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I'm with Luc on this one. Every time I've experienced what you are describing, it's due to a stray finger touching the friggin' touch pad while typing.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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See above. There's no chance of any accidental contact causing this. But the laptop was available - cheap - on eBay. Now I know why.
Will Rogers never met me.
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OK, well, I recall that one other time I had some weird stuff going on, was when my ham radio interfered with the laptop. Isolating the cables took care of that. But in your case, I have no idea how to check and see if something like that is going on.
On the other hand, maybe you should just leave it as is. You could have a competition with DD on Fridays and if you ever do tyupe somtging spullid wrong, you have the perfect alibi.  
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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No, nothing weird going on around me at the time. Just a boring hotel room.
I wonder what DD would be willing to pay for an alibi? I have a laptop available that would certainly do the trick. 
I need no alibi, as my drunken maunderings are always perfectly intelligible, if not particularly interesting. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Another idea: do you have anything else installed that can act as an input device? a bar code reader, a second keyboard, a gaming console, some kind of bluetooth device, ...? if so, disconnect all of them, and try again.
And finally: are you amidst strong electromagnetic fields, say in the middle of a power plant?
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Good idea, but there's nothing else connected, and the laptop is old enough to be missing all its blue teeth. Oddly enough, I wasn't in a power plant at the time, but rather in my hotel room in Phoenix. Perhaps I should have worn my tinfoil hat! 
By the way, is there a ANY_MOUSE_EVENT | ANY_KEYBOARD_EVENT I can capture, rather than writing a couple hundred separate event handlers?
Will Rogers never met me.
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No, there are no ANY_XXX_EVENTs. Just have a Form, and handle at least the following: MouseMove, MouseDown, MouseUp, KeyDown, KeyUp.
They can all call the same logging method which just needs one string parameter holding the caller's name and the coordinates or keycode.
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Form events will only help if hte wierdness happens when doing testing in the form. Global system hooks will capture input from anywhere in the OS. Even better, someone has already written an app to collect from them. 
Global System Hooks in .NET[^]
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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You're right, but that is taking all the fun away.
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Roger, grab hold of a Live Linux CD and boot (not install) from that. If the problem continues then hardware fault is likely, this way you have eliminated the probability of Windows misbehaving.
modified 1-Aug-19 21:02pm.
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Here's my situation. I have an ASUS laptop that has 3 USB ports. I put my Vbox2 adapter on one directly since I use that to make the laptop essentially be the TV for my Xbox playing the Rock Band video game (I have to use a direct port since the calibration is so important for this game.) I then have one port that goes through an unpowered USB hub to run all my devices, like a powered drive, a MagicJack (i.e., telephone dongle), interface with a Walkman, etc.
I'd also like to run the portable drive through this hub as well. Now this portable drive is unpowered (i.e., it gets its power through the USB port.) However, it seems that whenever I try to plug it into the hub, the drive makes an unnerving clicking sound at a frequency of about 1 Hz, and is not recognized by the Windows 7 OS. However, if I use the remaining USB port on the laptop, there is no clicking sound, and the drive works fine.
OK, so for now, it's not a problem as I only have this one portable drive, and I can use the third USB port of the laptop. However, as I am getting close to filling up my 1 TB drive (don't you just love Torrent and Rapidshare? ), I will be buying new portable hard drive soon. And as I am now at a stage of life where I myself need to be very portable (I am away from my home, and thus do not have my usual car), I must have this new drive as a portable drive.
So, it seems that the problem is either that the portable drive needs to have its own USB port for the purpose of the USB port itself, or because it needs to have the full power of the port. I would hope that the latter is the case, and that a powered USB hub would work as it would supply the full power to any device. Does this sound accurate? What other remedies might I try? Thanks
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yes it is a power issue. I own a CD/DVD that has dual USB cables and plugs just for power's sake; plugging that into an unpowered USB hub wouldn't work either obviously. So use a direct USB port or add external power to the USB hub.
Did you read the documentation on the disk? it really should be in there.
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A USB port can only supply 500 milliamps of power to EVERYTHING plugged into it. If your USB hub is unpowered, you're exceeding the 500 milliamp limit.
Either plug the drive into a powered USB hub or plug it directly into it's own port on the laptop. IMHO, unpowered USB hubs are complete waste of time.
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I localized a slow network to a RJ11 network cable.
A new cable made several orders of magnitude difference in terms of speed.
However there was no actual failure in the cable. It worked. It was just slow.
What is the mechanism(s) that allows that to occur?
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Noise being taken in by the cable.
A kink in the cable will can crease a wire, increasing its resistance.
A bad connection to the pins in the RJ45 connector.
...
...
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when the cable got damaged, its characteristic impedance may have changed, causing transmission failures at the nominal speed, which the drivers will try and cope with by retransmitting the failing packets until they either arrive well, or a time-out occurs.
Cut the cable in halves, and bin it. Assuming all is well with a new cable, the old one isn't worth anything anymore.
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If it was really RJ11 and not RJ45, then I would guess your old cable was cat3.
CAT3 cable only rates to 10Mbps, cat4 16Mbps, and cat 5 or 6 up to gigabit speeds.
Cat3 cable is can only handle frequencies up the 16MHz while cat5 can handle 100MHz.
You would have to ask an electrical engineer for anything more than that.
Not only do the cables have those ratings, but the jacks and modular plugs do as well.
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Hi,
I understand that Win Vista 64 can use all of 4 gigs, and that Win Vista 32 cannot.
I'm waiting for a friend at MS to send me W7 Ultimate, but in the meantime upgraded my current Win32 system to 4 gigs from 2.
Can't say I notice any real difference in use/programming, even with apps like PhotoShop CS5 where you can allocate more memory usage.
Perhaps if I were using big Excel spreadsheets, or humongous highly-styled documents in Word, I might notice a difference ?
So: the question is: if I give this 2 gigs of ram to a friend who is running Win Vista 64, so he is upgraded to 4 gigs: is that going to do anything real for him ... if he's doing the same kinds of things I am.
And, curious, if, after switching over to W7, the 4 gigs vs. 2 gigs will make any real difference on the OS level.
thanks, Bill
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
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BillWoodruff wrote: I understand that Win Vista 64 can use all of 4 gigs, and that Win Vista 32 cannot.
There's often a bit of confusion on this subject.
32 bit OS can address maximum 4 gig of memory, 2 gig of program memory and 2 gig of system memory (which includes the memory on the graphic card and all other hardware with addressable memory).
The ratio between program and system memory can be tweaked[^] though.
BillWoodruff wrote:
So: the question is: if I give this 2 gigs of ram to a friend who is running Win Vista 64, so he is upgraded to 4 gigs: is that going to do anything real for him ... if he's doing the same kinds of things I am.
Depends on if the programs he's running needs more than 2 gigs or not. If he never uses that much, he won't notice the two extra gigs.
If he does use more than two gigs he'll notice a big difference as there will be a lot less swapping to the pagefile .
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
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Hi Jörgen,
Thanks for your reply. There is, indeed, a lot of confusion on this, and one reason I posted a question here is that my searching the usual techno-discussion sites for hardware, and MSDN, did not give me a satisfactory answer. Consider the following recent MS page : [^] To me that is a useless resource.
The link you sent me leads to a page which has a warning appear that it does not apply to the operating system I am using (Vista), a link on it to a technet page that promises to reveal BCD settings in Vista, but that contains no specific information on what's specific to Vista vs. older systems.
The implications of what I have read seem to me that the old trick of using the /3G option in the boot.ini file is no longer available in Vista.
However, an alternative technique appears to exist: but consider this comment by an MS Employee on the alternative : [^] If reducing the amount of memory allocated to kernel processes is a side-effect of this technique, then how does one evaluate the potential negative effects of reducing kernel memory ?
A friend of mine who programs full-time in Visual Studio 2010 registered his strong opinion that VS2010 will benefit from 4gb in Win Vista 32, but he's using Win Vista 64
As a test: right now I have one instance of IE9beta, and PhotoShopCS5 open (CS5 has an 80 megabyte file open). The task manager:
1. the green "bar graph" is showing 920 to 1.49 megs of memory being used (it varies).
2. but the read out is showing:
Physical memory
Total 3581
Cached 2340
Free 3
Kernel Memory
Total 133
Paged 95
Nonpaged 38
And 13020 handles open.
Under CS5 Preferences it is showing 1643 megs of memory available.
Thanks for your time, best, Bill Woodruff
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
modified on Sunday, November 14, 2010 3:13 AM
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The memory limits still applies to all 32 bit OS based on the windows NT Kernel, it's just that you cant use the /3GB switch anymore on Vista and Windows 7 as boot.ini isn't used anymore.
From Vista and forward all boot configuration is stored in "Boot Configuration Data" files that are very well hidden from the users.
To edit them you can use BCDEdit[^] which runs from the command line.
BillWoodruff wrote: If reducing the amount of memory allocated to kernel processes is a side-effect of this technique, then how does one evaluate the potential negative effects of reducing kernel memory ?
The bluescreen will tell you what the problem was.
Think of the scenario where you have the /3GB switch and a graphic card with 1 GB of memory. Then you have no memory for the rest of the system at all.
I would be very careful when I experiment with this.
"When did ignorance become a point of view" - Dilbert
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Hi Jörgen,
Once again, thanks for taking your time to respond !
JA: "Think of the scenario where you have the /3GB switch and a graphic card with 1 GB of memory. Then you have no memory for the rest of the system at all."
While the /3GB is, as you say clearly, no longer relevant to Vista, this is, indeed, a very interesting question: if I interpret this correctly you are referring to a graphic card that consumes 1 gig of ram : so you are implying if you edit Vista with BCDEdit or whatever and have such a card, and have 3/4 gigs allocated for app use, that's a potential fail condition.
Since, in my case I use a graphic card that has 1 gig of DDR3 memory on it (the mainboard uses DDR2), I am not sure that applies in my real-world situation. Unknown to me is whether the memory on the graphic card is irrelevant here in terms of memory usage of the card (I suspect it is relevant). The only thing I asssume, right now, about the memory on the card, which supports DX11 (wasted on me because I'm not a gamer, or 3d wonk), is that it is used by the GPU on the card to handle what is off-loaded to it for computation by specific apps.
JA: "I would be very careful when I experiment with this."
Yes, I am being very careful, and so far it's all academic: until I understand the implications of this throroughly, I'm not about to muck around with these settings, and I intend to upgrade to Win 7 64 bits (now that the drivers are "ripe) asap which, perhaps, changes the whole picture.
Encountering the "blue screen of death" as a possible result of hacking hardware is not on my menu
thanks, Bill
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
modified on Monday, November 15, 2010 12:15 AM
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BillWoodruff wrote: Since, in my case I use a graphic card that has 1 gig of DDR3 memory on it (the mainboard uses DDR2), I am not sure that applies in my real-world situation. Unknown to me is whether the memory on the graphic card is irrelevant here in terms of memory usage of the card (I suspect it is relevant). The only thing I asssume, right now, about the memory on the card, which supports DX11 (wasted on me because I'm not a gamer, or 3d wonk), is that it is used by the GPU on the card to handle what is off-loaded to it for computation by specific apps.
Your GPU (and all your other devices) use memory mapped IO, which means that the 1GB of memory on your GPU is mapped to 1 GB of your CPUs address space. All other misc devices on your mobo do the same (but typically in much smaller chunks).
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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Thanks, Dan,
Illumination is always welcome here in the dark ...
A pretty obvious conclusion if I had really thought about it
best, Bill
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
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You can always plead Monday and have the charges dismissed.
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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