Somewhere out there!

If you have a BSOD crash and the BIOS defaults after a checksum error, make sure you check the SATA ACHI/IDE settings. Otherwise window will not boot and you’ll get confused.

Very useful Windows desktop icon organiser by Stardock. Review from Lifehacker.

I was trying a Windows Live game on Steam yesterday and got the above error. After a lot of googling I discovered that I needed to install Game for Windows Live. There is version 1.2 and 2.0. Once this were installed the game run correctly.

Lanuchy is a quicksilver-like key stroke application lanucher for linux and windows. Very cool.

Windows* client CIFS behavior can slow Linux* NAS performance:-

We have compared the performance of Windows* and Linux*-based CIFS* (Samba*) servers for digital media applications and found that the ext3*-based Linux server’s throughput was up to 53% lower than the Windows server’s–although both used identical hardware (Figure 1). An XFS*-based Linux server had roughly the same performance as the Windows server. Our investigation shows that the difference lies in the filesystem allocation and handling of sparse files. In particular, the Windows client makes an assumption that the CIFS fileserver uses NTFS*, a filesystem that assumes files will be data-full (not sparse). This contradicts a fundamental assumption of ext3–that files are sparse–and leads to fragmentation of files and degraded performance on ext3. Further, we’ve seen this behavior manifested for a broad range of media applications including iTunes*.

Often when using multiple screens with a laptop then traveling away with just the single laptop screen applications my remember the second screen and disappear when windowed. Often you can “get them back” by maximizing the window.

A better method is to:

There’s a simple trick to get around this. First make sure you’ve alt-tabbed to the window, or clicked on it once to bring it into focus. Then right-click on the taskbar and choose Move

At this point, you should notice that your cursor changes to the “Move” cursor, but you still can’t move anything.

Just hit any one of the arrow keys (Left, Right, Down, Up), move your mouse, and the window should magically “pop” back onto the screen.

Note: For keyboard savvy people, you can just alt-tab to the window, use Alt+Space, then M, then Arrow key, and then move your mouse.

This KB article from Microsoft might be useful with Windows failed to run an Update:

Method 1: Register the Wups2.dll file in Windows
To register the Wups2.dll file in Windows, follow these steps:
1. Stop the Automatic Updates service. To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
b. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
net stop wuauserv
2. Register the Wups2.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:
a. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
Note For a computer that is running Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
regsvr32 %windir%\syswow64\wups2.dll
b. Click OK on each verification message that you receive.
3. Start the Automatic Updates service. To do this, type the following command at the command prompt, and then press ENTER:
net start wuauserv
4. Exit the command prompt. To do this type exit, and then press ENTER.

Some links on migrating from Vmware to XenServer. Particularily converting vmdk to xva, and dealing with removing Vmware Tools.

• Thread: Howto for migration from VMWare ESX
• Virtual Disk Migration Utility 1.1
• Converting a Physical Disk to a VMWare Virtual Disk
• Thread: VMware Linux guest to Xen
• VMWare to Xen Migration
• Thread: Migrate VM under VMWare Workstation 6 to XenServer
• Thread: v2xva failure in converting .vmdk files? – phantom disks in vmx can make v2xva fail.
• VMware KB #1308 – Cleaning Up After Incomplete Uninstallation on a Windows Host– removing Vmware Tools can be troublesome. Check this kb article and also note the following location in the registry.
• VMware server memory controller service failed to start

The vmmemctl.sys driver is missing from your system or the registry contains the wrong image path. The \??\ is normal in the path.

If you selected the default path for the VMware Tools, your registry imagepath should look like the example below.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VMMEMCTL]

VLC problems on Visata? Switch to the opengl output driver.

Some software for using NTFS Links.