Back in the day Carbonite, for me was great; it backed up all of my data and worked flawlessly. But recently I’ve run into problems mainly support or lack of.

I’ve got a not inconsiderable 300Gb+ of data backed up online but a few weeks ago the client suddenly said I didn’t.

So I raised a support call and have been battling to get it fixed ever since. Initially I was told I had re-installed it on another computer erm, NO. Then they wanted to close the call already even though I was in dialogue with about 5 different support people.

Then I was told a web chat would sort it, guess what no joy send over some more log files. Then I found the software was filling up my hard drive, they didn’t seem to care.

So after sending 4 lots of log files, over 30 emails and a web chat the problem isn’t resolved. The client is now starting to backup all the flies from scratch which is annoying to say the least as I’ve already done it.

So in conclusion despite my other posts saying how good the service is, I’d say avoid it like the plague. You need a fire and forget solution not s hassle and stress service which is what I’ve got now.

So, I’ve moved to Crashplan it is much quicker to upload to it’s got more features and so far fingers crossed it’s still working just fine.

Update

So its all sorted and back working again, after a 7 week wait. Yes thats right it got sorted out in the end but it took an age to be resolved. No data was lost and I didn’t need to re-back everything up. And to help with silly wait I was refunded my entire subscription and then given a free year, I can’t ask for more than that.

I was told that they were looking for more people as they have expanded so fast they have more issues than they have support people, fair enough it happens a lot.

I still also use crashplan for local backups to an external HD that I keep out of the house so maybe I now have an even more resilient plan than before.

Its always nice when you get something through the post for free that might help you save some money. But not great when it doesn’t work.

So a week ago I set up the meter and its been working a treat but as I like my gadgets I thought I’d add the software onto my laptop and see what I could find out about my energy usage.

In the CD went and all look fine until I started up the software with a message about there is a problem with your software. Great what is the problem?

So I un-installed everything and tried again but still no joy and I got the same error.

So what’s the solution, run the install as an administrator. Yep I’m running Windows 7 (non ultimate) and I ran the setup.exe install program as administrator and hey presto it all installed fine and dandy.

My Dad has installed his on Windows 7 without problem, no idea why mine didn’t work but this might help some other people to fix there issues.

If you are reading this and fixed it another way then post away below and help others.

We all look forward to getting a new game especially when its a GOD / Empire building type game because lets be honest there aren’t many about these days. But sometime things can get in the way, and this time is some dreaded DRM. Know I don’t normally have an issue with this, I man game makes can get ripped off left right and centre as soon as they are launched and they need to make money after all.

The first hurdle – Installation / Getting it going

But things didn’t start well, when I installed Settlers 7 it didn’t work first time even though it even downloaded a patch before I fired up the game.  So I re-installed after removing it all for the same to happen.  So the troubleshooting started, here are a few tips.

1. Turn off dual screens if you have them. I did this and it at least tried to start, it seems after you have done this it you can turn them back on as the game is configured for using only a single screen.
2. Make sure you allow all the requests out through your firewall, doing this at least made it try and start but it still fell over. The standard changes are for the windows firewall but that doesn’t help if you are using Comodo or Zonealams
3. Turn off the Security level for Comodo, not the firewall that is left on but if I turn off the security hey presto it will fire up.

Yes yes its hard for a software supplier to test everything but Tropico started without problem so why can’t this be the same, oh and little or no DRM on Tropico and its been a dream to play.

Game Review – The Good

Well I’m up to about mission 5  or 6 and its brilliant so far, not too hard or easy but just right. The graphics are great and just about the right amount of serious and playful. The story line is evolving and the interface is pretty good as well. It is a bit confusing in some areas when trading, it seems you do it in the interface for trading but then can actually do it on the map or is it both, I’m a touch confused on that bit.

You need to get off the mark quickly on some missions to get ahead of your opponent that might need a second try to win but that is all part of the challenge.

Game Review – The Bad

Well I’ve mentioned the DRM a bit already and it really is a massive pain. Three times whilst playing the game its told my I’ve lost a connection. But so what I’m playing a local mission on my PC with no interaction with anyone else, why the hell do I care if I’ve lost connection. But in fairness its come back fairly quickly and I’ve been back to playing again.

But today takes the biscuit. Better half is out shopping for the day so I can get some quality gaming in but no, the Ubisoft servers are down and I can’t get a connection. Great so I can’t play a local game because I can’t get to the server. Now I can write this so by ADSL connection is fine but they can’t create a solution that allows me to play the game, pathetic.

Verdict

Well this is tough, I want to give the game a 9/10, its really really good but how can I give it a score like that when I can’t even play the game. DRM and the digital rights bill that is about to go through the commons in the UK is only going to make this sort of thing worse, not just for gaming but films and music. I buy all my games but do you know what I’d be looking for a crack if such a thing was available just to allow me to play the game.

So it seems its the verdict is

Ubisoft Game developers 9/10 well done you did a great job.

Ubisoft finance and marketing team 0/10, well done for killing a game I wonder how well this is going to affect your profits for this and future games, mine is going back to the retailer.

Until this issue is fixed for good I can’t recommend buying a game that might not work for a day or more (its still down after 2 hrs so far today). I will report back if there is a fix or the issue no longer occurs. Personally I’m off to play Tropico 3, that’s working perfectly and is just as good.

I’m sitting here writing this on a good old laptop with a keyboard and a lovely LED backlit 13″ screen. But could I do that with the new iPad, well I don’t think so I quite like having a nice keyboard to use thank you very much. But maybe this isn’t the audiance for the new iPad, well thats if what the new Apple Tablet is going to get called.

So what is it going to be used for?

Well I can see it as being a good way of viewing and surfing the net and looking at news articles and yes you guessed it reading books, how will Apple cope with having a device that doesn’t have a glossy screen. So thats good but I’m not sure I want to spend upwards of £400 or even more to get one. Surely its going to have to be more than that, it might be quite good for larger strategy games the developers have been asked to look at higher resolution games after all and expect it to have 3D graphics chips to spice things up.

Yes it will be super thin, and have a nice big 10″ OLED screen which will help to improve the battery life, it will need to be quite light aswell. I’d expect it might also have 3G as well as Wifi otherwise how would it update when you are on the move, I bet the networks will love having more devices to deal with.

So we could be looking at a device that is going to start to shape computing into the next decade or a big flop and and expensive one at that. It will probably be a great hit that many will love and an equal measure hate, me I’m yet to be convinced but I guess we will find out more on the 26th of January, launch date? I’d go for April or May pre-updated iPhone etc. likely in June.

So I’ve been looking for a replacement wireless N ADSL router. Some have Gigabit ports, others Dual Band wireless N but few have both at least not in the UK anyway.

But I think I’ve found the best compromise and here it is, the New Billion BiPAC 7800N Wireless N ADSL2+ with Gigabit Ethernet Switch, catchy name isn’t it!? But it has all the features that I need, but will it perform how I hope.

My ISP is Bethere Internet or Be as they like to be known and they offer a potential connection speed of up to 24Mbits if you live right on top of it. But I don’t so typically my connection speeds are about 13-15Mbits with my old router a Speedtouch 780 that was supplied with by my ISP, but that is still a lot higher than most sub 8Mbit speeds.

After I’d ordered the new router I did a set of test and noted down the speeds and times of transferring a 780Mb file to multiple different locations around the house and to different PC’s.

Equipment used for test

Homeserver – 1.5tb Green WD drive – Gigabit Ethernet

PC – XPS 430 -  Quad core – Duel stripped drives = Wireless G

Laptop – Duel Core Dell XPS 1330 = Intel Wireless G / N

PS3 via Ethernet

False Start

You know what its like, you order a new gadget and can’t wait for it to arrive. Only this time the excitement didn’t last for long as when I opened the box there was no power supply inside. I was a bit disappointed to say the least but hey these things happen. A quick call to broadbandbuyer.co.uk from whom I’d purchase the router and they got onto Billion as they had sold out of the router and there was a new power supply on the way. It arrived only a couple of days later so did it live up to the performance expectations.

A quick note on the instructions supplied before I get to the performance. Lets just say they are a bit rough and ready, no more than a few pages of photocopied A4 pages to get you started and they really aren’t that useful. If you know what you are doing then it won’t be a problem but for the novice you might be a little daunted.

Performance and Set-up

Set-up wasn’t to complex but I did need to make a few tweaks to get everything working well. The Auto configure didn’t work so I had to use the manual method.  I used this Billion Be/O2 help page to get the right settings and it almost worked, the trick was to add in the correct manual Primary DNS IP address as the AUTO setting wasn’t working. Hey presto it was up and running, but what have I connected at?

Speedtouch – 1090(Up)/14834(Down)

Billion 7800 – 1191/15801kbps (initial figure)

But things are set to get better, Be/O2 use Annex M and this means I might be able to get an even better upload and download speed but how good? Very good is the answer check out the figures below, this is far better than I have ever got before so I did a speed check as well to see if things go better.

Billion 7800 Annex M – 1347 / 17931 kbps

That’s a 3000kbps or 3Mbit improvement in upload speeds, a very healthy increase indeed. A quick speed test confirmed the boosted speed, going from 13.2Mb/s to 15.7Mb/s, not quite the sync speed but as it was via wireless and there are other factors involved that’s still a healthy increase. Another reason is that the Billion 7800 N uses a broadcom which is know to often get better download speeds.

Wireless N, is it any quicker?

I’d say maybe a little but that would be a lie, it is much much quicker for me at least. Rather than waffle on to much here are the transfer differences I saw below on the PC and the Laptop. The test was to transfer a 780Mb AVI file.

Laptop performance

Wireless G – 99% Signal – 1.82Mb/s – 6 minutes 47 seconds.

Wireless N – 99% Signal – 2.72Mb/s – 4 minutes 57 seconds.

PC Performance

Wireless G – 81% Signal – 2.42Mb/s – 5 minutes 41 seconds.

Wireless N – 50/70% Signal – 8.92Mb/s – 1 minutes 25 seconds.

The Laptop is a bit quicker but the test was done when the laptop was as close as it can get to the router, this can cause an issue with performance thus why the difference in speed is small. Also the laptop was having to try fairly hard to transfer the data @35/40% processor usage meaning it will start to be a bit of a factor in the transfer speeds.

But for the PC the speed improvement is dramatic to say the least and a clear view of how much faster wireless N can be. It wasn’t initially that quick, I had to play around with the location of the Wireless N dongal and ariels before I got a better figure and the 50/70% still doesn’t look great. I used a Billion 3010N that I bought with the router that doesn’t have a wireless antenna, but regardless of the noise the performance the speed speaks for itself.

Initial Conclusion 9/10

Well the Billion 7800N is cheaper than many of the other wireless N and Gigabit Ethernet routers, add to that it has full ADSL2+ and Annex M support and its a great package that these initial speed results show. The slight disappointment with the power supply is now  forgotten as everything else is as good or better than I hoped for.

I will update this review when I have done the Ethernet performance tests and if the router is more stable than the frankly terrible Speedtouch.  If you are in the market for a new ADSL router and are with Be or 02 or anyone for that matter then I would give this a serious look as it ticks all the boxes for me.

Now Wireless N has been out for a while, ADSL out for a lot longer and gigabit ethernet out for well… you guessed it a lot longer than both. So where are all the routers that have it all then? Well there aren’t.

So what I want this

Dual Band Wireless N
4x Gigabit Ethernet
ADSL+ 24Mb supported modem, all in one box

And do you know what in the UK, it just doesn’t exist. Netgear, nope, Belikin, erm nope, oh hold on D-Link erm … nope, Vigor well nearly everything but the 4x Gigabit, I mean why have 3x 100m and then 1Gigabit, that is just stingy for a router that costs £180.

Now if you check out the Cable models they have it all and plenty of them, dual band, loads of Gigabit ethernet ports and plenty more besides. So come on all you manufacturers out there where is my erm ‘Dream wireless router’ then, surely it can’t be that hard to produce can it?

Well as already reported a few days ago DELL XPS1330 – Nvida graphics card dies its now been fixed and the service was mighty impressive.

I called and reported the problem on Tuesday evening after a very helpful call to confirm diagnosis of the problem, they even organised the appointment at work so no need to take a day off. Dell called on Thursday morning as agreed to tell me the time of the appointment and an engineer arrived and fixed the laptop in the afternoon within 20 minutes.

When I got home I found that I had got no sound but had no time to try and fix it. But Dell called to check everything was OK today (Friday) and I mentioned the sound issue, ‘No problem I will call you at home later on and help fix the problem’, great service. They connected onto my in theory unsupported Windows 7 build no problem and fixed the issue that was a driver problem, which was strange as it worked before the re-build.

Anyway, either way the service was excellent at every step, if this is what you get from a Dell XPS machine I will be buying more. As the warranty was due to expire in a couple of weeks I’ve renewed it for another few years for £100, worth every penny.

Well as I already mentioned in my previous post Windows 7 RC inital views I was having a few problems with Windows 7 graphics issues. Well its not Windows 7 at all its a failure of the good old Nvidia 8400GS graphics card.

Just after I got the laptop I read many articles relating to Nvidia saying it had had issues with many of these chips especially under high heat. Well will only days to go before then end of the warranty period its gone. The screen won’t show a thing except for lines running vertically down the screen and the colour goes from black to white and back again with lots of other interesting lines of various colours.

Not great I know but at least it can be sorted. I have to say that so far I’m very impressed with Dells XPS support line and the quick tests, as the laptop has next business day support they are indeed coming to fix it in just over a days time (I called after 5pm so its not quite next day). Fingers crossed it all gets fixed and its back up and running for more updates on Windows 7, minus any problems.

On the warranty front , for those that are interested its £80 for 1 extra year NBD support and only £92 for 2 years. Whilst I don’t want to pay I don’t want to spend another £500 in a few months if I get another dodgy Nvidia card so I think I will be extending.

I will report back when its all fixed.

We have all read and seen first hand what Vista is like, bloated slow to load and uses plenty of memory before you have even used an application, so what is Windows 7 like?

What can I say, its quicker and lighter on its feet than Vista ever is. On my Dell XPS 1330 Vista used 1.4Gb of memory (3Gb Memory installed) before it did anything, yes some of this is due to the OS pre-fetching programs before you need them but even so that is a lot of memory. Windows 7 uses almost half of that, sitting here writing this in Firefox its only using 842Mb of memory and have I mentioned that everything is much quicker? I’ve gone for 32bit not 64bit OS for now, no it won’t address lots of memory but I don’t have any more memory and don’t intend to and I think I will wait for a few more 64bit apps to come along that I can take advantage of yet, and see which one is going to be fastest overall.

Installation

Installation took only 20minutes and it decided to do a fresh install as I’d only recently reinstalled Vista due to issues. The interface is an evolution to Vista not a revolution but everything is just that little bit better and slicker. Its not nagging me all the time either which makes for a much better experience than Vista. The windows update also found all the missing device drivers first time, that was impressive although more of that later.

The widgets that previously were bolted into where ever the sidebar are now allowed to be positioned anywhere on the desktop, if you fancy a few on the left and the rest on the right then thats no problem. I even connected my Nokia 5800 mobile phone and if recognised it and installed the drivers within seconds, it really is a great insight into what the final version is going to be like and its all very polished.

Problems?

Is it all perfect so far? Well I ‘think’ so except for some graphics problems. I’ve now installed the default Vista Dell drivers instead of the drivers direct from Nvidia. This was because its crashed a couple of time and I’ve even had graphics issues but I have a feeling that the 8400GS Laptop Graphics card might be going, the machine is coming up for a year old so I’m watching it closely. This is a known problem and I’m only days away from the warranty being finished, fingers crossed it was a blip hey.

More to follow as I get it to do more.

So you have loads of photos and data on your PC that you can’t afford to lose and need a method to ensure that both your PC and your images are backup up correctly. But you also need to know that you have a copy of the data off-site.

Well here is a simple guide on how I do it and what you need

Firstly this guide is only useful for Windows PC’s on the whole sorry, I know plenty of people use mac’s but currently I don’t but I’m sure you might be able to use elements of this guide.

Windows Homeserver

What is it and why do you need it? Windows Home Server is a piece of software that Microsoft have created specifically for the home. It’s based on Windows 2003 Server edition but with many of the features simplified for the home.  It can be installed on most older PC’s, I’m running it on an old Dell P4 desktop with 1Gb of memory and that’s more than enough.

However if I was buying something dedicated to Home Server (WHS) I’d have a look at one of these Tranquil Homeserver . It costs about £430 and consumes less than 40w of energy ideal for something you are going to want have switched on all the time.

So now you have your Home Server, you have bought it off the shelf or installed it on something you have already got and you are ready to go.

Install WHS connector software on your PC – PC Backup

To get the next feature that you will need you have to install the WHS connector software, this can be found on an additional CD that you should have got or connect to your WHS and go to the Software share and you will find the Homeserver connect Software there. Install this on each PC in your house.

The WHS Connect software will do several things but the purpose of this guide the main thing is that its the conduate to backup each PC to your home server. Its extremely efficient at storing this data, if it backs up three Vista 32bit machines all with the same patch levels it will only hold one copy of the OS data and just reference it for each machine.

You can log onto the WHS via the connector and configure the backup’s to be done each day, week, month etc. and it will nag you if you miss the backup window by showing the server as ‘Critical’ its not but hey you got to love Microsoft sometimes.

Important – Don’t use WHS to Backup Photos / music

One point to note, I don’t use the WHS software to backup my images in fact I specifically exclude them from the process. Why? Well speed of the backup for one and control being the other. I use a syncing tool to backup all my images, music and data directly to the home server so it can be viewed by other clients. If you only let the WHS do the backup itself it sits in a special file on the WHS that none of the clients can get access to other than via WHS. Don’t forget using WHS Media Connect software which is DLNA compliant you will be able to view the photos or listen to music via a compatible media player if you sync to the WHS not use the WHS Connector to do the backup.

Syncing Photos, Music to your WHS

To transfer your images and music to the WHS I suggest using something like MS SyncToy V2 you can configure this to your hearts content. Get to sync from the PC to the WHS only or both directions or just detect changes on one end. You can also set up multiple transfers.

I configure my Photos on one sync and Music on another to the corresponding directory on the WHS, I set it off once a week or so when I have carried out any major changes. Then after the sync is complete all the other clients and see the new files and can use them if they need to, he presto you have a media server.

Off-Site backup of your data via Carbonite

So you have constructed and configured your Windows Home Server, added files to it by syncing them from a PC and now you need to take another copy just in case the worst happened, Hard disk failure, fire, theft you name it, do you really want to take lots of lovely photos or rip all your CD’s to lose the lot…… no I thought not.

So you need Carbonite or a similar service. I use carbonite for several reasons, it works on WHS, it allows for unlimited (within reason) backup space and its not expensive. At $49 a year or $89 for 2 and now $135 for 3 years its extremely competitive especially when you consider the storage you can use. Currently I have a none to small 140Gb of space used up and its still growing fast. The data transfer is quick and the restore’s I’ve tried also seem to be ok.

Carbonite WHS Issues

Its not perfect, with WHS there seems to be a small bug when you allow WHS to span data across multiple disks itself, for some reason WHS won’t back them up. Carbonite sees them as if they are on other drives and they stay in a wait state, its a shame but it can be solved. If you store the data on one disk or use RAID so the OS doesn’t know where it is all is fine, so its not a big thing but worth mentioning. You can also start and stop the backup if you need to and even tell it to work on a lower priority so it doesn’t swamp your connection.

If you want to backup video files you will also need to select them individually, a hassle but at least you can do it. I think they are trying to limit the space people will use but if you have a compact camera that makes videos you are going to have to make sure you go through each directory to ensure they are all being backed up.

Backup times for me have been fine but remember that a typical UK broadband upload limit is only 256k not the 6-8Mb (6-8000k) download you enjoy when surfing the net and downloading things. If you can go to one of the newer services from someone like Be Unlimited they offer a service that gives up to 1.5Mb upload speeds very useful when you are using an off-site backup service such as this.

Conclusion

So there you go, you have a triple resilient solution that will have your data living in three places. Your PC, the Home Server and off site. This should be more than good enough for just about anyone. The only other thing that I’d advise to make things very secure is take a backup yourself to another hard drive and take it off site yourself, give it to another family member. This would only be needed if there was an issue with Carbonite of some sort and as anything is possible I might as well mention it.

So you need a Windows Home server, a couple of PC clients, a media player, an internet connection, router, and last but by no means least some great photos or music or other data to take advantage of this easy peasy full backup solution.

Useful Links

We Got Served
Windows Home Server – We Got Served – Widgets

If anyone has any questions I’d be happy to answer them post away in the comments section.