Installed my new Liteon 411DVD drive last night. (This marketing blurb also tells me the 48X speed of cdwriting which I’ve not been able to find anywhere else).Took me ages as I wanted to move my hard drives around and make the dvd drive the secondary master. In the midst of doing so I managed to remove the settings for the Western Digital WD800JB hard disk from the bios which sets it to be about 500mb instead of 80GB. This was to get around the bios hanging everytime you went into setup or checked to see what disks were available. Details on what I needed were eventually found at Alternative Bios settings.
Today I installed the software for the drive which unfortunately does not include Nero. The scary thing was that the readme said that if you use multisessions and write over 4GB of data on W2k/XP then you can loose the rest of the data. Microsoft have a FIX: Multi-Border DVD with More Than 4 GB of Data Not Readable Past First Border but I’d recommend installing Service Pack 4 which contains this patch.
Flashed the bios of the drive to the latest available firmware but it still looks like the drive isn’t region free.
The Register reports that there are plans afoot to broadcast more HitchHikers Guide to the Galxy on the radio. Can’t wait.
Apparently Red Hat is to drop linux support next year. A scary prospect for linux users with this and Mandrake’s money troubles. At least with Microsoft there is always another product you can upgrade too 🙂
Even James Bond would be impressed at a £100 car that clocked 480 mph. Sadly it shows how unreliable speedcameras can be.
There’s a new pdf creator program available at webattack, (which is shortly changing its name to snapfiles) that sounds fairly good. You just install it and you have a printer that “prints” pdf files. Go2PDF is free although it does put a “made with” sig at the bottom of the pdf. Personally I use Jaws PDF Creator which came free on a cover magazine and works great.
We’ve now started to get alerts that Mimail infected emails are coming in. Fortunately we’re detecting and deleting the attachments but I’m hoping it doesn’t eat too much of our bandwidth up. In the meantime the status of the threats can be seen at Symantec Security Response. When will these infected people learn?
5 months ago yesterday I requested a Windows 2003 Eval Kit and its still not arrived. I’ve requested another one.
As I’ve had a number of requests on how to reset the compaq Evo T20 I thought I’d post the answer here to make it faster and easier for people.
Just hold the g key down as you turn on the unit and keep the key held down until the unit asks you to set it up.
If you use this information I would appreciate it if you drop me an email me just so I have a rough idea of how useful this is to people.
I wasn’t sure whether posting this information is too much of a vulnerability disclosure and technically I guess its getting around the encryption of a device and thereby violates the DCMA? However the information is/was freely available by ringing up compaq – once you’ve worked out what number to ring AND managed to get hold of someone who knows what you are talking about.
Thanks to a tip off from Kase it is possible to use a Microsoft page to search security and hotfixes to see what patches are available for a particular product/platform.
I tried to subscribe the LangaList to mailbucket’s email to rss utility but the utility unfortunately strips out the reply-to field so I can’t reply to the confirmation email required to actually sign up. Shame really as this would be nice as a low traffice rss feed.