The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

My first taste of the Internet came in 1984 as a staff member of RAAF Academy at Point Cook, which was a college of the University of Melbourne, so we had sporadic access to a DEC VAX. By the time I had reliable Internet access, I was working for Unisys, one of a handful of non-academic entities who were given this privilege. After Melb PC started its own Internet Service, I hung up the Morse key and did not renew my Amateur Radio licence. The advent of mobile phones also played a part in that decision.

IRLP?

Recently, I received an e-mail from a former work colleague David B, who is a radio amateur, and heard that he is involved with something called IRLP. I went to http://www.irlp.net/ and found out about the Internet Radio Linking Project. Nearly 15 years ago I had looked at packet radio at 1200 bit/s, but as I was getting faster speeds from my PC modem, I never went down that route.

IRLP is a worldwide network of amateur radio servers and nodes that relay voice communications over the Internet using Voice Over Internet Protocol. David, who runs an IRLP node in Melbourne, says that this technology is "killing HF" - no more crackling single-sideband voices and massive antenna farms for some, I suppose.
 
If you follow the above link to Global Node Maps, you can find your way to Melbourne and the local nodes. You can also listen to radio amateurs using this system. I find it interesting but it is not enough to make me renew my callsign. After all, you and I can use Internet Telephony to speak to strangers in distant lands, sometimes with one or both sides using a mobile phone.

Microsoft Premier Support

I had not called Microsoft for technical support for many years, mainly because I can solve most of my Windows problems by using the Microsoft Knowledgebase or by searching the Web and newsgroups. My editorial position affords me free access to (otherwise paid) Microsoft technical support, but I had never needed to test it, until now.

I bring my work home and find it easier to use my home PC as the Internet gateway than to hook up the laptop to my ADSL connection. I cannot recall what caused the problem, but all of a sudden any Internet activity on the laptop (VPN, traceroute, ActiveSync etc) would cause a "blue screen of death" (BSOD) on the gateway. A BSOD is a very serious crash on Windows NT/2000/XP and creates a 200+ MB memory dump on my machine. A serious pain in the you-know-where, in other words.

I decided to test Microsoft's technical support because I could get no further than adding a registry key that let me identify the offending driver (afd.sys). A handful of newsgroup discussions said that one had to request a replacement driver from Microsoft but it was not otherwise available.

When I spoke to the call centre, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the number I was given was that of Premier Support, one of the highest one can get. I was asked to send the compressed 90 MB memory dump so that they could analyse it. I was also sent a special tool that grabbed numerous logs and other settings so that they could see what was on the errant machine. It was a pleasure to talk at the limits of my technical knowledge and I imagine this made the agent's task easier.

Coincidentally, Windows XP Service Pack 1 was released in the middle of my interactions with Microsoft and it comes with a new version of afd.sys and numerous other updates. I was instructed to apply it to both machines and the problem has vanished. If SP1 had been released a week earlier, I would not have had the chance to experience Microsoft Premier Support and I must report that I was very pleased with the quality and speed of the response.

A byproduct of this crash was that I removed ZoneAlarm Pro as a precaution and tried a couple of alternatives, which I will report on another day.

Reprinted from the October 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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