Bill Morefield My thoughts, discoveries, and occasional rambiings.

I woke up this morning to a rather odd issue on my phone. I have a Windows Mobile phone and use it to check several email accounts. This morning one showed up on the list, but didn’t seem to have synchronized since late last night. So I went into Pocket Outlook and the account doesn’t even show up. I then go to Messaging and do not see the account. Thinking it one of those odd errors or that I’d accidently deleted it the night before while changing some settings, I started to add the account back in only for the phone to tell me it already existed.

So at lunch I began searching for the problem and most solutions said just hard reset the phone. That’s basically means erasing it and reinstalling everything. Right now I just don’t have that kind of time. So I looked a little more and found a link to a tool called MailAccountRepair at http://nicolasmauri.blogspot.com/2007/01/wm5-utility-recover-your-lost-mail.html. It was written for Windows Mobile 5 and isn’t supported in any way, but given the alternative was to reset the phone and spend a few hours reinstalling and reconfiguring it this evening, I decided to give it a try. It worked for me so it appears to at least fix the problem in some cases.

I found out tonight that my site has been down for much of the last week because of a server move by the host.  I made the mistake of believing them when they said all my settings should move over instead of checking myself.  I lost a post along the way that I’ll get back up tomorrow, but for now I think all is well again.

I purchased a HP Mediasmart Ex490 back in the fall and until late last week have loved it.  Then late last week I tried to remote into it and found the server ran glacially slow.  I then used Remote Desktop to directly connect  to the desktop (the Windows Home Server Console is really just a remote desktop than runs a single application.  When you remote desktop in normally a shortcut to that application is on the desktop) and saw the CPU was pegged to 100% and the guilty application was the Twonky Media server.  This software lets me stream the music and video files from my server out to other devices on the network.

Some research confirmed this was the culprit as a few other people were complaining about it.  It turns out a patch had installed the problem version of the application.  For the short term I just stopped the TwonkyMedia service (Start –> All Programs –> Administrative Tools –> Services).  This accomplishes the same thing as using the Stop Sharing button in the Media Server tab of the Console, but was much faster to bring up.  Once I did this the server load returned to normal.

I finally had a chance to come back to this tonight and found a way to get the server back to normal at http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010/03/04/how-to-fix-twonky-issues-in-3-0-patch-2/.  The only thing I’d add to it is that stopping and starting Twonky through Services works to move the offending file and responds much faster than the Console does with the CPU pegged.

Now HP, how about getting a fix out soon?