Last night, my computer fell asleep and I decided not to wake it. Experience taught me that Hibernate was much more reliable but I decided, eh, it's already Sleeping and I should be too. This morning, after a public transit meltdown in San Francisco, I made it into work a mere 3 minutes before the managing partner was …

Aw yaille! I just wrote up a whole explanatory blog post then lost it so this one will likely be brief... or not. Recently, we found that one of our DNS servers was resolving external hostnames unacceptably slow -- about 5 seconds, give or take. The resolution was so slow, in fact, that all of the clients hopped on to …

I've loved my laptop since the day we met. If you are in the market for a fast, lightweight, decent looking computer, you too may be happy with a Dell XPS M1210. As I mentioned in some previous posts, my machine has the following specs: Core 2 Duo 2Ghz with 4MB onboard cache, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM 80GB HDD, 256MB nVdia …

Note from the future (2025): This post is from 2007. The TrueCrypt project was abruptly discontinued in 2014 and is no longer considered secure. The recommended and actively maintained successor is VeraCrypt, which is based on the original TrueCrypt code. Please use VeraCrypt for any new encryption needs. Just as I …

TweakVista.com is one of my favorite Vista sites. Yesterday, they posted something that I had in mind for posting on this blog but now they've saved me the trouble ;) "Extend Activation Period past 180 days" has step-by-step instructions for using Task Scheduler to legally and permanently delay the Activation …

I believe I have a pretty high tolerance for inconveniences but I just couldn't take it: running Windows Server 2003 as a primary OS on Macbook blows. As a fan of Unix, Windows and beautiful UIs, I promised myself I would put down any amount of money for a small Macbook the day it came out and I did just that. Then I …

My friend Brandon messaged me this morning telling me that he ran into the same issues with Office 2007 Professional (which he won & subsequently downloaded from Microsoft's website). The Office 2007 file extraction locked up even though memory & cpu usage was next-to-nothing so, eventually, he cancelled out …

I'm researching Offer Remote Assistance currently and dang, we had about 54 things to fix before we got the process going. First, we had to take all sorts of steps to enable "Offer Remote Assistance" in Group Policy. Then, we had several SID related issues which created the following events in Event Viewer: …

I setup a WSUS server in a test lab and the results of client machines registering themselves with the WSUS server were flaky; especially if they weren't on the same domain as the WSUS server. One of my cloned machines was having trouble until I changed the SID with NewSID from Microsoft. The others didn't appear to …

I'm terrible with traversing alphabetic directories; when I was in high school and I took the series of military aptitude tests, that was the only one I didn't do well on. I excelled at the rest and the military did their best to court me. All I can say is that I'm one of the many potential recruits that they lost …