eBabble

I’ve had my iPhone 3G for about six weeks now and since the latest firmware update 2.1 I have a strange call issue.  The phone will ring, I’ll answer and the call will last about ten seconds before disconnecting.  It will continue happening for all calls: to correct the issue I have to turn off the iPhone and turn it back on.  Not just pressing the top power button to put the iPhone into sleep mode: actually powering it down.  Once powered back up everything returns to normal and continues to work properly for about ten days when the disconnected calls start again.  Let’s hope the next firmware update corrects this.

Reading the October 2008 issue of PC Magazine and got angry at some crappy advice in their upgrade guide.  First issue is they call it the “ultimate” guide on the cover but open the magazine and it’s now called “PC Magazine’s Essential Upgrade Guide” and is a total of five pages.  Page 74 tells you to upgrade your hard drive and then suggests buying Norton Ghost 14 for $70 to copy over the contents of your old drive to your new larger drive.  Yes Ghost does other things but they don’t mention it in the article, so I’m basing my wrath on this horrible advice.  Seagate and Western Digital both offer free utilities to copy contents over to new drives.  A quick Google search of “drive copy” led me to Paragon Drive Copy Personal 8.0 SE which does just what you want for free, as does HDClone 3.6 Free Edition.  If you actually want the same features as Ghost for free try PING.

There are two basic types of external hard drives for sale: those that use 3.5″ hard drives and those that use 2.5″ hard drives.  The 3.5″ units typically have an external power supply, multiple connection types (USB, eSATA, Firewire) and have some sort of stand to keep them in position.  The 2.5″ units have no external power connections and normally connect via USB.

The important item here is that the 3.5″ units are designed to remain stationary while the 2.5″ units are designed to be mobile.  It’s this alone that should be the biggest determining factor when purchasing: is the external drive to be moved ever.  If it will never move then get the cheaper, larger capacity unit that utilizes a 3.5″ desktop hard drive.  If at any point the drive is to be moved (weekly backups, extending laptop storage, what have you) then get the portable unit that utilizes a laptop 2.5″ hard drive.

Mobile or laptop hard drives are designed to move the write heads off the platter if it detects a sudden drop or rapid movement.  They’re designed to be moved and tussled about so it can handle being in your briefcase for the week.

Contrast that to the desktop hard drive, which is designed to be stationary and only work that way.  If you’re feeling scientific and dangerously carefree start copying a file to your external 3.5″ unit and then push it over: you’ll end up with most likely a dead drive.  I remember using the PARK command in DOS when powering off a PC but it’s not available in XP…

Found this excellent walk through at Maximum PC for setting up Windows SteadyState.

Setting up Windows SteadyState

I read a post today about setting up hMailServer on your Windows Home Server (WHS).  This reminded me of a lot of comments made during the beta stages of WHS when testers kept asking for a mail server like Exchange to be added to the product.  The developers responded that if you needed that feature then Small Business Server was the product for you.

I’ve used every version of Small Business Server right up until the RC1 of SBS 2008: it was the only all around server product that Microsoft offered with wizards and hand holding that allowed you to have an active directory and Exchange for the small office environment.  I needed something that allowed email access from anywhere (OWA), easy remote connectivity and simple remote desktop connection, and basic file sharing.  SBS had these features from the get go and have added more wizards and simplification with each version, making it a must have product for my small office.

Unfortunately WHS turned that thinking on it’s ear with its outstanding backup, file sharing, remote access and easy storage handling.  It’s dirt cheap for what you get and I run the OEM version on decent server hardware.  I only ran the release candidate of SBS 2008 to see if they’d implemented the same outstanding backup from WHS, but they didn’t.

Windows Home Server did everything I needed except email serving.  Luckily I had solved that issue some time ago by using Gmail as my main email client through web or IMAP in Portable Thunderbird or Outlook.  I’ve had a domain for ten years now and have used 1&1 for web hosting most of that time.  Every email user should register a domain and at the very least use it for email: one ISP move and it’s paid for itself in lack of frustration.  I have my email account set up so it automatically forwards a copy to my Gmail account, which neatly filters out spam for me.  My ebabble domain email is set as the default address.  The only issue is in Outlook it shows my Gmail email address “on behalf of” my domain address, which really annoys me.  Gmail is accessible anywhere, even nicely implemented on my shiny new iPhone.

For those that need to run a mail server on WHS just use the built in POP and SMTP services built into Windows 2003: here’s an excellent walkthrough for Windows Server 2003 but if you remote desktop into WHS you can accomplish the same.

Ran across this tip while web browsing this morning.  It’s a golden oldie: when wiping your Windows XP installation to get things squeekly clean, copy c:\windows\system32\WPA.DBL off the system first.  After your reinstall boot to Safe Mode and paste it back: no reactivation needed.  This will only work if you’re not changing any hardware.

You’re copying data over and don’t want to delete any existing: of course the dialog box doesn’t have a “no to all” button, so you click no about a thousand times.  Or follow this trick: hold down SHIFT and click no: now no existing files will be overwritten.

I’m from an admin background and love the granular control of shares and security that come with Windows Server products and Windows 2000 Professional.  In Windows XP Microsoft wanted to simplify the process with Simple File Sharing.  To turn this rubbish off:

1. Open My Computer
2. Pull down the Tools menu, click Folder Options, and then click the View tab
3. Navigate to the Advanced Settings section, and uncheck Use Simple File Sharing
4. Click OK

Here’s a great site that provides keyboard shortcuts for a ton of applications.  I’m a DOS user from way back and enjoy keyboarding instead of pointing and clicking.  A simple and to the point web site.

KeyXL Keyboard Shortcuts

I have that wonderful WD Passport drive and use it for shuffling files between work and home.  I was copying a directory over and it was telling me the destination was full and couldn’t copy a 6 GB ISO image.  Not exactly sure what the issue was but guessed it was related to the file system when I saw the WD Passport used FAT32.  I know why WD would use FAT32 since it would work well with most versions of Windows, Linux and OS X, but I like NTFS since my environment is strictly Windows 2000 and up.  Two simple commands to convert the drive from within a Windows XP command prompt:

1. vol e: (where e: is the drive you’re converting)
2. convert e: /fs:ntfs

You’ll be asked for the volume name before conversion; hence step one.  It was quick and easy.