Honda TV

I was prompted to scan for new channels by the BT Vision box this morning. Once it had finished I went and browsed through the TV guide to see if it had actually found any new channels. It might have found more than one but Honda TV jumped out at me as being new and rather odd.


It turns out that it isn't actually a TV channel as such, but rather the BT Vision box is pretending a website is a channel, allowing for interaction and streaming video. In fact the screenshot above is from the Honda TV website rather than from the TV (the only visible difference is the TV doesn't show a progress bar under the video). Even stranger for a new feature on the BT Vision box is how out of date the whole thing is. Honda pulled out of Formula 1 back in December yet they still have an F1 section on Honda TV which is showing videos that are at least two years old. All very odd.

In principle I think the idea of using a website as a TV channel could prove useful and interesting but I think BT really missed the mark when they choose Honda TV as the content for this first attempt.

An Update To: Win XP + Network Drives == Slow Boot

Just a quick update to a previous post on network drives slowing down the boot sequence of Windows XP. Turns out that I was too quick when I stated that Windows Vista doesn't seem to suffer from the same problem.

In the last few days I changed which shares were being mapped to drives and I suddenly started finding that logging in to Windows Vista was taking ages. It would just sit there with a black screen and mouse pointer apparently doing nothing. So I've just added the registry key from the previous post, rebooted and everything seems back to normal.

So to recap, don't rely on Microsoft to fix things and if you are getting a slow log in under Windows Vista and have mapped drives then it's worth trying this fix.

Cleaning up Your Windows Machine

As an update to yesterdays posting I got some feedback that the script I supplied couldn't be used. I'm not sure what the problem was but the safest option is just to enter the key manually. A slow performing Windows machine can of course be caused by other issues than the one I highlighted yesterday which got me thinking about a tool I run quite regularly -- CCleaner.

CCleaner will scour your hard disk for temporary files that can be deleted as well as allowing you to remove private data such as browsing histories etc. It also has an option that scans the registry for what it calls Issues and then attempts to fix them.

I tend to run it about once a month and it tends to remove about 200Mb of files and about 50 registry issues. Note that the it's worth running the Issues scanner multiple times until it tells you that it can't find anything else to fix. This is because sometimes the fixes it applies on the first pass highlight further problems.

Win XP + Network Drives == Slow Boot

Given that I've been busy today I thought I'd just give a quick Windows XP performance tip that I had to hunt down a while back.

I found that my machine was suddenly taking an inordinate amount of time to log in. There was nothing obviously wrong so I started to look around the web for suggestions. After a lot of hunting around I came across a Microsoft tool called Bootvis. Bootvis allows you to visualize the time taken by different bits of Windows as it boots. Unfortunately Microsoft no longer distributes Bootvis but you can still get a copy from Softpedia.

To cut a long story short I eventually traced the problem to some network shares that I had recently mapped to drive letters and which were being restored each time Windows booted. This was what I wanted, but there was a problem. Some of the network shares were not always available and Windows was waiting for each connection to timeout before moving on to do anything else.

The solution is a registry change. Adding a single key to the registry means that all network shares are mapped to drive letters as before but Windows does not actually try to connect them until the first time you use them. This cut the time taken to get to a useable desktop on my machine by about two minutes!

So without further ado the magic instructions are: Open the registry editor (run the command regedit from the start menus "Run..." option), and then add a new DWORD key RestoreConnection in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider folder leaving the value set to the default of 0.

Note that as far as I can tell Windows Vista does things differently and this registry change is no longer needed.