BlueScreenOfDeath

Aww geez… no excuse for my busy schedule lately. Here’s something to get ya laughin

Do you want to join the team that is bringing virtualization into the mainstream? In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively. Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.

Do you want to have the opportunity to work on a great Core OS team at the heart of Windows? If you have big ideas and want to implement them, if you love writing code, if you love delving into operating system internals, if you want to work on high visibility projects with direct consumer and customer impact and still work in a very technical environment, then you will feel right at home in this team.

Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal.

From the looks of things, Windows 7’s features are beginning to look very promising and look to really make the next version of   Windows stellar. With the recent talk about Windows 7’s , HomeGroup and better performance Windows 7 definately looks like the OS that Vista was destined to be. Look here as more information becomes available. With this recent development it looks as if VMware and other virtual desktop applications have some definate competition if Microsoft follows through with this. It will also open up new door ways that can change the entire windows experience for years.

Recently I was scanning Windows Update for any new updates like I typically do when its not Patch Tuesday and I noticed that actually one of my devices had a new driver. Thinking nothing of it, I updated the driver. That being the Gigabit Ethernet controller on the Nforce 4 Motherboard. After rebooting after the install was done, . I successfully booted back into Windows Vista Ultimate x64 to find that my ethernet icon had a red X .

Now to my knowledge, the only other person I know that has had this issue is a friend of mine Chris123NT. I believe that this driver is defective and does nothing but cripple the device if you update it through Windows Update you are most likely going to run into this issue. The solution is simple, simply stick with Nvidia’s 15.00 or 15.01 drivers that they released themselves. MS try to make sure the driver works before ya go pushing it out to the masses. Anyone else have any testimonies or problems? Microsoft has seem to have closed shop for the Windows Beta Program section which prevents us from even reporting bugs, not to mention MS contacts have almost fallen completely silent.

Hi everyone, Seems like I’ve been pretty busy. Well soon after I got my new router, my PC’s chipset on the DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D started going south and making an annoying noise. Seeing as how a bunch of people have replaced this annoying fan with an Evercool VC-RE I decided it was time I did the same. As you can see the cooler fits nicely and does an awesome job as far as cooling. I saw temp drops from 44-46C all the way down to 30C …this thing is a miracle for $7! Simply adding Arctic Silver 5 and this fan did wonders! Also while I had the case open I decided to also reapply my thermal compound under the Heatsink. The new way of applying it to dual core and quads allow for it to cool even more. Doing this I also saw my temps drop down to 27C …very nice.

This should definitely hold me over until I build my next rig later this year. I simply want to wait until the Yorktown’s and the beefed up Core2 Quads get better and better.

Router Update: Seeing as how I almost toasted my router less than a week ago, I was a little adamant about flashing it again.. DD-WRT RC-6 is successfully running on it and I LOVE it.

Believe it or not, after only 2 official days of having this router (WRT 350N). I now have to RMA it back t Newegg. I knew something was fishy when i tried to flash the firmware to the latest update which fixed some critical issues. Apparently after it got to 90% it failed. Thinking nothing of it and that there was some sort of failsafe in place..the router still functioned…until i restarted it today. My worst nightmare had just come true, not only did the flash fail but the router was now a 150 dollar brick. After trying multiple times to get it to respond by hard resetting it, and tftp into it…all hope was lost. I sadly put my newly purchased gigabit wireless N router back into the box, requested the RMA information from newegg and is now packaged up and ready to go to california to be replaced….

Lessons learned from this experience:

1. Linksys firmware is crap..
2. wondering why theres not a failsafe back up like motherboards have now…seriously can it not be put on a router?
3. DD WRT is by far the best firmware and i should have flashed it with that instead of the linksys update.

Good thing my wife is understanding…and realizes it wasnt entirely my fault.. but she did give me this funny look after i told her my router was broken…oh well..now to wait on a replacement

UPDATE: Well some great news! No need to RMA it , i figured out a way to Un-brick it and it worked… *Stupid linksys firmware*

After much consideration I decided to retire my old Linksys WRT54G v2 . After numerous firmware updates and years of reliability I tried to extend the life of the little guy using DD-WRT’s astounding firmware. I noticed this past week though that I lost my connection all together on my wired connections with my connection speed reading 0kbps and no packet activity. I looked all over at best buy and circuit city and found that they had taken it off the shelves, (not everyone can afford a $180 router) and had replaced it a very peculiar looking WRT310N which looks nothing like a router but more like a baby pod like thing. So I’m sure your excited so lets look at the features this little guy packs.

• 4 Port Gigabit Connections & 1 USB for NAS

• 256-bit encryption and support for WPA2.

  • • • • VPN Pass Through

• 3 Antenna’s that support MIMO technology

So many of you are probably wondering…Ryan are you going to leave the Linksys firmware on there? Heck no! After running DD-WRT on my old WRT54G, I am waiting for them to release USB support for the Storage Link, and even then I might still jump on board before that. I have to say I am quite pleased with this router, I was definitely uneasy about getting it seeing as there are reviews floating around giving it only 3 stars. So far I have seen my internet speed shoot up to 20mbps on Cable! Which I was sitting around 13mb. My wife’s signal went from a dismal two bars to five. If you’re in the market for a new router, DO NOT pass this one up. It’s well worth the investment.

del.icio.us Tags: linksys,router,WRT350N,DD-WRT,Wireless-N

It was almost two weeks and counting ago that Microsoft sent out the beta invites for Internet Explorer 8. The first batch were primarily web developers. MIX08 was right around the corner and what more than the perfect opportunity to wow Microsoft fans with a launch of IE8 Beta 1. From start to finish, the install took a little under 15 minutes on Windows Server 2008, and around 10 minutes on my Vista SP1 x64 setup. After having used it for a couple hours now some of the main features that I think people will want to look out for are: Activities, Webslices, the Automatic Crash Recovery and a new and improved Phishing Filter.

• Activities allow for a user to highlight and right click and use the content to blog,look up, send or share on places like facebook. It essentially eliminates the need for you to navigate to the other site and go through the hassle of pasting back and forth what you want.
• Webslices are very similar to what we currently know as RSS feeds but better! With Webslices you subscribe to get updates within a webpage and add them directory to the favorites bar. Webslices detect changes at the site and notifies the user of the update.
• Automatic Crash Recovery is equalivant to Firefox’s recovery mechanism where if the browser crashes then the tabs you had open before that crash will be recovered. Pretty straight forward but a welcome feature.
• Last, the Phishing Filter now ‘Safety filter’ has been updated and improved and a slight overlooked change to this is most URL’s now show a darker tint of black to show that the site is legit.

Word has it that more people will be getting into the IE8 beta as the pool opens up within the coming months. Stay tuned! The summer is shaping up to be very exciting.

Well after much consideration i hit my friend David over at JCXP up for a new layout for the blog, the other one was just… not very tech oriented so now that i have worked with K2 a little i still have some work left to do on it. Im having a heck of a time getting this header to work my way and its not so if anyone wants to lend a hand please hit me up on Windows Live Messenger.

So there’s nothing to show at this point but what we do know is…
The build is 6.1.6519.
The GUI is very much like Vista. I don’t know if once the right video card driver is in place whether there will be flashy stuffs to surprise me. The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot.
Gadgets are now integrated into explorer. You can right click on desktop and select “Add Gadget” or “Hide Gadget”. There is a new gadget called “Windows Media Center” that displays now playing information from the WMC. On the same menu, “Display” is added above “Personalization” which gives you direct access to display DPI settings. The page is much more polished than the one in Vista.
The start menu features a pin besides each item. Clicking on it toggles pinning/unpinning the item. Search in explorer is now states where you search within (usually being within the folder, as in Vista). You can now, however, adjust the size of the search box.
XAML fonts, called the “Composite Fonts” are now added to the font folder. Perhaps WPF will be much more prominent in this release. It’s disappointing that I don’t have Aero running, or otherwise there might be some interesting stuffs to see.
A new application is added, dubbed the “XPS Viewer”, no surprises, either.
Then finally, something interesting came up: the feedback tool. The feedback tool lists the “pillars” of Win 7. Highlight’s include ”network aware”, with improved connection tools and detections. It will have the ability to detect which network you’re in and switch your settings and devices accordingly; With Live account, you can carry your IE settings and favorites with you; Gadget data caching; New Calculator, Paint, and Wordpad using WPF; install to desktop in 10 minutes with only 1 reboot; instant streaming; better battery mileage, etc. All descriptions are scenario-based, so what will actually turn up is still yet to know.
Oh.. how could I miss this. A new boot screen does show up, finally!!!!! A full screen Vista-logon screen like boot screen with a beam scrolling across the whole screen near the bottom. Looks nice but reminds me of Win9x (well since XP we’ve been in the “dark”, so surprised to see such a bright boot screen)!
More than likely with this information getting out…someone in the OEM/Partners sector is going to drop the ball.

Thanks Long Zheng from for the post

A recent study by ZDnet UK showed that in 2007 alone, Windows Vista and XP had a combined 23 vulnerabilities reported throughout the year. However Mac OSX had 234 highly critical vulnerabilities reported. This means that in any given month alone, OSX has five times more vulnerabilities per month than both the Windows versions combined.

I can only imagine what apple is thinking about this now. But this only makes Windows Vista and XP shine even more in light of the recent backlash that Vista has been weathering for the last year since it RTMed.