DECT telephones

DECT telephones

DECT is an acronym for Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications. Like most acronyms, it's a way of making a simple concept sound more technical and more marketable.

Approved in 2005 by the FCC for use in the US, DECT is a new standard for cordless phones and headsets, using the 1.9GHz frequency range to connect the base and handset. It provides superior sound quality and improved range, compared to the 2.4GHz and 5.8 GHz technology which it has largely replaced.

It's primary benefits of DECT 6.0 (the current DECT version) are:

• DECT devices have up to 2-3 times the range of 5.8GHz phones.
• Significant improvement in sound quality
• Because they operate on a different frequency range, there is no interference with wireless network devices, a major problem with 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz phones.
• DECT devices are more resistant to interference from many sources of static and noise, such as microwaves, flourescent lights, and copiers.
• because of the separation of frequencies. rejection of interference and static from other wireless devices.
• Extended battery life and talk time due to DECT's improved efficiency
  

Remote Telnet & FTP

OK, I admit it, I'm old... but I'm not so old that I can't learn new tricks.

Instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into the new era of telecom, I'm busily scratching and clawing my way up to the next level. That includes such things as domain name resolution, gateways, subnets, and port redirection and the obligatory new alphabet soup of DHCP, TCP/IP, VLAN, and DNS.

Anyway, I'm feeling self-satisfied right now because I've just set up one of my Mitel SX200 ICP systems for both remote Telnet maintenance and remote FTP backup/restore to online storage. I'm sure that sounds absurdly basic to young techs who cut their teeth on TCP/IP. But, then again, I confuse the heck out of most of them when I talk about serial ports pinouts, ASCII characters, and ACK/NAK flow control... and I gave up on explaining the telco color code because their eyes glaze over if I go past White/Brown.

So as you read this, lift your glass to my dogged determination. And if you pass me somewhere on the Information Superhighway and notice my left-turn signal blinking, be kind enough to Text me a gentle reminder.

Harry

ProcessQuicklink from ProcessLibrary.com

ProcessQuicklink from ProcessLibrary.com

This is another excellent source of information about the inner workings of your computer. Most of us know how to pull up Task Manager and the 'Applications' tab is pretty helpful in sorting out the status of the programs currently running on your system. Sometimes, just clicking 'End Process' on a balky application is enough to clear the log jam and get you back to business.

Next to 'Applications' is the 'Processes' tab. There you'll see a long list of the things that are going on in the background and sometimes you can spot the one that's hogging resources and relentlessly pushing the CPU to 100%. While some of these files have reasonable names like ' OUTLOOK.EXE', some of them are written by guys that never leave the basement unless they're running low on Mountain Dew. They name their programs things like 'btwins.exe' or 'jqs.exe' and that's not a lot of help, is it? If one of those is out of control, how do you know what you're messing with if you shut it down? And how do you know that they're even legitimate parts of the programs you want on your system?

That's where ProcessQuicklink comes in. It puts an icon beside every running process that takes you directly to it's entry in Uniblue's Process Library. There you'll find out that "btwdins.exe is a part of the Microsoft Windows Operating System which deals with Bluetooth functionality and should not be terminated" and "jqs.exe is a jqs\r belonging to Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U5\r from Sun Microsystems, Inc.\r".

As always, a little knowledge can be a bad thing. Before you start shutting down processes, be sure you know what you're messing with. It would be smart to backup anything you're working on and close any running applications. Making a Restore Point might be overkill, but it wouldn't hurt anything either.

Mike Lin's Home Page

Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel

It seems that every program you load on your machine adds something new to the startup process and, before you know it, there's stuff going on you don't know about and maybe don't want happening. Your system takes longer and longer to start and seems to drag more and more as time goes on. It seems to me that anything that gives you more information or control over startup is a good thing. I've used this utility to do just that for several years and I highly recommend it.

The Startup Control Panel give you a direct look into all the different processes that load as your system starts. It's easy to access from the Windows Control Panel and it lets you selectively disable or delete them. A word of caution though: You're messing with the Registry here so be sure to know what you're doing. Creating a System Restore point before any changes would be a wise step.