Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Dell Remote Access and Decrapifying my Dell Laptop

I was willing to give the Dell software a chance but decided to remove the "Dell Remote Access" which had previously nagged the cr#p out of me, the last straw was finding millions (I'm prone to exageration, but not this time) application event log messages with source "PHP-5.2.4", I'd already wondered about the high CPU usage.

The messages began "The description for Event ID 2 from source PHP-5.2.4 cannot be found." so OK, not DELL but installed by DELL and these messages indicate that its garbage anyway otherwise it would have registered itself correctly.

Some examples of the actual messages (20/min):
  1. The text of the event was "php[6732] gets Content-Type: text/vnd.wap.wml; charset=utf-8
  2. PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Dell\apache\htdocs\media_tags.php:0) in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Dell\apache\htdocs\dsl\include\mob_header.inc on line 0

Anyway, glad thats over, will look at the others when they give me a reason. Hopefully that also removes the occassional 2-5 second hang that I get where even mouse doesn't move (in Vista Ultimate 64 bit).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Dennis,

I had the similar issue on my machine and I found out that all I needed to do was upgrade my version of Dell Remote Access from version 1.1 to the latest the version 1.3.

If you would like to give the latest version a try simply click on the link below.

http://downloads.dellremoteaccess.com/ra_setup.msi

Also is this a new multi-core PC or an older one?

dbareis said...

Not sure what version it was but my laptop is less than a month old.

If it was an old version then dells software updates checks was also not working as it told me there were no updates.

Thanks for the tip and its always worth a try but frequently when someone thinks a new version fixed it, it could just as easily be the fact that they uninstalled and (re)installed the product. If I thought it was useful, I'd have done it. I may be missing a good reason for using it but if so Dell's site didn't want to tell me what that was.

It is also anoying that Dell's "support centre" didn't pick up the major problem in its own product and do something, that product is next on my hit list...


SysInfo says: Intell(R) Core(TM)2 Due CPU t9800 @ 2.934 MHz, 2 cores, 2 logical Processors...

Bens said...

I'm busy doing my research papers right now but my Dell laptop also give me a nerve-wrecking bad trip! :|

Anonymous said...

It is better to go for specialized remote access solutions than using in-built ones. You could try Webex or LogMeIn for personal use, while RHUB (http://www.rhubcom.com) system is better for commercial purposes.