Personal Computers

A PC is perhaps not the first thing that you may think of taking on a Paranormal investigation, its big, heavy and takes up space when transporting equipment. That's a fair comment, but there are some very good laptops around out there are pretty competitive prices and they are very portable.

These are extremely useful at an investigation., in fact now that we have our IP cams we could not do without at least one on site. Usually we have two laptops, two routers a couple of 10/100 switches, two high capacity external hard drives and of course our four IP Cameras.

That little lot does most of the remote monitoring at the investigation, but it also provides the ability to download camera memory cards and audio recorders, freeing them up for reuse as well.
 

On the subject of external hard drives we use dual network high capacity Freecom drives. These can store 500 GBytes and have a 10/100 RJ45 access port as well as USB2. This means that we can attach the drive either directly to the Laptop and have the router there as well or the router can be elsewhere and talking via WiFi to the Laptop or we could have the disk elsewhere with the router.

We try to avoid the latter configuration because of the extra network traffic going from camera to router, router to PC, PC to router and router to disk, yuk! Normally we can have four cameras on one router/Laptop, but to minimise risk we usually split the workload 50/50 so that if something breaks we don't loose everything.

The rule for anyone who works in IT is don't trust the disk, that goes for the one in the laptop as well as the external drive, hence two complete sets of gear. Oh and did I say that one of the laptops runs windows XP and the other one Vista, I never trust Microsoft updates much either, I have been caught out too many times.