Hardware & Devices

20-Jul-08 18:49

Hi,
I'v been thru lots of articles related to hardware changes but couldnt find one specifically for this topic.
OS/Platform : win XP / .NET C# v2.0

im unable to get the relevant Windows Native APIs, though i'v tried in advapi.dll as well.
one way is to use the WndProc(ref message) method but this works with windows form where you can intercept the WM_CHANGE... signals.

Need a breakthru with services, as i work with smartcard Readers and Contact/Contactless/RFID tech.

-ck

killabyte20-Jul-08 19:22

killabyte

20-Jul-08 19:22

Are you trying to monitor if a smart card has been inserted/or RFID card swiped?

or are you looking to compare hardware profiles to check if a device is present?

launchck20-Jul-08 19:31

20-Jul-08 19:31

Using the service, im trying to detect if an appropriate reader has been connected so that i can launch the corresponding application.

killabyte21-Jul-08 1:43

killabyte

21-Jul-08 1:43

depending on the device driver u may use
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363432(VS.85).aspx[^]

launchck21-Jul-08 1:55

21-Jul-08 1:55

This is the problem i was talking about when i posted the Question. With VC++ its ok cos there's a windows.h header file, but im currently working on C# so the only way i can do it is from a Windows DLL that has Windows Native APIs but still havent got the method that i can "extern import" and receive such device notifications.

Now there is a WndProc(ref message) method that can be used to override the System.Windows.Forms method, and it will work with Forms, but im using a windows service without a UI.

Now, there is also a way to bypass this problem as well, create a windows Form and hide it, but this is a major security lapse that i dont want.

Thanx for ur attempts, killabyte.

killabyte21-Jul-08 2:19

killabyte

21-Jul-08 2:19

haha sorry i failed to read properly, the danger of skim reading!

my C# knowledge is poor but i found this example on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.win32.systemevents.aspx[^]

and example 2 here uses a hidden form in a service so if they do it it cant be a HUGE security hole... we hope hahah

launchck21-Jul-08 2:43

21-Jul-08 2:43

Cool, i'd never seen the page u posted but im in trouble again. Doesnt define any hardware events.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.win32.systemevents_members.aspx[^]

These events wud make u laugh. Thnx buddy.

Dan Neely21-Jul-08 3:20

Dan Neely

21-Jul-08 3:20

I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but if you just need signatures for the win32 API try www.pinvoke.net They have signatures for most if not all win32 apis.

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall

BIOS fails to recognize hard drive

MrKalinka23-Jul-08 1:40

MrKalinka

23-Jul-08 1:40

A nice way to look for hardware changes is to use Windows Management Instrumentations (WMI).

.net has the System.Management namespace for WMI interaction. You might use ManagementClass and ObjectQuery for searching specific hardware components.

Hope this info helps

Vaclav_18-Jul-08 4:48

Vaclav_

18-Jul-08 4:48

This is no joke!
For a second time in past two years I have this weird problem.
My internal hard drive (dynamic disk with mirrors) gradually disappeared from the BIOS.
By gradually I mean sometime it was there and another time it was not.
The Logical Disk Management (win2000) would report dynamic disk missing and reactivation would say the disk cannot be located.
During the windows startup I would get two consecutive short beeps at random until the windows starts – maybe two or five of them.
I had this happened before ( different box, same OS) and the temporary solution was to take the drive out of the machine (!) and place it vertically next to it! I am not kidding!
So, last night I took the drive out of the box (vertical mount) and turn the power on.
Did not touch any cabling!
Guess what - it loaded and RAID started regenerating my mirrors!
I put it back into the box and it worked just peachy the whole day.
Today – zilch, same old problem - disk is just not there!

Of course the disk is out of warranty and the vendor could careless about my problem.

In reality I do not want to spend much time troubleshooting this, but this is a second time around and I feel the hard drive should last past the warranty period.

Before I toss this worthless drive – can anybody tell me what could be wrong and where are these beeps coming from.
My best guess is that the drive has some temperature related issues.
Or maybe “consumer grade “ run of the mill drives are not suitable for RAID – the forced or hidden regeneration may be too stressful.

Thanks for reading. Any constructive comments are appreciated, just please do not waste my time telling me that drives are cheap and to buy a new one.
Vaclav

Mike Dimmick18-Jul-08 5:59

Mike Dimmick

18-Jul-08 5:59

The beeps are most likely your RAID controller or BIOS reporting that it can't see the drive you've configured.

I'd check and replace the cables. They do fail if damaged, and often intermittent connections occur where it works in a certain range of temperature or certain positions, but not others.

Likewise, electronics can fail when subjected to shock or high temperatures. There can also be poor joints in the soldered board which eventually fail with vibration, shock or temperature.

If it's mirrored, and replacing the cables doesn't help, toss the drive. It just isn't worth investigating the problem. If it's bad electronics or weak joints it can't be fixed without replacing the drive's controller board anyway.

Consumer drives are pretty much identical to 'enterprise' ones, except that the enterprise drives generally have write-back buffers disabled (consumer drives will report that they have written data when they have written it to the on-drive cache, not actually to the disk itself, so you can lose data on losing power that the OS thought was written) and also have aggressive error-recovery disabled. Consumer drives will re-read sectors that have errors repeatedly, leading to long delays if there is a problem, but it might be able to recover the data. Enterprise drives are intended for use in mirrored or parity-protected arrays, the system can recover the data from other drives, so the recovery is much reduced so the OS or RAID controller can get on with doing that, then replace the bad sector.

Drives often do last quite a long time. We recently had to replace one that had been in service for six years in a RAID array in a server - this was a setup with Windows 2000 Server mirroring the data on consumer IDE drives. Unfortunately it's common for drives in the same batch to fail at more-or-less the same time, if they haven't been subjected to different stresses. Some administrators get drives from different batches or even different manufacturers for this reason.

Sometimes, though, drives fail much sooner. In a computer I bought for my parents in 2001, the disk failed in less than three months. (It was replaced under warranty by the manufacturer.)

DoEvents: Generating unexpected recursion since 1991

Vaclav_18-Jul-08 6:43

Vaclav_

18-Jul-08 6:43

Thanks for the comments.
I run two development machines side by side and some of the drives are "semiopen", one in the bottom of "standard" IDE 3 slots horizontal bay and the other has the drive attached vertically (front of the box). All together I have five hard drives and have noticed that they get rather hot. You cannot keep your hand on it for long.
I am beginning to believe that is my problem - poor air flow around drives.
I have used some swappable drives in past and they have rather beefy cases.
Maybe some small fan would help. I’ll try that.

You have mentioned possibly bad cable. I went that route with my other problem - moved IDE ports and cables. But eventually tossed the 80GB drive.

I think this one is on the way to the wherever bad drives go.

But you have answered my main question – where does the beep comes from, thanks.

Thanks

PS. I forgot to mention - I use OS RAID.

Jörgen Andersson20-Jul-08 21:52

Jörgen Andersson

20-Jul-08 21:52

Brilliant summary!

Re: driver development help

CaptainKrtek7-Sep-08 9:13

CaptainKrtek

7-Sep-08 9:13

Upgrade your bios maybe?

PosPrinter Receipt

Arijit Manna16-Jul-08 2:04

Arijit Manna

16-Jul-08 2:04

Iam designing a receipt using Microsoft OPOS and VB.NET2008. The receipt is to generated through a thermal/dotmatrix printer. I have to provide a feature to the user by which he can stipulate the nos. of columns to be printed eg., 5,10,12.
How will I provide column generation function dynamically ? I have previously hardcoded my columns in the program.
Also how can the column names(col. header) generated dynamically? I will only provide names eg.(1,"SRL NO.)(2,"NAME")etc.

I appreciate any help in this regard.

Best Wishes ....... ARIJIT

driver development help

ashishmax4716-Jul-08 0:21

ashishmax47

16-Jul-08 0:21

Hi I am new in windows driver development . can any one tell how can i start it.

Ashish

Perspx16-Jul-08 10:15

Perspx

16-Jul-08 10:15

This is a good article to get you started - it's written in C and outlines the basics of NT kernel programming.

Hope this helps,
--Perspx

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." - Bill Gates

BSoD during a Win98 presentation

Remote Display Monitors

TravisNorwood15-Jul-08 6:21

TravisNorwood

15-Jul-08 6:21

We need to set up monitors throughout a hospital that display information to the nurses. This will be like the flight information displays in an airport (just a display, no interaction through keyboard or mouse). Each display will have different information and there could be quite a few of these displays (Multiple per floor).
Does anyone have suggestions or relevant experience on what is the most economical way to do this?
You could have a PC per display, but this seems like overkill.
The application that displays the information has a small resource footprint, so many could run on one PC.

Jörgen Andersson15-Jul-08 23:26

Jörgen Andersson

15-Jul-08 23:26

I can think of a couple of different approaches.

1. Get Samsung 940 UX monitors, they get the videosignal over USB. And buy USB over CAT5 extenders, for example Gefen[^].
Pros: You can service really many monitors from one server in the server hall.
Cons: Price of the USB extenders. Might be negotiable if you buy many.

2. Same approach but with VGA extenders and normal monitors.
Cons: Cannot connect as many monitors per Server
Pros: VGA extenders are cheaper, but not cheap.

3. Thin clients
Pros: This might actually be the cheapest solution.
Cons: Not as tamperproof as the thinclient has to be close to the monitor. Administration.

Dan Neely16-Jul-08 2:22

Dan Neely

16-Jul-08 2:22

Isn't usb bandwidth limited to 1024x768x16? That'd require running almost any monitor below native resolution and really sucking the display downward.

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall

Jörgen Andersson16-Jul-08 11:31

Jörgen Andersson

16-Jul-08 11:31

I don't know anything about the compression algorithms used, but there is no apparent speed problems in normal office use.

So for the use similar to flight information displays I can't see how they can be to slow.

Well, I surely wouldn't use a USB monitor for gaming, movies or 3D modeling. Wink | ;)