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02 dicembre Consolidation is fun...Over the years, I like many others have used CDs or DVDs to backup files. Of course as videos, pictures, VHDs, ISOs, etc get larger and larger... the limits of these technologies result in a number of headaches. Recently I decided to switch to doing all of my backups on external HDs. You can now easily get a 250GB external USB drive for about $100. At this price, it becomes feasible IMO to simply backup to two of these HDs instead of using 50 or so DVDs.
Cheers, 03 luglio Cute - Fun with Office GUIDsWhile trying to fix a corrupted Microsoft SharePoint installation, I noticed that there was something funny about the GUID used for the WSS SharePoint package:
MsiExec.exe /X{90120000-1014-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}
The last 6 characters spell Office J 26 settembre Dell D630 with NVS 135 PerformanceI have now been able to get results of a Dell D630 with both the Intel X3100 and the Nvidia NVS135. See below for details on their 3DMark 06 performance. Please note that Dell has released an updated NVS135 driver, but not a X3100 driver yet. 15 giugno Dell Latitude - NVS110M vs Intel GMA950 vs Intel X3100I have seen a lot of people trying to figure out the 3DMark06 performance of Intel's new "Santa Rosa" graphics chip the X3100 chipset. I had the opportunity to test this on a Dell Latitude D630 (the replacement for the D620) so the results below are as apple-to-apple as you can get. It is important to note that the machine was running the Dell A01 drivers (only one available since it is so new). I have read that the current Intel drivers do not support HW T&L, but that the chipset does, so I would expect to see a jump in the numbers when the A02 drivers come out later this year. If the "jump" is the same as Nvidia got last year, that means the 3DMark06 score will be over 1200; which is not bad. The test was also run on Vista (32-bit), which to-date has been about 5% in 3DMark06 scores than XP. Updated: Someone asked for the RAM speed of these machines. Both the D620 and the D630 used the faster 667MHz memory. Here are the results:
22 giugno Dell Latitude - Nvidia NVS 110M vs. Intel GMA950I have seen a lot of people ask the question, but I haven't seen anybody with the answer; so here it is!
Q: I am going to buy a Dell (or whatever) laptop and it comes with the Intel integrated GMA950 (256MB Shared) Video card. For $60 or so more, I can get the Nvidia NVS 110M (256MB Shared). Is it worth it?
A: Yes, but only if you get the latest drivers.
 I recently had the opportunity of having two identical Dell Latitude D620 laptops side-by-side. The only difference between the two was the video card. I then ran 3DMark 2006 on each and here are the results:
You will notice that with the A01 drivers from Dell that ship with the laptop, the performance of the Nvidia card is actually WORSE than the Intel card! But if you get the A02 drivers (Released 6/22/2006), things are MUCH better!
Cheers,
20 febbraio CCleaner - It really is that good! This is a non-CRM bit, but I think it is worth sharing with the world. CCleaner is hands down a fantastic tool. I say this for several reasons:
Overview of CCleaner
"CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! :) "
I use this tool all the time. As a software developer that is constantly switching from project to project of VPC to VPC, this tool is the next-best-thing to a re-format and it takes only a few seconds to run.
 Cheers, 06 dicembre Cool (or not)About a week ago the northbridge fan on my MSI Neo4 Platinum motherboard gave out. In my endless quest for a silence PC; I decided to replace it with the Zalman NB47J passive heatsink. I did this based on reviews and some postings on the internet that people have had luck using this device on my motherboard.
The part cost only $9 + about $7 in shipping. Installation was a pain (you have to remove your motherboard to get the old spring loaded screws out (what a bad design) but generally speaking, I was able to get up and running quickly.
It only took a few hours for the problems to start. Random lockups, networking not working, HD not working... all on and off and all at random times. I decided to see how my little heatsink was doing. I touched it and felt that the thing was pretty much on fire! This of course made me dig a bit deeper; I hooked up a temperature sensor to the heatsink and saw that the sink was almost 70 degrees Celsius! (HOT!) I then ran down to Fry's and bought a PCI slot fan that would blow air over the sink; this brought the temp down to 30 degrees Celsius (MUCH BETTER). I have no idea what the temp was with the old fan, but I am pretty happy with the new temp.
The moral of this story is that if you expect to cool a Nforce 4 Ultra with this bad-boy and you intend to do it in a case isn't a wind tunnel; this heatsink isn't for you.
Side Note: The PCI fan I bought is WAY too loud and will have to go... I guess I am back to having to get a new fan-based northbridge cooler. Something more like this:
 03 novembre My new phone...After my old Sony T637 took a bath (rather a wash), it was time to get a new phone. Since I use to work at Microsoft, I had had the privilege of playing around with Magneto (Windows Mobile 2005) well over a year ago. Of course this only gave me a "taste" of things to come and thus began the long wait for the "perfect device". What is this perfect device you ask? Well, I wanted a single device that would meet the following requirements:
As it turns out, my phone going in the wash was a blessing in disguise. Within a week of that phone going bye-bye, I was able to switch providers and buy this little gem: 
I have had the Sprint PPC-6700 (Really an HTC Apache) for almost 2 weeks now and I freakn' love it. It does everything I want. It's an MP3 player on the plane or at the gym, its a phone when I need it and it lets me stay connected (productive) when I am out of the office.
Overall I give this device an "A" and would highly recommend it to all. The phone is not as big as the picture would have you think. The only thing that could make this phone better, would be a VGA screen. It currently has the "standard" QVGA screen (320x240)... the very latest PPC devices have VGA (640x480) screens.
23 agosto Visio 2003 Connection Tool TroubleToday, as I often do, I set out to create a Visio flow diagram as I so often do and my "Connection Tool" was not working as expected. Sure it let you connect shapes up, but it would not let me set arrow heads on it. No matter what I tried, it simply ignored the setting I applied and reverted back to "no arrow" heads. The other screwy thing is that when I right-clicked on the line it gave me two odd options that I had never seen before on this shape.
Some Visio option somewhere got set that was messing my connection up. I did my usual looking through the online help, newsgroups and Googling for tips, but nobody had an answer. After messing with it for a bit it seemed that the problem was file specific. When I tried to open the file up on another machine Visio would crash with a C++ runtime exception! So my fix was to simply:
While I always like to know why a problem occurs, the "black box" that is Visio prevents me from digging much deeper. For now, I will settle with "the file was corrupt"; I hope someone finds this entry useful.
15 marzo Adobe releases Acrobat Reader 7.0.1
http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/7x/7.0.1/misc/Acro-Reader_701_Update.exe
According to Adobe: 31 gennaio New MSN Desktop Search Beta!!! (02.00.0001.1203)
You can download the new beta refresh release here: 30 gennaio Adobe Reader 7.0 - Javascript problems...Well it appears that others are having the same problem. A quick search on the Adobe Forums shows that I am not alone. http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@915.KVK3dWczJ2D.4@.3bb76df8
24 gennaio Aaron votes "No" to Adobe Acrobat 7.0I have been running Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 on several machines since the day it came out (about a month ago) and all I can say is "no sir, I don't like it". For those that know me, this may come as a shock. I love new versions of things, newer is after all better, faster, cooler, whatever... I want it. Enter Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 - Since installing this new reader I have run into a number of problems. First, Microsoft Internet Explorer seems to remaining running even after I have closed all instances of it (I can see one or two IEXPLORER.EXE's in Task Manager)... second and more importantly... I randomly get Adobe Acrobat alerts asking me to enable JavaScript. Why would I have to enable JavaScript? Well because I turned it off. Adobe Acrobat 7 seems to now support inline JavaScript, since I never use fancy PDF files and I like to practice good security by reducing attack surfaces I disabled this feature. Now that it is disabled however, Acrobat will randomly say: "This document contains JavaScripts. Do you want to enable JavaScripts from now on?" The problem is that Adobe Acrobat is not even running and I don't have a PDF loaded! I found that if you open Acrobat reader by itself and simply close it (with NO document loaded) you will get this error. Sounds like a bug to me. I imagine that the Acrobat IE plug-in may be causing other troubles and when the IE process ends finally unloads I get this pretty error again. Long story short, I think I am going to stick with Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 until 7.01 comes out. 21 gennaio MSN Desktop Search IFilters Rock!Here is a great little site that offers a ton of free IFilters. Simply install these bad boys on your machine and you can index and retrieve content from all sorts of file formats via MSN Desktop Search. As of now they have IFilters for CHM (Help Files), HLP (More Help Files), MHT (Microsoft Office HTML Format), CAB (Microsoft Compressed Folder) and ZIP (Classic Compressed File). 18 gennaio BusinessWeek & MSN Search (A response)Wow, I actually got a response from Mr. Wildstorm about his article on MSN Desktop Search. (Most impressive!) Here was his response to why he believes MSN Desktop Search doesn't support PDF files. Mr. Wildstorm: "IFilter is an Adobe tool that, by Adobe’s description is intended for expert use. I have had difficulty getting it set up and working and I think most people would be baffled by the process. Microsoft and Google both need to build this capability into their tools." (Typos Corrected) While I certainly agree that Microsoft should have this functionality built-in to default installation of MSN Desktop Search; I feel it is incorrect to assume that installing the IFilter is too complex for most users. I have installed MSN Desktop Search and the Adobe IFilter on 4 different machines and there was no special configuration or steps required for either. Just download and install. In fact the MSN Desktop Search Setup is even more complicated than the Adobe setup.
06 gennaio Business Week Article on MSN Desktop SearchBusinessWeek (a very good business magazine IMHO) has an article on various Desktop Search tools, including MSN Desktop Search. You can read about it here: http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_02/b3915019_mz006.htm One problem though, is that Mr. Wildstorm incorrectly states that you can not search for PDF files from within MSN Desktop Search. This of course is completely untrue (I have sent him an e-mail regarding this error). Since MSN Desktop Search is based on technology found in Windows Indexing Service, it is compatible with the IFilter Format. This means that users simply need to install the Adobe Acrobat PDF IFilter (as I mentioned in an earlier entry). If you are using MSN Desktop Search, you can install the IFilter from here: 05 gennaio MSN Desktop Search - More Tips & TricksIt turns out that you can search specific metadata! I am not sure if this is undocumented or not, but it is very cool. Here is the syntax: Author:Joe Smith Notice that there are no spaces between the end of the Metatag Name and the ":" and the Content. 04 gennaio MSN Desktop Search (Beta)Well, I have been playing with it for a bit and so far I really like the new MSN Desktop Search Tool. You can download the tool here: http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/ Here are some thoughts on the topic:
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As any one that has read this blog before will know, I have been having trouble with Adobe Acrobat Reader v7.0. Mainly due to an odd "JavaScript is not enabled" error, which randomly pops up even when a document is not loaded. Anyway, it appears that Adobe has released a minor update and you can get it here:
- Computer news you can use!
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