[Rant] Parking in Manchester

At the moment I time it right to go into Manchester (free after 6pm on Monday > Saturday and free all day Sunday) On days I work I tend to stay behind an extra 20 minutes before leaving which means I get into town around 6pm and find a spot no problems and not have to pay for the meters.
Failing that I might park in the AMC car park should I go to their cinemas (£2 for 5 hours parking once NCP ticket has been validated.)

Recently Manchester Council has been discussing extending the parking chargeable times to 8pm EVERY DAY!  Obviously this means I would have to fork out parking charges every time I go (and this increase might mean the extra petrol/cinema ticket price at Trafford Centre or Bury/Bolton would be more justifiable!)
It does mean though I would have to rush eating or not go Jum Cha with the family on Sunday...
See:
http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/News/City-Centre-Businesses-Hate-New-Parking-Extension

Meanwhile other councils like Oldham and Leeds have reduced their charges and offered free Saturday parking!
http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/News/Council-Offers-Free-Saturday-Parking-In-Oldham
http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/News/Leeds-Cuts-Parking-Fees-Manchester-Ups-Them

How at the moment the meter prices are ridiculous £0.65p per 15 minutes by China Town = £2.6 per hour! *ouch compared to AMC!*
See attached map for chargeable zones (and cheapest meter prices)
http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200072/parking/146/on-street_parking/4

1 thing I learnt the hard way is that although you might only need 2 minutes (to up the time from say 5.58pm to 6.00pm, the meter WILL EAT THE MONEY BUT NOT ISSUE A TICKET UNLESS THE MINIMUM 65P WAS INSERTED!)
THERE IS ALSO NO REFUND SHOULD YOU ADD TOO MUCH (OR DON'T NOTE THE MAXIMUM TIME ALLOWED!!!)

Now at the end of last week I stopped a parking bay ticket enforcer (lovely lady by the way to chat to) who told me that these plans were not set in stone and the council was still looking over the complaints and arguments.  However it looks likely to happen and herself and colleagues weren't too happy as it meant longer working hours in the dark and no Sunday's off...
Reading this article then added insult I reckon:
http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/News/Our-parking-Q-and-A-with-Manchester-City-Council

SB: Will there be more enforcement officers on street?

Cllr NM: No, there’ll be no more. There may actually be a reduction in 

So there you have it.

I HATE IT!

Maybe I should always drive into work (after loading my bicycle to the roof rack, park the car in the rear service yard 1 or 2!, then cycle into town after work?)

Of course this means I have to find somewhere safe to lock the bike!
Safe I wonder as both front and back wheels are relatively easily to remove!!!

Vauxhall Zafira Roof Box/Rail/Bike Carrier accessories

From past experience of driving fully loaded with 7 person and a week's worth of luggage (including jamming bags into all of the space underneath the seats Id thought it'd made perfect sense to buy a roof box.
See, the interior 'listed' loadable space with all 5 back seats down was 1820 litres (obviously add in the 5 seat and people and it's tiny!)

During my hunt I somehow convinced myself to upgrade from a cheaper unbranded set costing about £150 to £290!  This was based on the fact it'd looked better, had slightly better fuel consumption (which these days will pay for themselves) and being Thule branded could be used on other vehicles.

The cheap deal: (from £139.95)
http://www.roofbox.co.uk
for a package including Cruz roof bars and Karrite Odyssey 325 root box.
However my car roof rails has no sunroof but with 3 sets of 2 holes on the inside which meant I had to go for the premium set costing £154.85!)

In the end I went for Karrite Odyssey 360 (in grey) and the Thule Aerobars kit.
The roof box itself is attached rather simply ith 4 large U bolts (and nuts on the inside and offers 2 luggage straps to tie down any large objects.  It also had it's own lock and can only be opened from one side.
During my research I found out that Karrite is actually Thule's own brand (albeit their value brand if you will)
The Thule roof-bar package that I ended up going for was the Rapid System 753 consisting of:
* Thule Rapid System 753
* Thule Aero Bar 861
* Kit 4011 Fixpoint XT (cos of the 3 holes on the roof rails.)
Instructions for fitting should I lose them are here:
http://www.thule.com/pdf.axd?ext=\Classification_1_root\Image_Hierarchy\ImageFolder_175958\ImageFolder_177936\184011.pdf

In the end due to time constrants (3 days to go on family trip and still no box/rails) I got PFJones in trafford to match the cheapest deals I could find online:
http://www.pfjones.co.uk/
When I got there, day 1 they couldn't try as the fixing part had to be ordered/transferred from their Stroke-on-Trent branch, day 2 I got there with only 10 minutes before they shut so couldn't.  However day 3 came and I got there around lunch and they spent 20 minutes fitting the box and bars to my car in the rain.  Cheers guys.

After driving a mixture of 1300 miles with/without the box not much noise / wind resistance could be noticed. However my car trip computer said it was giving about 30mpg on the motorways which is A LOT lower than expected/usual!  photos to come later....

Test driving an [un-released for sale] Hyundai i40 through a Safari

Found a freebie through Hotukdeals forums where Hyundai were offering potential car buyers a free chance to test drive the high end luxury car that they were going to release on sale a few weeks later:
http://www.hotukdeals.com/freebies/free-safari-park-entry-when-test-driving-a-hyundai-i40-woburn-longleat-west-midland-996054

Wiki of the car and manufacturer site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_i40
http://www.hyundai-car.co.uk/i40/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=PPC&utm_term=i40&utm_campaign=Brand

As it was Summer I booked 2 cars - one for my dad and one for me to drive (each car allowing 5 passengers) which meant we could all go!  Before going I was slightly worried that there was a £500 insurance fee should the car become damaged! (and lots of stories of monkeys wreaking cars in a safari, not to forget the different types of animals found there!)

The car itself was extremely spacious especially when we start talking about the boot size and leg-space and other features such as individual front seat heating/climate control (here's to Ray Sum saying she's heating her butt up so the lion would turn around and face her for a good camera shot!)

I must admit that I did stall the car a few times due to the unfamiliar controls etc and after the 1st time and errrr.. how to release the electronic handbrake I quickly gained control and was definitely faster than my dad in doing so!  Power-wise I felt the car didn't have enough - may that was because I was mostly in 1st/2nd gears (and 3rd at one point) due to the small drive space we had and number of other cars on the road.

Whilst driving through the 1st parts I used the jetwashers to clear the front windscreen for better camera photos but quickly thought bad idea as the jetwasher heads were rather powerful and cover the panamora style sunroof as well!

Vauxhall Zafira (Modifications / Secrets)

Whilst having my Zafira for so many years a quick google searches show that it is based heavily on the Vauxhall Astra (H model)

Original post had been deleted so a quick google shows that I wanted to blog about this cool site:
http://www.diagnostics.org.uk/category/zafira-b/

[Troubleshoot] Ray Sum's Graphics card crashing (Part 6)

Continued from:
http://wai-pc.blogspot.com/2011/09/troubleshoot-ray-sums-graphics-card_7457.html

OK an update from the last few days: (starting from Wednesday 28th)
A tad bit of light reading...
>> Nvidia's forums for Geforce M series: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=202
     >>> Most sensible answer/excuse for crashing is overheating due to drivers:
             http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=206597&st=0&p=1272274&hl=330m&fromsearch=1&#entry1272274
             and something called a DPC Latency
             http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=188633&st=0&p=1187409&hl=330m&fromsearch=1&#entry1187409

A different bit of light reading though then explains a 'connectorgate' issue (bad solder or connection between gfx card and motherboard or something along those lines)
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137385/nvidia-bad-bump-misery-deepens
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/142730-beans-nvidia-connectorgate-issue.html
Will check these out more in depth next chance I get to sit down for a while!

******************************************************************************

Back to the tests then
Somewhere along the lines I found out that Windows Vista onwards included a driver verifier tool to test drivers for problems http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;244617
and so I tried this in safe mode, where the tests wouldn't run then in normal mode where they ran but no errors found.

Whilst this was happening I used my desktop PC and whilst doing more research found out that Windows Aero themes are rather resource hogs so I disabled this and changed the setting to windows default.

I then installed a 'classic' game of mine, Battlefield 2, downloaded and applied the patch v1.5 and launched single player games with 16 bots (no settings were amended.)
After 2 games taking 1 hour, the system hadn't crashed or anything (so I thought it's windows!)

The next few day however it did a number of 'bad' things:
* The glitch-y graphics came back (once) and an unannounced automatic shut down!
However this was after changing the video setting in battlefield to the widescreen resolution.
One thing that could be noticed was that the laptop was BOILING HOT!!!! See photo of my desk and you will understand that I couldn't easily use either computers (Toshiba laptop fan's on the left (where the mice are!)
According to Toshiba's PC Health Monitor the CPU temperature was only 50% of maximum (what is the maximum though? and why does it not show graphics card temperature!?)

I'm definitely gonna have to buy some sort of temperature sensor to test whether its a cooling problem.
Thinking about it though I'm sure there should be a desktop app that checks the temperature (something to do  over next few days!)

Since then Wai On's had a play (supposedly on facebook) and it crashed 3 times according to WhoCrashed all of the 0x116 (0xFFFFFA80097E0010, 0xFFFFF88004892180, 0x0, 0x2) / Video TDR Error!

So long story short (only change is no Windows Aero theme!)
* Crappy graphics card settings in Battlefield works fine (6 games to date so crashes)
* Increase to 1366*768 widescreen resolution and it appears to overheat, 1 garbled crash and 5 premature shut downs
* Light computer use including Facebook by Wai On (3 crashes over 30 minutes)
Conclusion Ray Sum should forget her social life and start gaming!

[Troubleshoot] Ray Sum's Graphics card crashing (Part 5)

Continued from:
http://wai-pc.blogspot.com/2011/09/troubleshoot-ray-sums-graphics-card_5633.html

As Ray Sum's now taken the laptop back I can't test it further and write more on the topic so as a quick de-brief I've attached some photos of typical crash screens!

Typical screen garble and 'BSOD' "blue screen of death" after typical use!

This new messages only occured after changing physX settings and running DxDiag BUT NOT COMMON therefore I'll put these to a once off for now!

My next steps of attack would be to maybe test the system in a LIVE CD environment using Ubuntu to see if it's simply Microsoft/Windows based drivers causing the issue or the actual graphics card!
I did try to do this using the 32 and 64bit versions of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS disc I had but they simply wouldn't boot - goes to a DOS styled prompt after the initial GUI screen asking if I wanted to try the LIVE environment, install, test memory etc etc!

After that, backup to USB stick (or other external memory / storage deviice) the existing Nvidia drivers after noting their versions and installing a fresh new set (firstly trying the Toshiba listed ones then the latest set(s) off Nvidia's website.)

[Troubleshoot] Ray Sum's Graphics card crashing (Part 4)

Continued from:

http://wai-pc.blogspot.com/2011/09/troubleshoot-ray-sums-graphics-card_25.html

As the laptop's Nvidia GT330M graphics card chip is labelled as 1GB (shared with PC RAM) I'd thought I'd double check that it wasn't this.  This also meant that I could leave it running over night untouched.
[Note that the system had also crashed once due to accessing invalid memory address!]
[System has 64 bit processor and operating system so should be able to access all of the 4GB RAM installed which detects perfectly in the BIOS and windows!]

Some actual specs for the graphics card here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html
And a quick review:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-330M.22437.0.html

The utility used was the MemTest86+ RAM tester that came as part of a Live CD of Ubuntu 8.04!
Note that after 17 iterations of the test over 11 hours NO problems had been detected so the RAM should be perfectly fine.