The semaphore timeout period has expired...whatever that's supposed to mean

[buzzy]

Nothing happened yesterday, so have a computer-related entry.

Annoying Error

It could be worse...it could do what Vista did and tell me my file transfer would take 125 years.

I went on a little car trip around town and took some video (1280x720, ~26.7 Mbps bitrate for audio and video), so while it wasn't a long recording, it was large. There were a couple JPEG files, which copied easily. The MOV files were another story. Every time I tried to copy files off my SD card, I would get a "The semaphore timeout period has expired" error. Twice it happened while the progress window says "Calculating", but once it happened in the middle. The time it happened in the middle, the progress bar turned red and just stayed like that for ten minutes before deciding to throw an error. The close and cancel buttons didn't respond. If I eject the SD card and reinsert it, the problem goes away for one copy/move operation, but then it happens again. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the SD card or slot, as I can watch the videos. I found a forum thread where people were trying to figure out what it meant and why they were getting the error. The thread was posted originally as a reference to this error appearing on a network transfer, though people got it on USB, IDE, and SATA hard drives; NAS; SD cards and USB thumb drives; large and small files; files copied through Windows Explorer and the command prompt; 32- and 64-bit Windows; laptops, desktops, and servers running various versions of Windows and even one Ubuntu server. As people say on the forum, you can ignore the word "semaphore" and just pay attention to timeout. To summarize some solutions:

• For the problems over a wireless network, the solution seems to be to lower the security to WEP or none at all. (Maybe a driver issue if the encryption causes problems.)
• For wired network problems, check the network cables on each end. I guess that goes for the NAS too.
• For local hard drive to hard drive transfers, it could be bad sectors (you'd have to run the lengthy CHKDSK /R on each drive), bad wires (SATA or IDE cabling, a bad USB cable), or bad drivers (probably chipset drivers unless you're running a fancy RAID setup or an add-on card, in which case you'd have to update the drivers for those).
• For SD card transfers on a built-in card reader, try updating the drivers, especially if it's made by Ricoh. (This might be my problem, but now I don't have large file to try to transfer to see if the driver update fixed it.) You could also try an external card reader, such as a USB one. If the card still doesn't work, try copying instead of moving or flipping the read only switch on the card.
• Sometimes when you have this problem, you can copy it, then move it. Another way around it is to use a compression program to compress the source file with a program like 7-zip or WinRAR, saving the compressed file on the destination drive, then uncompress it there. That's kind of a lot of work though.

That's the problem with vague error messages: there's no way to know for sure what it's telling you without having to look it up.