Alex Threlfall's Blog

Well, I got bored this afternoon and decided to update my Desire to 2.2. Obviously as mine was supplied by Orange, it had to be debranded first. Easy enough to do that, but I ran into a few snags further down the line. First issue was after 2 Over The Air updates, I lost my wifi.

This was fixed by downloading froyo 2.2 update from the htc website and dropping it into the SD card. However this introduced a second issue, in so far as it kept rebooting after the update. I eventually discovered that this was due to not using the gold card, copied the update to the gold card, did a forced update again to 2.2 (I didn’t need to downgrade for some reason) and everything worked.

Anyway, now I don’t have the stupid orange installed apps (honestly, why do they bother?) and I’m running 2.2 happily.

No, not the Lego Excavator I mentioned earlier in my Blog (that one’s on order, should be here next week!) – today I got my new phone!

I’ve been using the Palm Treo 750v for a while now, it’s a Windows Mobile based phone so was perfect as it would synchronise with Exchange and keep my contacts backed up there.

Palm Treo 750v

However after nearly 2 years, it was time for a change, and my Orange Contract was up for renewal (the 750v was a Vodafone supplied phone via a client’s contract which was subsequently upgraded to a BlackBerry, the second phone I normally carry) so after a bit of looking online the HTC Desire was what I wanted. Online, I was quoted £49.99 for the upgrade, but the website wanted me to change my plan, so I rang up only to be told my upgrade was free! Yay! Ok, another 18 month contract, but that appears to be par for the course these days, and I don’t vandalise my phones unlike some! Ordered on Thursday and Delivered today, so can’t get much better than that! I also took the precaution of ordering a Hard Shell Case for it from eBay, with a Screen Protector, which came in at the grand sum of £3.50!

So anyway, here it is, my latest toy:

HTC Desire

The OS is brilliant, but Android 2.2 is supposed to be even better. As it stands, I have wifi, exchange sync, and lots of fun apps FartDroid here I come!

Is still under way, it’s amazing how much junk you accumulate over 10 years of geeking with a serious ebay habbit! One trip down the tip has yielded some space down there, which was then quickly filled in when the stuff fell down where it had been piled up! Looks like another trip or two will be needed!

16 Large Dell server boxes now occupy the dining room. With the landie empty, I was also able to fit the security screens and have now ordered the dog guard too

…just when things can’t get any worse, this morning my hard disk decided to give up. Rather odd really, as it’s a RAID 1 set, and it would boot to a point but not any further. Luckily as a Geek, I keep a few spare new disks lying around for this sort of eventuality, so I snagged them and popped in the new 6-port raid card I’d been meaning to install – actually screwed the cards in for once also – and reinstalled windows.

It took me over an hour to go round all the sites I’m a member of and login and hit remember me on each login! God, so many different usernames and passwords – thank god for KeePass, one password for that and everything else is easy! I also took the time to remove some old 300GB drives one of which had errors and I’d move all the data off, and the other which is full of random apps and stuff. The machine seems much quieter now, though I appear to have some sort of power supply fault which may have caused the data corruption as the RAID card had write caching turned on without battery backup.

Now to find another pair of 1TB drives to pop in on the spare channels for another RAID1 set and I’ll be happy At some point I should really go RAID5 in this machine, but the cost of buying 6 new drives in one hit is a bit crippling, and I’d only end up with 5TB usable or 4TB if  I hot-spare it Well, theoretically anyway, as I’ve discovered for another customer this week, it’s more like 900gb once you format them, and those arrays take *ages* to build too! 20 hours for a RAID5 with 4x1TB drives, giving 2.8TB of usable space. Then the customer called to say “on second thoughts, could I have a hot spare please”. Odds on them filling it up in the next 12 months and asking for that extra terabyte? High