I got my hands on a HP nc4010 laptop and for the life of me I am unable to install Windows XP on it. All Hardware on the system passes even stress test of 20 minutes. I have individually tested all the Hardware. After getting frustrated I decided to install Ubuntu and it did install Ubuntu without any problem.

Now to add to my misery there is no optical drive present in the laptop. Luckily I had IDE to USB adapter and I am able to boot up from disk using the external drive.

Main Problem:

- Windows XP setup will hang/get stuck on the Text blue screen setup (when it says "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI....)

Weapons at my disposal:

- MacBook with fusion running Windows XP  read more »

This was a long time coming and finally the verdict is announced. The crew of four behind Pirate Bay are sentenced to one year prison time in Sweden. I love these guys for their enthusiasm. Direct yourself to read there blog entry about the verdict.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/boston-college-prompt-commands-are-...

On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. The problem? Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student's propert

From all our clients only one was infected with Conficker. But they were down completely, the whole office. First sign was that they couldn't get on symantec.com or microsoft.com. Little bit later computers started freezing and couldn't get online.

So removal procedure is:

- boot into "safe mode with networking", virus doesn't load itself into safe mode, so you can get removal tool from symantec
- run it - it takes about an hour
- install all windows updates
- you're done

Amazon announced the release of Kindle 2 on February 24th with a whopping price tag of $359.99. The original original Kindle was going for the same price but now it’s down to $250 for a used one. I do like the concept of Kindle and would buy one if I had finished my collection of action figures for the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s tempting to go for this one since I can get all my books in one device, however it is hard to find some books in digital format on the net.  read more »

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows Search\Gather

In LowDiskMinimumMBytes change from c8 to 0

Antec's newest case:

I can only see it being good for motherboard/parts testing. But it does look pretty nice.

The first production "case" that I've seen that was made to be open, was nothing but 2 plastic sheets, 4 plastic bars, and a bunch of screw holes...

More info at ExtremeTech.

Jeez! Is it Deepak Chopra?

While on my fabulous vacation in San Francisco, I stumbled upon something that I find to be incredible.

We all know how easy and fast it is to set up different network options for OS X. When faced with a $8.99 per-day charge to use the hotel's network, one would do anything to find a way to get the internet without having to pay extra. Well, if you have a Macbook (or Macbook Pro), and a bluetooth enabled Blackberry with a data plan and EVDO service to the phone (like Sprint does), you can set up your phone to be a EVDO adapter for your computer. It is quite simple, really:

1. Create a bluetooth connection between the Mac and the phone.

2. Select the phone carrier (in my case it was Sprint).  read more »

There is always smth about VMware products that makes me start hating them right away. I personally prefer Microsoft Virtual Server in Windows environment just because when I tried VMware it didn't "click" with me. Interface made me feel uncomfortable.

Today I had a problem with Parallels (which is not a good product either) om my laptop. One of my virtual machines was eating all CPU resources. After tweaking some stuff, fresh install etc I found out that it's probably problem with Parallels.

So let's try VMware Fusion

works fine

but ...  read more »

It looks like that tomorrow Google is going to release it's own browser.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

Doesn't really change a lot for me. Doesn't seem to be a big change for the IT industry. Just one more buggy browser for end users :)

mood: sceptical