How to keep your XP for another 7 years

I came across of an interesting articles: "How to make Windows XP last for the next seven years (Vista, schmista. Follow our tips for keeping your XP setup humming happily for a long, long time)" by ComputerWorld (full article here). I do recommend using Windows XP over Vista, although Vista looks great, it's really a resource hunger and eat on your wallet, alive. Think about that, nowadays you pay for an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB of ram, and only got some performance like an Intel P4 with same Mhz and 512MB ram. And don't forget that, you already close to or reach the upgrade limitation, esp if it's a laptop. Usually, I need a lot of memory to run a lot of application at same time. Therefore, I do not wish the OS took too much of that from my machine.

Anyway, let's keep our Windows XP SP2 (or SP3) for at least another five years.

De Hotdog

Piece of information picked up by client and forwarded to my boss:

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/07/mobile-hotdog--.html

Buffalo DriveStation broke down

My Buffalo DriveStation (HD-HB250U2) was not working. My iMac did not recognize it nor show anything on the hardware list. My Buffalo LinkStation could recognize a USB drive but could not show the details of it. I said to myself, may be I need to buy a replacement because the DriveStation is the primary backup of my iMac. And it was close to full capacity. Therefore, a replacement has to have 400 or 500 GB, which cost HK$1400.

But I need to figure out which part is broken, whether the hard disk is broken or the main board of the USB drive. I borrowed a USB-to-IDE cable from office, remove the hard disk from the DriveStation iron frame. The hard disk is a Western Digital one (WD2500BB, 250 GB, ATA-100, 2 MB cache). If the WD failed, I may purchase another ATA HD, instead of buying another DriveStation.

The WD start up noise seems very okay. But it still not recognized by iMac. I changed the jumper settings from "Master alone" to "Master with Slave present" and try again. After a while, it appears on the desktop. All content were there and looked just fine. So, the WD is okay. I undo the jumper settings and try the DriveStation again. Nothing happens. I changed the jumper to "Master with Slave present" and try again. It took a while but finally appears on my Mac.

Isn't that strange?

p.s. seems that Buffalo's quality was... sigh (see user reviews)

Remove MSN ads

Finding MSN ads troublesome? Kill it without installing software. Simple!

Source (Thanks Luzi82 for googling):
http://eg-land.com/viewthread.php?tid=2463 (Chinese site)
http://briian.com/?p=642 (Chinese site)

In short:

Press Windows key + R. Type notepad [enter]. Press CTRL + O. Type %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts [enter]. Press CTRL + END. Type 127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com [enter]. Type 127.0.0.1 rad.live.com. Press CTRL + S. Press ALT + F4. Right click on MSN Messenger icon on task bar. Right click on Exit. Restart MSN Messenger from Start menu.

No more ads. Fresh air!