Okay, so I like the new Gmail design – cleaner and more whitespace – just looks much more modern that the existing one. But it’s still bloody annoying ! The thing is, I hate having to go across to the little ‘back arrow’ reply icon, click the dropdown next to it, just to get to [...]
Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category
CurrentCost Power Monitor Software
May 11th, 2010
3 Comments
I recently bought a device to monitor our household energy consumption. After looking at a few I lumped for a CurrentCost Envi. this is a great little device that comes in two parts – a transmitter with jaws that wrap around the main power cable coming into your home and a desktop display unit. The [...]
Install Windows from a USB Drive
April 3rd, 2010
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This post is for my own benefit more than anything. I frequently have to ‘google’ for the instructions to make a bootable USB drive to install some version of Windows from. So, to save time in the future, here are the instructions : Open a command prompt As Administrator. Run diskpart. Enter list disk – [...]
Enabling virtualization when booting from VHD
November 23rd, 2009
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I ran into some trouble with Hyper V the other day – I had booted from a VHD into Windows Server 2008 R2 and was trying to start a VM – I got the usual ‘The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running” error.I had just had a BIOS failure [...]
Exchange 2007 Access Denied when installing Mailbox Role
November 10th, 2009
1 Comment
Yesterday as I was trying to install Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, I got a pretty strange issue. Everything worked well up till the ‘installing mailbox role’ phase – it seemed to fail pretty quickly when it got there. Subsequent retries also failed (quickly) with exactly the same error – ‘Access Denied’ [...]
Dual Boot is Dead – Long Live Boot from VHD
November 10th, 2009
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It is official, dual booting is now dead – Boot from VHD is the new king. On my flight to BoS2009, I was inadvertently reliving some nostalgic milestones from the past 10 nay 20 years. I had my Windows 7 laptop, booted from a VHD (see Scott’s great post for some easy instructions on how [...]
Windows 7 and my Windows Mobile phone
February 26th, 2009
1 Comment
After upgrading to Windows 7 on my laptop I found that I could no longer sync with my Sony Ericsson X1 (Windows Mobile 6.1) Phone. It didn’t even seem to be charging (over USB). Looking in the system Device Manager I found a missing driver for the ‘Generic RNDIS’ device. A bit of goggling uncovered [...]
Windows 7 Sticky Notes
February 26th, 2009
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I am loving the Sticky Notes app in Windows 7. The only issue I have with it is the dreadful font it uses – well my issue is not the font, it is the fact that you cannot change it to something more ‘normal’. I mean, I can easily change the font for Outlook Notes. [...]
Kameleon 8040 aka One For All 4 in 1
January 15th, 2009
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I bought one of these about 4 years ago – initially loved it, but it chewed through batteries at an incredible rate, so after a few months of use and another instance of needing fresh batteries (and none being available) it sat in a drawer for some (considerable) time. Now that I am a (proud [...]
Xbox 360 Networking
January 15th, 2009
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So before Christmas I bought an Xbox 360 (60GB HDD version). Reasoning was “it will be good for the kids hand eye coordination” which in reality was a thinly veiled “I want one and the kids might like it too” (as it turns out they don’t)… Anyway, one of the first tasks was networking it [...]
