A1GP Dashboard

Yes I know that Melbourne has the Grand Prix, but there's another series where the Australian round is run "over the border" in Sin City called the Al GP. Unlike the GP, the Al GP pits country against country, and our team is run by former world champ Alan Jones. Recently, Al GP.com launched 'Dashboard', a new live GPS-style mapping and telemetry system to enhance fans' viewing of races.

While watching the live television coverage of qualifying and races, fans are able to access a host of information including real- time position maps, detailing the exact location of every race car on track, along with a live feed of dashboard information from every Al GP nation's car.

Thanks to the new technology in the Ferrari powered Al GP, a fan can select to view any of the 22 team's real-time steering wheel data, including speed, throttle pressure, G-Force, gear and how many applications of the crucial PowerBoost button they have left. This is the same data which teams use to help determine race strategy and their all-important pit stops.

The new Al GP.com Dashboard can be accessed for free from www.A1GP.com for every practice, qualifying and race session for the rest of the season.

In The Line's Den

Dear editor,

Some of your volunteers who help with internet problems may remember dealing with my drop-out problem. This was occurring far too often, several times per week, in the six months before Christmas. Finally I did as urged by a neighbour - get Telstra to check the telephone line. A pleasant man arrived, asked to see the computer, fiddled a bit and said 'It looks like your modem is at fault.' There was also a noise caused by an electric fence that he went away and fixed by talking to the landholder. In the course of conversation he listed all the advantages of broadband and I listed all the financial and need and service reasons why I hadn't changed from dial-up.

Later he rang to check that all was okay. Since that call there have only been two occasions when the connection severed!! Touch wood of course. Could I be allowed to wonder at the coincidence? Did I convince him that I was too poor/hard/old to be sold broadband? Was there a plot afoot to harass one into a  change? Am I a suspicious old cynic?

Yours sincerely,
Laura Levens

The Freezer for the Frozen

A week ago I experienced every PC user's worst nightmare. My notebook refused to boot with the screen displaying a message similar to "A disk read error occurred, Press CTRL ALT DEL". It appeared my hard drive had frozen. According to Murphy's Law it occurred the night before I was to give a presentation and at a location where access to my home desktop PC was not possible. Naturally I tried numerous attempts to boot the notebook, all to no avail. I also attempted to again start the notebook the following morning, but still no joy. The hard drive was definitely frozen.

The only hint of trouble was a strange rattling noise from the hard drive the night of the problem as I was fine tuning the presentation. As the PC continued to function properly after I heard the noise I ignored it. There's not much I could have done anyway.

Fortunately I had a plan B. As a precaution I had a copy of the presentation on a USB flash drive. I had also recently read Ash Nallawalla's September PC Update article on Acronis Drive Image. After reading Ash's article I decided I must take my backups more seriously so purchased a copy and backed up the notebook. I felt content knowing that I could at least get the notebook up and running quickly by copying the Acronis image to a new hard drive.

Considering the number of PC's I've owned over the years there's only been one other occasion that a hard drive has failed me. On that occasion Windows would not boot because a critical operating system file resided on a bad sector. I took the hard drive from that PC, loaded it into a portable rack and was then able to extract all necessary data. This seemed a good approach for my latest hard drive fault.

Luckily I had recently purchased a $15 Ritmo 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure from a computer swap meet for backing up to. I proceeded to remove the hard drive from the notebook (Figure 1) which proved to be a very simple matter. After removing a small plastic cover, the hard drive could be pulled straight out. It was mounted in a thin metal case that that had a plastic handle enabling it to be removed. The hard drive was then removed from its metal container by removing six small screws. I then placed the faulty hard drive in the Ritmo enclosure and connected it up to my desktop PC by a USB cable. On this occasion I was not so lucky as the hard drive could still not be read by Windows. The hard drive was definitely frozen.

I could remember reading that in desperation someone once placed a frozen hard drive in the freezer and was able to get it working long enough to extract data from it. I did a Google search and found others had also found the freezer approach worked. I had nothing to lose so I thought why not give it a go. There were a number of theories why placing the drive in the freezer works one of them that it causes the hard drive read heads to move enough due to the cold temperature to "unfreeze" them. I placed the drive in a snap lock bag and then into a freezer bag to ensure moisture did not get into the drive.

The hard drive was left in the freezer all night and on its removal I immediately placed it back into the Ritmo enclosure and from Windows explorer was able to read the drive completely. I've since returned the hard drive to the notebook prior to purchasing a new hard drive. To date (a week later) the drive has not missed a beat but I know it could happen again so it will be replaced soon. The moral of the story is if desperate, send the frozen to the freezer, it may just do the trick and start working again.