Windows XP startup question

John Larkin Inscribed thus:

Yes !

But its still garbage no matter how many times its said. ;-)

Looks good.

My computer doesn't have Instrsrv.exe.

Microsoft sucks. The registry was an incredibly stupid idea.

John

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

You need the Resource kit.

Cheers

That is almost guaranteed to go wrong. All it takes is a visitor clicking on a rogue site, the PC crashes hard, guest gets frustrated and simply turns it off.

IMHO the only viable way. Use an older generation laptop that is currently collecting dust? The older the OS the more reliable it'll be. There are ways to get onto the web from DOS. FTP is definitely possible because I did it in the last century.

That looks seriously over-engineered for a one-off cabin thing :-)

Or run it on a UPS? ...Jim Thompson

For a home automation PC? The next step would be to install a self-starting Diesel generator :-)

A UPS won't help much up there where power can be lost for days and a thoroughly crashed PC may then not wake up in an orderly fashion.

Personally, the most I'd invest in a case like this would be a telephone DTMF interface. Call the cabin, push star-something, wait for confirmation tone, hang up, pack skis, head up there.

I haven't crashed a computer in so long I've forgotten how ;-)

WHERE is it that you surf that you keep getting crashes?

Can't you use sleep or whatever they call it to minimize power consumption? ...Jim Thompson

I don't, but others do. Mine sometimes crashes on Acrobat but this is not very surprising, it was IMHO never a particularly robust software.

Anyhow, I would not want to trust a Windows-based PC with any kind of home automation. Just like I won't trust X10 with that.

Hibernate. In that mode many PCs drop to less than a watt. Regardless, a UPS will manage to drain itself because its converter must keep humming if the connected hardware requires 120V to be there all the time.

However, why do that if a simple DTMF thingie around a MSP430 can do the trick? There are even app notes for that so you can take pre-digested code and embed that into your application. You can then set up star plus number commands where, for example, one tells it to pre-heat the cabin or cancel a previous pre-heat request and the next one tells it to do that only if the outside temp is below a keyed in level. If you have DTMF decoding capability at your end you can also have it read stuff back to you, such as actual temperatures. Or if you want to get super-fancy embed some basic speech synthesis. Press "2" for Spanish :-)

For freeze protection I'd want something substantially more reliable than a PC or a uP. (From experience: pipes in friend's cabin froze and burst... ruined the place.) ...Jim Thompson

Server 2003? Does that work for XP?

John

There I'd use one of the simple thermo-switches. Temp goes below 35F -> on. But AFAIR John already has that in the cabin. He just wants to add creature comfort by upping the cabin temp to 70F while the family is heading up there.

Mo wants it to be warm when we arrive.

John

But then I'd need a telephone! And I want to monitor the temps, too.

John

But there are simpler ways to do that. DTMF decoder, call cabin -> click, 70F thermostat goes parallel, furnace begins to rumble.

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Yes, OS requirements are listed on that page.

Cheers

No phone at the cabin but you have Internet up there? Then you'd have to do some telnet thing maybe.

What do you want to monitor the temps for? Weather channel not trustworthy?

Have a look at this...

or here

Cheers

Is that "rumble" anything like a "phut"?

That's easy. Drop the luggage off, kick up the thermostat, and head down to the lodge for a beer, or three. No electronics needed at all.