Sunday 1 June 2008

Resetting PatientLine Terminals

When visiting my wife in hospital, we had been use of the internet facility available via the PatientLine service. However, after a while the browser (actually Internet Explorer 6) was becoming very slow, and so we exitted it. Even going back to the TV resulted in a message about low memory to keep appearing, and the phone didn't appear to be working very well.

So I thought, if it is using Internet Explorer then it is probably running a version of MSWindows (Embedded XP), and sure enough pressing ctl+alt+del on the attached miniature keyboard brought up the usual reset dialog. From there it is possible to select Reset and therefore reboot the terminal. I wouldn't recommend using the shutdown option as the is no obvious way to restart the system, and you would have to get someone to come out and restart it for you.

Anyway after a few minutes watching the system shutdown, restart, boot from the network, start up xp, and waiting for all the applications to start up, the terminal was again working at full speed.