I was really doubting the reality of what I was wittering to Ofcom about.  'He's just obsessive' I could hear you saying. With an undercurrent of 'Why doesn't the sad twat get a life and stop bothering us with all this crap?' (mostly from the back row - you know who you are). But these monitoring gubbins are beginning to pay off. I'm not imagining things.

I set up a monitoring sensor to time the download of a 100KB picture from a Google site once every 60 seconds. This isn't a perfect measure, but there are no sensors to do the same with a file on the NAS (and no, file:// doesn't work with the sensor, before the techheads start making suggestions). Setting up a webserver on another machine just brings another bit of kit into the equation).  Google's infrastructure should be pretty performant, the DSL connection is very stable - as indicators go it will do.

I also set up some sensors to ping the devices around the network - essentially a measure of whether this wirelessly connected laptop can even start a conversation with them and how long it takes them to say hello back.  If the timing of the web download goes awry - well that could be Google or the ADSL.  But not if the laptop suddenly can't have a sensible wireless chat with the router at the same time - that almost certainly has to be a sudden problem with the wireless transmission.

If Les had been here for most of tonight he'd probably not have seen anything - perhaps a couple of small blips, but it's been pretty good.  But I'd really liked him to have been here in the run up to midnight...

This is the download of the image from the Google site, over a 2 hour period:

And this is ping to the router over the same period:

At the same time as the download time goes through the roof, communication to the router pretty much gets lost (that's what the red dots are in the lower trace.  Pings to the other bits of kit on the LAN are pretty much the same. The only thing common to both of these are the router and the wireless connection. Yes, it could be the router - but I can't see what would cause a good router to go into a tizzy like this for 10 minutes.  More to the point, I've been seeing behaviour like this for 10 months, during which period I've had three different routers in the attic in my desperation to eliminate possible causes.

So I don't think I am going insane after all. Which is a relief. People with proper qualifications, Cisco and everything, please feel free to point out flaws in my thinking: It all helps and I am a total amateur in this stuff, floundering around in the wrong end of the IT pool...

I liked Windows 7 the moment it was released - nice to use, nice to look at but, above all else, rock-solid stable. I liked it so much I bought a family pack to install it on everything in the house. I've carried on liking it ever since. Right up until Sunday morning.

Because, on Sunday morning, all the icons for Office disappeared, along with Adobe stuff, Evernote and a couple of other apps, document icons too.  I've seen this happen in earlier versions of Windows, so I wasn't too bothered - just need to find the location of the icon cache, delete it and let the OS rebuild it. Which I did. And it didn't.

I turned to Google and MS Answers and lost an hour understanding the HUGE number of possible causes and resolutions. None of which worked. Gave up on it and resigned myself to reinstalling the affected apps, starting with Evernote and Adobe, both of which recovered their icons. Then I turned to Office, once I'd dug the installations disks out from some dusty corner of the attic - and that's when the fun really started.  Installing over the top of the existing installation failed halfway, with a meaningless error. Uninstalling - I wish I'd never decided to do it - failed halfway with another meaningless error, but got far enough to have removed the apps. Installing over the top of the now useless installation failed with... you get the gist. Lost another hour filtering error messages out of the Windows Event Viewer, Googling them, throwing them at Technet, all to no avail.

No other route open to me: I'm now in the land of 'format c:' and reinstall the OS. I keep all the data on a separate partition - but have to reinstall all the BLOODY apps, find all the latest BLOODY drivers, re-instate all the BLOODY user accounts, add back in all the BLOODY BITS OF CONFIG, set up all the BLOODY backup jobs again.  Etc. Etc. I started at 11pm on Sunday evening and went to bed at gone 2am, with  a clean Windows install, the latest 110 Windows patches applied, MS Defender watching for infiltration and some remote access software in place (the excellent TeamViewer). Left it plugged into the network and went to bed.

And on Monday I dipped in when I had a moment at work and kicked off the occasional installation, jobs to rescan all the pictures, find all the music etc. I'm still tweaking bits now, two days later.

Which brings me to the one useful bit of advice out of all this. I don't know how many times over the years I've had to do this with an OS, but more than I care to think of. I've always been anal about backing up data, but backing up data is not the same as backing up the core OS, the apps, all the little tweaks you make over the years... And for years, it's been quite possible to do that, you just have to invest a bit of time in creating an image of the OS partition. Every time I've been through this I resolve to do exactly that - and I never get round to it.

Not this time.  This time I am now the owner of a shiny image of the rebuilt system, clean as a whistle, which I can re-instate at the click of a clicky-thing - and, moreover, not just to the same hardware, but to a completely different chunk of tin, should I need to.

So what did I use to achieve this? I had planned to use whatever Acronis currently call their imaging/backup solution - in fact, I did download a trial and create the first image.  But's it's not cheap - $45 for one machine - so I Googled around whilst it was doing its stuff and came across a freeware alternative which seems at least as competent. Web reviews seemed to back up my first impressions too. A bit more research turned up the same organisation's free partitioning tool, which I used to recover the space I'd freed up by blowing away all the Dell recovery crap in the 'hidden partition' which was of no help in the first place, not least because I didn't try it because if I'm going to rebuild the machine I'm going to rebuild it properly, not riddled with Dell's spammy crapware.

These are nice tools. Intuitive interfaces, which allow you to focus on the key tasks, but loads of configuration and tweaking if that's what you need (which I don't, not for the critical tasks at hand anyway). They're at least the match of anything Acronis will sell you and impressively quick in operation. If you've got the space to store the images, you can back up whole machines, data n'all - the lazy man's approach - and know that you can have the whole lot up and running - even on another bit of kit - with a trivially simple set of steps. 

If you've ploughed your way through all this and wondered where the payback is - well, that's it. 

For no money at all you can go and research the wares at easeus.com, download them, spend half an hour understanding them and then use them. I guarantee someone will be saved tears - of frustration, if not loss - as a result.

So - if you read the diatribe about my wireless network last week, you're probably desperate to know how it went. Or possibly not. Either way, I'm going to tell you about it, so if you're squeamish about technical matters, look away now.

This is a Spectrum Analyser. This is what serious Ofcom interference jockeys whip out from their jacket pocket at the first sniff of dubious transmission - which is what the very nice Les did when he turned up at my house. ('Jacket pocket' is somewhat metaphorical, it's about the size of a cereal packet, albeit dwarfed by some of the aerials that Les carted in a bit later).  Les sniggered a bit at my suggestion that one of these will set you back about £500; I now understand that a very, very cheap one of these will set you back about £500 and a proper one starts at about 10 times as much.

So I spent a very pleasant hour and a half with Les, chewing the fat about the issue whilst he waved expensive bits of kit about.  And he detected absolutely nothing that might be causing the problem, which didn't appear to be an issue all the time he was here, frustratingly - the network connection had dropped three times in the morning before he came. He did comment that it was odd the way the signal appeared to weaken at the back of the house so dramatically - but, whatever the cause of that, it's not something transmitting locally.

All very frustrating.  Les has gone off to write up his initial findings and I undertook to see if I could get some better measures of when the problem occurs, although I'm not conscious of particular times being worse than any other. To that end, I spent a bit of time on Sunday* setting up some network monitoring doobrey and am playing around with some measures of reachability for the devices on the network alongside timing scheduled downloads across the network. The latter is surprisingly tricky to get a handle on: A few years ago I'd probably have written some code to collect data based on transfer of a file from the NAS in the attic but that's not really an option any more, seeing as how I've forgotten to write anything more useful than the occasional batch script and I'm not resurrecting my skills just for that. Found a cut-down edition of PRTG that might give me some clues for free, so I'll see what that tells me in the next couple of weeks. And if it doesn't tell me anything that looks useful, I may just give up and wire the house up more robustly. You lot will have to watch this space for a bit longer.

* I had to do it all again on Monday, on account of the hitherto reliable Windows 7 OS going into meltdown on the kitchen laptop. Which absorbed most of my Sunday and is going to be the subject of a later post entirely to vent my annoyance and help me calm down.  I don't care if you're interested.

But had cause to deploy it in anger today.  I hope they use it in the 2100s to educate children about life in Britain at the turn of the century. 

Only yesterday, Abby was a little blonde bundle of energy-excess and giggle-surfeit. If I took her to the shops, she'd coo over fluffy things, shriek at pink things and fall prostrate at the paws of dogs in the street, the smaller the better.

I took her to the shops on Saturday.  She ignored the felt-tips, turned her nose up at the pony books and threw disdainful looks at gonks on keyrings. We came home with a poster of some C-list trollop, to go next to the recently acquired poster of an (un)popular beat combo, the (un)Wanted. 

In the words of a real musician: The Times, They Are a-Changin'