I dislike Windows - about the best debugging info you get is "it's slow". Then you get to monkey poke while watching different performance counters and try to guess which thing is causing the problem. Today I got to reschedule my lunch on short notice since Avalon decided to be a little lethargic around noon. I went to reboot it, and it took around 45 minutes to finish flushing disk caches. Then it got really bad almost right away. I turned off SFM to reduce the load and it stayed up until 6 when I took it down to apply firmware updates. I updated the firmware on the drives themselves, the RAID controller, and updated the driver too. The drives were the one that we really wanted to try though - apparently even though the docs say the update is for the 180 and 200GB drives, my boss was told by them to apply it to smaller drives too. It seems stable now, even with SFM enabled, so here's hoping. After I got home a bit later than usual, for some reason I went over to ebay and started browsing. That's usually a bad thing for me. Tonight I only bid on 3 things though, and got good deals. One was an AXB-232++ AXlink bus controller, and the other is an ABX-IRS4 IR/Serial controller. I have a few other things on watch pending the results of those auctions. I love mislabeled auctions... In case you haven't figured it out by now, yea, I'm planning to have a bit of fun, automate most of my theater, and learn how to program in Axcess in the process. Not exactly the way the company intended it to be done (you're supposed to buy the hardware and setup through a dealer), but if you're a geek... :) You sorta have to have played with an existing system and poked enough to know how it works in order to know what things you need though - that's the one type of doc they don't have as you're supposed to go through the dealer who's supposed to have gone through some training. The cool thing about systems like this is it's totally modular with a backend bus (in this case AXlink). If I get ambitious I can eventually add stuff like lighting controllers, and relay outputs. I don't know about the lights, but I'd probably do relays in the semi-near future for screen mask and projector lift control. Yea, I got a bit of construction to do too... :) Well, looks like C1 for lunch tomorrow. That should be good.