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VHD in Windows 7

Given changes to Windows backup formats in Vista/7/2008 the following tools may be rather useful as W7 and 2008 become ever more common:

http://www.jmedved.com/default.aspx?page=vhdattach
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4

this 2nd one can even allegedly be used [with care] with Vista native VHD backups. or
http://www.winmount.com/mount_vhd.html

which allegedly also allows one to write to the VHD as well.

Alternatively, if you need quick access to VHD backups, you can mount them directly from the 7/2008 Disk Manager, but the mount doesn't survive a reboot.

Also VHDTool - command-line tool which provides useful VHD manipulation functions including instant creation of large fixed-size VHDs.

Help! My Screen is Upside Down! - Shortcut Keys to Fix

upside down xpCLICK HERE FOR THIS ARTICLE UPSIDE-DOWN!

We occasionally get a call that begins 'Help! My screen is upside-down!', this is usually on a laptop, and it can be done inadvertently - it has even been done by cats on the keyboard according to one customer. However, there are simple shortcut key combinations that can put everything back to normal.

If the display has been rotated, it can normally be corrected by pushing the key combination <Ctrl> + <Alt>+  <Up Arrow>. 

This capability to invert/rotate the display is a feature of some of the Intel® Extreme Graphics Chipset driver.  

The following chipsets are affected:

Intel® Extreme Graphics 845GE
Intel® Extreme Graphics 845GV
Intel® Extreme Graphics 845G
Intel® Extreme Graphics 845GL
Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 865G
Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 865GV
Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 855GM

Image rotation is enabled by default and is activated by the default key combination <Ctrl> + <Alt> + <F1>.

Once it is activated, you can rotate the display with the additional "Hot Keys":
 
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Right Arrow>
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Down Arrow>
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Left Arrow>
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Up Arrow>
    
To disable this Hot Key Feature, remove the check from the Enable Hot Keys selection box in the Extended Graphics properties.

Windows SP3 installation - "The system cannot find the file specified."

Trying to install Windows SP3 (Network Installation) on a client machine. It would not install, giving the error message "The system cannot find the file specified." and "The installation could not complete"

Thank you to DataOne on the softwaretipsandtricks.com forum which pointed me in the right direction.

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
regsvr32 /s atl.dll
regsvr32 /s Softpub.dll
regsvr32 /s Wintrust.dll
regsvr32 /s Initpki.dll
regsvr32 /s Mssip32.dll 

 

Sometimes you just have to love Microsoft

Not sure what to say really. I got this error earlier this month and just stared blankly at the screen for a while.

 gotta love MS 

 

And a Windows 7 error (March 2010)

 device failed

Error 1327.Invalid Drive : when installing an Application

I recently encountered a problem when attempting to install ACT! 2009 Premium on a clients computer. Every time I ran the installation program, the following message appeared on the screen.

error 1327.Invalid Drive: N:\  

Then the installer would close itself.

The machine was running Vista Business and had a mapped drive to a NAS called N:\.

Early searches led me to think it was a problem with either a previous installation or the Installer program itself. This did not make sense as ACT! to my knowledge had never been installed before on the machine.

Disconnecting Drive N: did not make a difference nor did running the Sage ACT! special uninstaller program just in case.

A quick phone call to Sage was next, who denied the problem was with their product but with the installer service on the computer itself. However, they did give me some information in passing which eventually helped me fix the problem.

According to Sage, ACT! copies some demo databases to the My Documents folder on the PC which is hardcoded to be on Drive C. This PC had the My Documents folder mapped to the NAS drive for backup purposes. Once I remapped the My Documents back to the local drive, the ACT! installation was able to run and it installed without any further problems.

So if you are seeing this error then check that your system does not have any odd drive name allocations or remapped My Document folders.

The cost of the number 9

Some customers are asking about downtime, so here is a quick summary of realistic expectations. The following excerpt is from a Slashdot comment 6 weeks back (thanks to mcrbids)

So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.

So in order to assess how much money you should spend on uptime depends on how much downtime really costs you.

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