Congratualations! You must be so happy for her, and she must be very excited to finally be able to drive. :thumbs:
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Congratualations! You must be so happy for her, and she must be very excited to finally be able to drive. :thumbs:
Ahhhh! - Steamy windows..... :shades: :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Tiago
Finally !!!! I bet she is more then happy !
Some days ago we had a huge thunderstorm here in my area, and the lightning struck one block away from my house into an electrical box, and all of the houses in my residential estate had stuff that got damaged.
For me, it was so far my modem, no internet working, my Mede8er (media player) is booting up but I get no image, my new Onkyo receiver, which seems to have given up passing image and sound via HDMI, and of course, how else could it be, my new beamer, which has a blinking warning light that flashes, but doesn't do anything, cannot boot it up :mad:
I was now 1 week in Budapest, and coming back on Saturday evening, this was surely no pleasant surprise at all, I'm quite mad.
Will have to call the guy now who sold me the stuff, if he knows what the problems could be, and if there's some kind of magical reset button trick, then I'll call my internet provider, and of course my insurance guy, as I have insurance for electrical devices in my house, that was a plus on the house insurance, and now I'm really glad I took it.
If it was a power surge that caused a sudden electrical spike from lightening, then all the electronics could be damaged and the only way would be to replace it. Does your house have trip switches? If not do you connect everything to the mains sockets with surge protectors? I have all my equipment connected using Belkin surge protectors, which come with a lifetime $50,000 insurance against surge protection.
If they are protected, then a sudden power lose and cause PSUs to internally trip with a poly switch to protect themselves. Unplugging each item from the mains by disconnecting the actual plug from the socket, and waiting at least 30 seconds, then plugging back in can often reset the poly switch and allow it to work again.
My house has trip switches, one for every room in the house. One was off when I came home, which is always the same one when there's some electrical issues, it's the one from my PC room, as there's a lot of connections.
I use surge protectors with overvoltage protection from APC, where all my devices pass.
Unplugging the beamer from power for 24h didn't help.
The devices also all still work, they switch on perfectly, like I mentioned in my post.
I called the internet provider, and they're gonna call me back to fix an appointment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Me
I called the guy which I bought beamer and receiver from, and he also tries to pass this week, to check on the things, but he already mentioned that the blinking warning light from the beamer is not a "good" sign.
The insurance send me papers to fill out for all the damage I have, and then I have to send it back to them.
With the Mede8er I don't know what to do as I bought it online, and sending it back for repair could take an eternity.
Do you have proof of the electrical strike from the local authorities or electric company? If you can get that it would speed up any insurance claims as it would prove to them the cause from the outset. Also insurance companies will only pay out if they authorise someone to test the equipment. Otherwise they will refuse to pay.
Also remember you will need to replace all the surge protectors the damaged equipment was plugged into, because once they have protected from one surge, but a power spike as still damaged the connected equipment, it means they won't protect against any further surges.
I've been going thought this process at the moment with my house and it can take months. So far after a couple of months we are still waiting for any authorisation to get money from the insurance company to replace items. Our electrical kitchen appliances failed the PAT tests and so are authorised to be replaced. Those tests were now done over a month ago.
If you have all the receipts for the damaged equipment that will also be great as it will prove the value to the insurance company when making a claim. However if it is like the UK insurance system then they will ask you to find 3 similar products with varying prices, and will normally give you the middle price, so play it in your favour. We are doing this at the moment with our sofas. They were not damaged in the floods, but because they were still in the house when the house drying company install industrial drying equipment that has now damaged the leather and we have authorisation to have them replaced.
There's one big proof, in the region I live, they have to replace stuff in over 50% of the households :-)
The internet provider guy came this morning, he replaced my old Thomson with a brand new Fritzbox 7390, the one I wanted to buy anyway, so that's already great, and internet is also working again. He wrote my a paper for the insurance that it had to be replaced as the old one is damaged, thus not repairable at all. He said it will be no problem at all to get the money back, as at the moment, the only thing he does, is replacing modems in a region of 25km wide.
The guy also told me, that they have boxes with distributors that withstand 10.000 volts, and even those blew, so you can imagine the impact it had here in the whole south.
As for the beamer and receiver, I have of course still the receipts, as I bought them not even 6 weeks ago, so that will be no problem. They will give you the exact value of a new one, or if it has to be repaired, they will pay that.
Nice result on the new router. The Thomson routers are definitely not good. My ISP gave me a free one when I joined and it was rubbish. When replacing it I considered the Fritzbox, but in the end bought a Billion 7800n as it had slightly more features and better Wi-Fi speed, but other than that the Fritzbox is nice. Definitely looks nicer than the Billion too.
That was some lightening strike then to do that much damage in the are. Should have no problems claiming. Just so annoying having to wait for claims to be processed before you can get everything. Especially just after buying all your new setup too.
Exactly!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
Here's some of our news, in English:
http://www.wort.lu/en/view/tornado-i...b0c058fb267b58
http://www.wort.lu/en/view/emergency...b0c058fb26783a
Wow! A tornado. Looks like the weather we have been experiencing moved over to Luxembourg. It really annoys me when the news never reports such events in other countries. With 24 hour news channels you would think they could cover more international news.
Were there many floods in your area?
Have you seen the current floods in the UK? Scotland, Wales and parts of Western England had some really bad flooding at the weekend. Seems to be getting bad everywhere.
I have seen the floods everywhere lately, it's really horrible. I can also watch now the english news, as I mounted a new satellite dish covering from 13.0 to 28.2, so I get now all the free channels that they have at freesat.co.uk, good for my girlfriend, as german/french TV tend to dub their programs, like 95%.
In my area there was no flooding, there's not much water around, and the rain only comes to certain houses, which have big cellars, and they have then to pump it out, but that is quite rare.
And as I already mentioned, I live a bit uphill, so there's no possibility of any flooding ever happening.
That's cool that you can pickup Freesat. Can you get all the BBC channels? I know they try to block them outside of the UK because of licensing (In the UK every household has to pay a yearly TV license fee of currently £145.50).
Also, if you can pickup Freesat then you are accessing the Astra 2 satellites, which are the Sky TV Satellites (as they utilise them to aks broadcast Freesat). I've read it is possible to unofficially use a Sky TV box outside of the UK and pick up Sky channels. Not sure if this still works or not.
Yes, I've seen some and it can be quite funny how they are dubbed. On analogue Sky (before it switched over to digital years ago) we used to also get all of the other channels broadcast on the Astra satellites, so could pick up the RTL channels and many others. It was funny seeing things like the X-Files dubbed into German. They never tried to match the voices to the original actors, so one that originally had a soft voice would suddenly have a deep aggressive voice.Quote:
as german/french TV tend to dub their programs
Here's all the channels that you get: http://www.freesat.co.uk/what-you-get/our-channels
Yesterday I almost feared the worst when I booted up my NAS. I booted it up on Sunday, to check the network on the PC, and it booted up fine. I couldn't reach it though, as my router was not working, but as you know that's fixed now.
So yesterday evening I wanted to configure the new Fritzbox, then I also fired up the NAS again. Strangely it was stuck for over 30 minutes with the message "BOOTING UP" on the LCD. So I googled the problem, and as it was, it does this when there's a problem with the PSU. And there's a whole procedure to take if you wanna try getting it to work again, without any guarantee that it will actually help.
I just thought WTF!!! Now also my NAS has given up working!!! Tried to stay calm and switched it off again by holding down the power button. Switched off fine. So I unplugged it once from the power, waited 1 minute, and plugged it back in. Then I was praying (literally) for it to boot normally, and then it also did, leaving me with extraordinary happiness.
But this is the second device which had problems now when switching it on for the second time? Remember, my beamer was working fine when I tried it after the lightning strike, then when I came back from holidays, I switched it on the second time, and it wouldn't work anymore. Strange.
Hopefully I will not witness the same with some other devices. Still didn't boot up PS3, X360 and my new Oppo BD player for a second time. The beamer guy also didn't come yet to me, and also still didn't write me back. Hopefully he does soon.
EDIT: After this struggle, I bought an UPS yesterday, the APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 550.
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...Pro_550_VA.jpg
This one is 330W, I looked yesterday, and my Qnap 659 Pro II with 6 disks uses 46W. With full usage, the APC would run 10 minutes on batteries, but with only having 50W, it will last for approximately 1 hour.
It was test winner on several sites, and only costs 115€, I thought that this stuff was still a lot more expensive.
Beamer and receiver got picked up today, there's nothing to do, they will go to repair.
The beamer's lamp is still intact, he guesses that it's some circuit board that has given up working.
Same for the Onkyo, did a firmware update, didn't help, also resetting it didn't help. Guess is that the HDMI circuit board is damaged.
Mede8er is also dead, tried analog video, updating firmware, removing HDD, nothing helped.
A UPS definitely is the best solution for protection against power cuts and surges. Can your Qnap communicate with a UPS to power down when power failure occurs?
I've considered getting a UPS for some time to use with my home server that is on all the time so it will control it and power down the computer if a power cut happens.
Don't know yet, would be nice, as I cannot hook the PC to the UPS, which could then power down the NAS, but perhaps there's an option or application on the NAS itself that can do so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
Today they finally picked up the receiver and the beamer, hopefully it's not taking too long (which honestly I doubt :dry:).
Are they being repaired locally? Or sent back to the manufacturer to be tested? If they are going back to the manufacturer it could take months before you get a repaired or replaced return.
The bad thing is that normally the manufacturers will give you a refurbished item as a warranty replacement, rather than another brand new item. This happened with me when I had to do a warranty return for my HP B9180 professional A3+ printer. HP were very good, sending the replacement printer before I had to return the faulty one, so that the packaging from the replacement could be used to return the faulty one. They even paid all the shipping costs and pre-arranged the courier collections. The annoying thing was that my new printer was manufactured in 2011 when i purchased it, but the replacement I received was a refurbished one made in 2007! It had however worked perfectly to date so I can't really complain. It is just annoying to know you have purchased something nice and new and ended up with something years old.
They are sent back to the manufacturer.
But don't they just repair them then? I didn't get any replacement. And honestly, I don't want older stuff. Although they are quite new in their range, both of them.
It depends on the company.
In my experience with electronics they will test your returned items, and make a report. If they agree it is a fault covered by the warranty, if it is a straight forward repair,such as swapping out a part, they might repair your original equipment. But more often they will either give you another new replacement (which I would always prefer they did rather than even repairing the faulty one), or they will send you a refurbished replacement and then put your faulty items to be repaired ready to be used as another warranty refurbished unit.
I had also to send in the Mede8er for repair yesterday, as my insurance company doesn't want to replace it, they want me to get it repaired.
Mede8er told me to send it back in the original box and in a anti-static foil, which unfortunately I didn't have anymore, so I just hope that they accept the package.
No news yet for my other stuff.
That is annoying, but I expected your insurance would try to do that.
I got the Mede8er already back today, and it got repaired, the HDMI output was defective, and they replaced the motherboard. Everything went on the guarantee. Work fine again now, and I have to say, everything went without flaws, I have to admit that their support is awesome.
The mediaplayer arrived on Wednesday at Mede8er, and they already send it back yesterday, and I got it today.
That is brilliant service.
My car (Seat Ibiza 1.6 tdi) just gave me a "small problem", he were going to the beach, and then a sound came out and the alert light "refrigerator water device" or something like this came out from the dashboard. I stopped and checked the refrigerator liquid container, and it was empty, not even a single drop of liquid. The car (like all cars today) has a device that warns when it goes below the minimum limit, and it's not so low. Some tube broke and all the liquid went away very fast. It didn't have me time to put more liquid. :(
It went to the garage (Seat) and the result... 275 euros.... fxxx !!! the bill has so many shxxs that it looks like a supermarket list. Even shixx like "environment measures - 5 euros " .... 275 euros here is a lot of many.:mad:
I never go to a main car dealer any more. Better to find a recommended local independent garage. Better service and cheaper.
A couple of months ago a couple of the tire valve stems on my Peugeot 407 snapped off while I was trying to check the air pressures. The car has pressure sensors. I rang Peugeot and they said you could only buy a whole new sensor unit and it would cost £275, plus £75 to fit, plus £65 to recode the car into the new sensors. I did some internet research and found I could buy replacement pressure stems from eBay for about £11 each and ringing a local garage I trust they fitted them for £10 each wheel. Result!
The garages tend to be very expensive, and also often change things that don't need to be changed. That's always difficult to see for myself, when there's like 10 items that got changed, and they tell you that they really needed to do it, because I'm a total car noob :)
I sometimes wonder how much the large garages do tell the truth. I used to use main dealers, but ine year I booked my car in for a yearly service and mot and they kept ringing me saying they had found more things that needed doing. They quoted a total over £1500. I told them just to do what was needed to get it through the mot. Cost £240. Just shows! Got a friend who is a mechanic to look at the list and only a couple of the items needed doing. The rest were just slightly worn, but had years left in them.
Why do the main dealers charge so much?
My mother bought a Vauxhall car about 4 years ago, and had to get a regular service at the dealer in order for the warranty to remain valid. This was expensive. Now she goes to a reputable, much cheaper garage. But we still get 'courtesy calls' from the dealer advising that it is due a routine service.
This isn't country-specific obviously, as I've had similar experiences here. My old Citroen, the first time I had it in for a periodical I used the garage of the local "official" citroen dealer. It returned with a good long list of flaws that needed fixing. It was also way more expensive than I expected (close to £2.000!!). So I took the car to a different garage that someone at work recommended. The guy there took a look at the list and the prices the first place had noted in the margins, and he just shook his head. Said he found it amazing that they had customers at all with prices like that, and guaranteed they'd do it "a lot cheaper". So I delivered the car there on the morning of the agreed upon date and later that day I get a phonecall from them. One of the things on the list that required fixing to have the car approved was the brake lines, due to heavy rust damage. This is a serious flaw that many older cars usually needs to deal with, and mine was ten years old so no surprise there. Well, the guy that called me said he'd now had all five guys there studying those lines and none of them could find anything wrong with them! In fact, it turns out that the brake lines on Citroens are part of their particular hydraulics system, it's not a separate system at all. And Citroen has made their cars with rust-free lines for their hydraulics since.. oh well before mine was made! You'd think the official garage would know this, right?
Anyway, they fixed the rest of the flaws at the other garage (which were genuine flaws) and it all ended up well under £1.000, less than half the original asking price. This was without the changing of brake lines though, which was one of the more expensive items on the list, but still.
For the next periodical two years later I decided to send it to that same official garage first, just for the hell of it. The periodical itself costs about the same everywhere, so no worries there. This time, oddly, there was no mention of the brake lines allthough nothing had been done with them since last time of course. I confronted the garage chief with this, and all he could do was mumble some half-hearted excuse that maybe his guys had confused the brake lines with the fuel line, which wasn't as serious a flaw.
I did the same thing, had the car fixed at the other place, and to the official place's credit the flaws they'd found were all genuine. And again the other place fixed it for half the cost the official place had estimated. So I've continued and will continue to do this with my current Peugeot and all future cars I will own; have the periodical at the official place since they after all know the car best and know what to look for, and then having the flaws corrected somewhere else. And it has always been a lot cheaper for me.
You say the official dealers should know their cars the best, but that definitely wasn't the case with VW.
My wife's last car, an 04 Beetle convertible TDi had the airbag light permanently on. We took it to the local main dealer VW garage and they wrote us a quote. They said it was the airbag sensor and to replace it would involve removing the left-hand front wing and the whole front bumper and grill assembly to get to it, and once replaced it would need the to be recoded to the car. Quote was £700!
So we went away and I found a mobile airbag repair company that come out to your house. He took a look at the car and read the VW report. Looked very confused, and looking at the engineering schematics for the car, because the sensor was actually located under the passenger seat door seal and very easy to get to. It actually just needed an ECU reset of the sensor and then worked ok again. Cost... £45 total including the call out. Mad!
My first car, a Ford Fiesta, when i took him to Official ford Garage for a repair, they gave me the bad parts so i could see that it was not a false repair. Of course they could brake something that was working... and say it was not...
*sigh*
I sold a perfectly good, hardly used modem on ebay and the buyer has decided that she can't get the ADSL light to light up, and is complaining.
I think I'll send a message just to check that she did turn it on with the power button on the back.
It is reset back to factory settings? If the power light comes on and they can log into the hardware's configuration page via the browser, then it is proved to be working and it's their settings not working with their connection/ISP. They need to contact their ISP.
Well, she just said about the DSL light, not the power light. Even if the settings are wrong, I would at least expect the DSL light to flash.
I did do a factory reset.
Still no news about my stuff, F*CKING ANNOYING me :fury:
They do take their time for any insurance or warranty claims. We finally got confirmation that the Insurance has agreed to replace our shed. That has taken over 3 months to get agreed!
No input for current dilema's, but a rant of my own........
But where to start....... :mad:
Bought a couple of GTX580's back along, 4GB versions & boy, were those things damn hot! I was facing a £500+ bill to upgrade my water cooled 1366 i7 rig to deal with these infernal Blast Furnaces so decided to eGay the gits & made a few bucks in the process. Picked up a couple of Gigabyte GTX670's & it was all Disco RE much cooler temps for another £130 outlay. No need for a massive 1200W+ PSU or water blocks as these cards are infinitely cooler & draw much less power than the GTX580's.
Having done this & seeing what Z77 & Ivybridge was capable of, I ended up with an Asus P8Z77-V Premium board, a 3770K CPU and decided to upgrade hard drive storage from a 2TB Segate Barracuda to a 3TB Seagate Barracuda.
Having installed the Asus boards 32GB mSATA SSD device, I added my 3 x Barracuda 500GB 7200.12's in RAID0 stripe & then added the 3TB drive which has all my backup files on it. During a reboot hanging session, mr bloody 3TB Segate shite decides to corrupt itself to the point, it takes nearly 14 days of continuous of chkdsk @ a DOS prompt on the desktop to try & recover ALL my 1.4TB backup partition to it's former glory. Unfortunately, it totally cocked itself up, meaning I lost everything on the partition. GRRRR you Mother :censored: B**TARD!!
230GB of Amiga Files:
120GB of pictures of my house restoration:
Shit loads of pr0n:
My entire picture collection:
Well, pretty much an entire lifetime of experiences......
I have recovered some of the files through chkdsk, & despite chkdsk actually completing twice during this 14 day period, most pictures were un-readable. The only pics I have recovered of the house renovations are ones sent via Email to a few friends, & they are only like post card sized files of around 100k from their original 4Mb JPEG sizes.....
I've moved on since the fateful day on Saturday last week, where I formatted the entire partition & licked my wounds. Holidays and some other precious moments are on DVD but ffs @ Win7 64bit being such a f'kin BS OS @ trying to recover from crap like this & the worst bit is......
I still don't know why it f'kd itself in this manner? - Seagate Tools for DOS passes every test possible on this 3TB HD, so I have to sit here feeling like...... W T F ? ? ?
The only solice I have is that chkdsk was sat running continuously & 4.9Ghz on this rig for 13.5 days uptime with at least a 12% CPU loading at any time & could still play CS:GO or BF3 or rip DVD's whilst it tried to un-F'k itself. :dry:
What a complete & utter Mofo Ball Ache ffs.......
Sorry to hear you lost all your data. Not good. You know the saying. Make a backup, then backup the backup, then backup again! Relying on a single copy of files you can't replace is never a good idea.
Regarding the HDD. As you know, to use a 3TB HDD you have to use GPT and not MBR. However I understand that if a GPT HD is in a mixed system with other HDDs using MBR, then the GPT disk will drop down to MBR legacy mode (GPT HDDs have legacy MBR first sectors). I wonder if this might have caused any of your issues.
Losing your data is always the worst that can happen, and backups are really your friend here, although a bit costly, it makes life easier and you happier.
I already wanted to buy a second NAS to mirror with the first one, but that will cost me around 2000€, and I prefer to trust my single Raid5 NAS setup, hopefully it will not die!!
The only issue with a NAS in RAID5 would be if more than one disk failed at the same time. Or if the NAS hardware failed you would need to buy an identical NAS to get the dataset working again. Quite secure other than that.
But I think even then, if you have data that could never be recovered (downloaded) again, such as personal photographs, videos and anything else made yourself, then an offline backup is a very good idea, such as to BD-R or DVD-R.
That's why I also have a back up of my photos/videos/music and that stuff on a local HDD. The only things that are on the NAS without backup are my movies, and my ROM collections, as you mentioned, they could be downloaded again, although VERY time consuming.
I think that the risk of 2 HDDs failing is less probable than the NAS hardware itself, which wouldn't be funny at all.
I wrote my reseller again today, and he replied that apparently he already got my beamer back, but is still waiting for the amp, which was sent with the belgium post, but unfortunately that isn't the fastest one.
Anyway I would need both, I cannot connect the beamer alone without the amp. So I really hope that he will get it soon, and that it actually also works fine again.
That's good that one of the items is back. Did he says what needed repairing?
I just asked him now :) Because I also want to know, if now the beamer is still calibrated, or if they reset it, and it will need calibration again.Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
Ok, apparently he will get the amp back today. He said that it was sent to him from Lille (France) on September 18th already, and when he called, as it didn't arrive, it got lost in their stock.
For the calibration, he said that it should still be fine, but he's gonna verify together with me when he brings the stuff, we made an appointment for Friday at 14:00. Hopefully he will come.
That's some good news. So hopefully you should have everything up and running again this weekend? Is there anything else you sent for repair? Or will that be everything back?
We have had some good news. Our house is now officially dry and the builders are just waiting on a certificate of drying, then they can begin work to restore the house. So we could be back in sometime in November, or early December. :)
That will be everything back, I'm so happy, then it will run again for this weekend. Just hoping he will get the beamer back today or tomorrow, so that he doesn't have to cancel our appointment.
Some friends of us come on Saturday, and they didn't see it yet, would be a good opportunity for a demonstration. Funny thing is also, that the guy loved the C64 when he was young, and especially the International Soccer from Andrew Spencer. And as I have C64 emulation on the PS3, I once tried to play International Soccer (which I love too) on the beamer, and that was absolutely fantastic, I just had to laugh because of the huge pixels, that's quite funny. So hopefully I can surprise him with that :)
Glad to hear that your house is finally dry, and it would really be great if you can "already" move back again next month or even in December. Are they redoing floors and wallpapers and all that stuff? You had wooden floor, no tiles if I'm right?
Yes, we had wooden flooring throughout the downstairs, with tiles in the kitchen. They will be redecorating nearly the whole house including floors, wallpaper and kitchen.
They had to take out all the floors including the kitchen tiles, and cut out all the plaster boards from the walls from the ground up about 60cm in all rooms to stop the damp rising. A lot of the woodwork in the house also needs attention as the drying has caused the wood to shrink causing the door frames to crack and plaster in the ceilings also needs attention. All interior doors need replacing too. Also the whole of the ground floor concrete floor has a lot of holes drilled all over it to allow the moisture to escape, and also for their injection drying equipment. They also have to take out the kitchen units as the base units were also damaged by the water.
So the builders have to first remove the kitchen and test our built in appliances. Then seal the holes in the floors. Put new plasterboard up and then re-plaster the walls and any cracks in the ceilings and also fix any movement in the walls upstairs too. They can then start laying the floors and tiles, skirting boards, install the new kitchen and appliances. The front door also has some water damage. So quite a lot of work to do.
We are also still trying to sort out replacing the shed. We are also currently looking at sofas to buy replacements. And have just ordered a replacement washing machine.
I never thought we would get flooded, and never even considered how much damage just a small amount of water could do to a house.
When I get time I will post some of the pictures of the house right from the flood, through the drying process, its current state, and then as work is being done to restore it.