and selected channel required
5. When streaming started, I selected full scene option in the bottom menu (only appears when you hover the mouse at the bottom of the screen)

Quality

Really very impressive, similarly to the BBC iPlayer on normal setting I think. It is noticable on the screen that its streamed, as it’s slightly slower frame rate, and colours aren’t clean and perfect, but you don’t notice after a while, and it’s more than enough to see quite fine detail. Well worth having in-place for those occasions when you need it.

Having been given a neighbours laptop that has been attacked by viruses, I found that the main issue was a Win32/Patched.FM and Win32/Patched.FL which had infected explorer.exe and winlogon.exe.

The issue with these viruses is that they “patch” Windows files to include themselves. This means critical system files like explorer.exe are infected, making removal more difficult.

After some thinking through, I ran AVG in Windows Safe mode. This however deleted infected files, and left the system unable to boot. I considered options to place the missing files back, but in the end used the AVG Rescue Disk to replace the files from the Virus Vault (still infected), to give access to Windows back, and used a very good, and free, rootkit infection remover called Combofix to remove the issue. Combofix is available from bleepingcomputer.com, and removes critical files, replacing them from ServicePack backups, and hence leaving the system operable.

Hope this helps others with these and other critical system infections.

Having been given a friends laptop with issues (booting very slowly, and throwing regular errors). It hadn’t been maintained for a longer time, so I went searching the Internet for some ideas for a PC healthcheck (having drafted a basic list myself), but found very little of any use at all. This entry aims to give you a view of what I ran, which hopefully may prove useful to others looking to do the same type of thing.

Items are in my recommended order.

1. Virus scan
   Free virus scanner available from AVG: http://www.avg.com
2. Windows Malicious Software Tool
   Can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.aspx
3. Uninstall useless software, including browser toolbars
   It never ceases to amaze me what rubbish is installed on peoples machines. A regular visit to “Add/Remove Programs” in the Control Panel is vital to keep your machine clear of unwanted software which maybe stealing memory as well as disk space from you!
   Search the internet for any items not by a major brand, as you may find it to be less than honest (on my friends laptop, I found looks of “search optimisation” software, to improve her searching experience in theory. In practice, it was stealing information, and making money from her web searches by opening popups). Be particularly suspicious of browser toolbars, these slow browsers down and many are the cause of popups and data theft.
4. Chkdsk/f
   Scans your hard drive for data and index corruptions and attempts to fix. Run “chkdsk/f” from Command Prompt. You’ll need to agree to restart your machine, and the scan will happen during the restart.
5. sfc/scannow
   System File Checker – run “sfc/scannow” from Command Prompt. Given regular error messages, I ran this command to verify the integrity of the Windows System files (suspecting that some files were corrupt due to viruses found in step 1).
6. Bootvis (optional)
   Available from: http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664
   This Microsoft tool is no longer available from Microsoft as they claim Windows handles speeding up boot times itself in the background. I did however download it, as it is widely reported to still improve boottimes, plus is helpful in seeing what drivers are slowing the boot. In my case, AVG was actually the main slowdown ironically!
7. Microsoft Update / patch key software and drivers
   For a machine to run efficiently, it needs the latest drivers, so I recommend visiting Microsoft Update (http://www.update.microsoft.com/) and downloading any updates, plus updating any other key software you have on your machine, particularly anything that loads on startup.
8. Run a registry cleaner
   Over time your registry gets messy, with lots of orphaned entries (entries needed and added by software that you have since uninstalled). Eusing Free Registry Cleaner is the one free registry cleaner that I trust… important, as once again this is an area where a lot of dodgy software exists.Eusing Free Registry Cleaner is available from their website: http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm and is of course free.
9. Compact your registry
   Also available for free from Eusing is Eusing Free Registry Defrag, well worth downloading, as your registry can get bloated in size, slowing boot times.
   http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_defrag/registry_defrag.htm
10. Disk Cleanup
    Emptying the recycle bin, internet cache, temporary files etc.. is a great thing to do once in a while. Running Disk Cleanup does most of this for you. If you use a browser other than IE, you’ll need to empty that cache separately.
    Tip: If you’re like me and avoid the “Compress Files” option for Disk Cleanup, you’ll find the start time of Disk Cleanup a wind-up, as it spends ages on the Compress Files option. To stop Disk Cleanup considering the Compress Files options, simply delete the entries in the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches” (you may want to keep a record of these in-case you want to re-enable this option in the future!). Disk cleanup will start a LOT quicker now!
11. Disk Defragmentation
    I leave this until last as some of the activities above will cause fragmentation. Obviously you may want to run earlier too as defrag is a great way to improve the overall speed of your machine.

I hope that helped!

Any ideas for further items? If so, feel free to add a comment.

Yes it really does seem that we’ve lost the plot as far as privacy goes. I’m not just talking about security breaches at companies, or government personnel losing sensitive information…. I’m talking about you and I sharing far more data than ever we surely should.

I’ve not been a huge fan personally of the massive fashion of social networking, and obsessive Twitter type behaviour, and a new site hitting the news at the moment just goes to underline my concerns.

The site is pleaserobme.com … and yes, it very simply uses a Twitter API to capture a list of people using Twitter and foursquare, and who are declaring themselves to be away from home at the moment. The result is a list of addresses that are currently ripe for a robbing! A scary use of the geo-location information that social networking sites just love us to share.

I’m glad to say from my own perspective that I’m not on Twitter or FourSquare, and even those close to me have no idea whether or not I’m at home or not, until they ring and find out… and frankly, I prefer to keep it that way!

So being serious for just one moment, we do seriously need to take a look at our activities these days, particularly on the Internet, and realise that we all share a lot of information online. The important question is, of course, whether the information we provide can be pieced together to provide more information than we would wish to provide.

Thanks to the guys behind pleaserobme.com, the general public maybe getting a slightly rude awakening to the consquences of social networking habits. Time will of course tell as to whether this site changes habits or simply provides a few minutes comedy for people.

I don’t know if it’s my anti-virus getting a grip onvirus ridden e-mails, but I am getting a lot of “unknown error” messages in Windows Live Mail when I try to delete or move to junk, spam mails with attachments.

I was somewhat frustrated by this, as it leaves my inbox littered with junk… I have however found a solution by accident which works, so thought I’d pass it on!

Solution: Simply right click on the mail in question and select properties…. yes, you’ll get another error message (“The properties of this message could not be displayed”)… BUT, if you now try to delete, or move the mail to junk, it WILL work!

Assumption of the situation: I assume the issue is that the mails in question have viruses (I assume this), and that my virus scanner is grabbing them and deleting or quaratining the .eml file behind the mail (I certainly do get a virus found message when replicating such mails). Windows Live Mail is probably therefore screaming because it has the mail in its index, but can’t find the .eml in the file system to remove as part of the delete or move. The selection of properties (again, I assume) must create a placeholder .eml or other reference that allows the original move or delete function to happily perform against that mail.

Hope that proves handy to someone!