Sky +

[CarMad]

The clicking could be to do with the drive starting to fail. I have had this with drives in servers and workstations, it can be a sign they are on the way out.

As Snail says ventilation is everything for them, oh and that and getting knocked when they are on. We would normally find than machines that were near peoples feet under the desk would go quickest for the reasons above.

[Sparky]

I removed the original maxtor drive and put a 200GB drive instead. Downloaded the free tools from Maxtor to put the drive into silent mode rather than performance.

The original drive never made a sound - never suffereed any problems.

All good so far.

[Sparky]

[ QUOTE ]

The clicking could be to do with the drive starting to fail. I have had this with drives in servers and workstations, it can be a sign they are on the way out.

As Snail says ventilation is everything for them, oh and that and getting knocked when they are on. We would normally find than machines that were near peoples feet under the desk would go quickest for the reasons above.

[/ QUOTE ]

Technically, you shouldn't move a normal hard disk when it's spinning - regardless if you knock it or not as it can result in head crashes.

As you said, the clicking could easily be the heads resetting as they cannot read the index track (track 0) from the hard disk.

It's normally the first sign of a dying hard drive.

[CarMad]

Too true, unless you have one of the new IBM Thinkpads or similar drives that are now coming enabled with auto park when they feel a movement. I have it on my laptop its really clever.

[Frodo]

I do remember reading an article that said if you put an OS kernel onto solid state memory rather than a hard-drive you would virtually eliminate a vast number of OS crashes. A hard drive is spinning very fast and a fraction of a millimetre from the plateau.

My Sky+ box is in a glass fronted cabinet on it's own shelf have not had a problem to date with failure or noise

[Gabster]

[ QUOTE ]

I don't see how they can do this, I wanted Sky+ for my apartment when I moved in, but because we have a communal dish for Sky, I couldn't install Sky+. Apparently you need 2 cables coming in from the dish for Sky+, and with a communal dish this isn't possible.

So if what Sky has told you is true, everyone with a communal dish will not be able to get Sky after Xmas??

[/ QUOTE ]

The intergrated reception system (IRS) sky spec which we are installing has two dedicated wires going from the communal dish so you have a plate in your lounge with two sky sockets, one TV socket and a FM Radio socket, total four sockets. Its effectively twice the cabling and twice the switches in the system for about 30% extra over a standard sky installtion.

Sky changed there standard spec for all IRS systems in the last year to make them future proof for Sky+ and HDTV. You probably live in a block which had IRS installed between 1 year and four years ago.

The switch offs of analogue TV have now been officially announced by Tessa Jowell a few weeks back in the central region we are set for 2010, first area to go off is Borders in 2008.