Ghost to usb drive.

Had problems trying to create a ghost image on a new Dell machine which only has usb ports (no ps2 ports for mouse and keyboard) to a usb hard disk. When the drivers for the disk were loaded, the mouse and keyboard were disabled. Removing the aspiehci.sys from loading in config.sys by pressing F8 at the Starting PCDos prompt and answering No to the initial question I had a ghost program with mouse and keyboard support.
However, ghost complained with error 622 – Cannot create image file. By going into the bios and setting the SATA controller to run in compatible mode rather than normal, Ghost worked – or at least it is currently creating an image for me.

myway search bundled with dell laptop

Myway was bundled on the new laptop and I didn’t mind it too much until it started to hijack my search results in internet explorer. With a reg file merged into the computer, I am used to typing things like “gg fred” into the address toolbar in the bottom right of my screen to get the fred term loaded into google results. By typing in abso fred, it would return any mention of fred on this website. Not so with myway installed though – it would hijack these results to its own website. Even after uninstalling the software it still continued to do so until I rebooted the laptop (there was no request to reboot when the software was removed). It also leaves behind crud in the registry – I still had a
“HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\My Way SA” entry.
Looks like I’m not the only one to get a bit fed up with it. Get your act together Dell!

Work updates.

The laptop keyboard has now been replaced so I can now type away again uninterrupted. It’s amazing how often the k key is pressed in one day. (three times in this post already!) I also had a chat with the certification bod and they want me to get my MCSE next year and the first exam will be an elective and they have chosen the Small Business Server exam. My exposure to this software is fairly minimal as I’ve only used it in live environments so I’m looking forward to spending some decent time on the software to see how it really works. I’ve requested a copy of virtual pc and the software to put on the laptop so I can play without causing any damage to live servers. I’ll probably need a bit more ram for the laptop to run it though. I’ve also got to come up with a way of generating an smtp feed of email so i can populate the exchange database – I’ll probably just run some batch files to use blat to send emails to it or something…..
It is hard work getting up early in the morning though – I went to bed at 9.30 last night and I’m about ready to go to bed now!

Firefox 1.07 crashing on startup.

I’m not sure why yet, but two machines that I have installed firefox 1.07 on are crashing on startup. I’m figuring it is an imcompatible extension as it seems stable until the extensions are loaded. A new profile fixes things but it is rather annoying. I’ve lots of extensions so it is taking a long time to test them, especially as you have to restart firefox each time you change an extension 🙁

csccmd 1.1 works a treat

Following on from my previous post about offline files and client side caching , I can confirm that the newer version of csccmd1.1 works a treat and solved our problems. It took me about 50 minutes on the phone to Microsoft (which was nice as it was a sunny day in the park in the middle of Columbus) before I got through to someone who wouldn’t try to tell me to download the file off the website which is the old version that I already had with limited capabilities. As the kb article 884739 mentions you have to speak to PSS and as the file is not a hotfix you can’t get it from the hotfix team. I ended up speaking to the Enterprise support networking team to get the file (after the personal support and the business support were unable to release the file to me).

Information Improvisation

Not everyone is at ease in a computes and software shop. This is why the majority prefer to download software. In rare cases do they bother making a trip e.g. for purchasing microsoft office software edition 2007. Other software tools are preferably taken from freeware sites. The same is the case with mobile phone software.