Thursday 26 January 2017

High CPU usage on Surface Pro3 running Windows 10

System interrupt uses one CPU core

Windows 8.1

I already had this issue running Windows 8.1 and could work around it, simply disabling the realtek high definition audio driver, that seems to be the docking station's audio system.

Windows 10

The problem came back with Windows 10. But this time disabling drivers did not help.
That should be an "idle" system

What brought the fan to a standstill, however was:
Restarting the Surface Pro 3 while in the docking station.
I don't mean powering it down and switch it back on again. That doesn't do any good. It is the restart that does the trick for me.
A very relaxed CPU
This, of course, is only a very temporary solution. So whenever the fan (which rarely ever stops completely) gets on my nerves, I reboot and things are better for the rest of the day.

Docking station drivers?

I suppose that a driver for the docking station's peripherals causes the problems. But disabling any of them did not cure the problem, so I might be wrong. Can anyone shed more light on that issue?

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Edit 2017-03-08: The current driver package SurfacePro3_Win10_1700802_1.msi did not help either.

Monday 23 January 2017

More work on the TOP-308 IP Camera

Great news on the TOP-308 IP camera

Root access to the camera

Last year I got this Top-308 IP camera and got a little stuck as I couldn't get full access.
Now user Choziro over on the IPCamTalk-Forum has found a great way to get full root access to the Linux OS of the camera.

This is how it is done:

  • Telnet to port 9527 of your camera. (Most likely 192.168.1.10 9527)
  • log on as "admin" with an empty password
  • type "shell"
  • type "telnetd -f"

The session is more or less stuck at that point, but that does not matter.


  • Now telnet to your camera (192.168.1.10) at the default telnet port 23
  • User name is "root"
  • Password is "xmhdipc"
  • You now have a nice busybox shell that behaves much better than on port 9527
Rootshell !

No still images from the camera

Nosing around in the file system showed that there was no obvious way to get a single image from the camera. But that is what I need. So I resorted to letting my Raspberry Pi do that job:

This works both with avidemux and ffmpeg:

avconv -i "rtsp://192.168.1.10/user=admin_password=_channel=1_stream=0.sdp" -vframes 1 "image.png"

That will capture a single frame from the camera and write it to a file "image.png".
Putting that into the RasPi's crontab could copy an image to a web site.