Pimp my Home Server
Just before Christmas 2008 I bought the HP EX475 MediaSmart windows home server. After reading about it before I purchased it I already knew that the puny 512 MB ram that it came with was too little so I already had 2GB ready for installation when the server arrived.
Now a little over six months later the 1TB disks was already over 75% full and I was tired of the underpowered CPU chopping up performance whenever the server tried to do more than one thing at the same time. The server uses AMD AM2 slot CPU’s and I bought a new 2.6 GHz Athlon processor for just over 300 NOK which is a really nice price for a CPU. Following the excellent guide from Home Server Hacks the procedure was quick and painless. Installing a new 1TB disk was also done in a few seconds.
Now my EX475 has 4 times the RAM, 2 times the storage and a CPU that is clocked at 45% higher frequency (but also quadruples the L2 cache) compared to the original. In other words my EX 475 is now more like a EX 485 than the EX475 that it once were.
And to be honest it was needed. If you want to do anything other than sharing documents and backing up PC’s you need to upgrade the RAM and CPU.
Main screen
v1.1.0.0
- Fixed shortcut keys (F5, F6, F8 etc)
- Pattern matching for select and deselect of files
- New dialog for storage information and server uptime
- Revamped user interface to match the Home Server Console style
I’ve implemented the two top features you the users had voted for. Click to read more and download.
left right left right left
One of my favourite bands Coldplay is once again giving away free music to their fans. This time it’s the live album “Left Right Left Right Left” which you can download in DRM free mp3 (192 kbps) format. So surf over to http://lrlrl.coldplay.com/ and download your copy today.
Thank you coldplay…
Click to view full screen shot
I recently decided to jump ship and upgrade my developer machine from Vista to Windows 7 RC. I usually do a clean install, but resofting everything would take a whole day, so I tried upgrading and I was very pleased to see that everything is still working.
Windows 7 (Ultimate and professional) has something called XP mode or Virtual Windows XP which basically is a built-in virtual XP running in an integrated version of Virtual PC (you’ll need to download and insttall from Microsoft.com) . That’s nothing new, but what’s interesting is how the whole thing is integrated with Windows 7.
Microsoft uses a feature of RDP called remote applications. So when you run an application in Virtual XP you don’t see the whole XP desktop like you do when using normal Virtual PC or VMWare, you only see the application’s window, and it’s visible in Windows 7′s start menu, taskbar, ALT-TAB etc. It’s very similar to how things work on the Mac when running Windows apps.
As a developer I sometimes need to maintain old VB6 legacy code. VB6 does not run very well in Vista or Windows 7 and working in a Virtual PC has been the only option, same goes for testing web sites in IE 6. With Windows 7 and XP Mode I now have both VB 6 and IE 6 available directly from the Windows 7 start menu. Clicking any one of them will start the virtual xp machine if not already running, open the said application and transfer the application’s UI via RPD to Windows 7. It takes a few seconds the first time, but man how much better it’s to work with those old tools now.
I was lucky enough to snatch an invite for wimp that was twittered by @aspiromusic today. Wimp is a competitor of Spotify made by Aspiro Music. Where Spotify offers a free ad-financed version along side the payed Premium account Wimp is a pay-only solution.
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Posted in Fun
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Tagged music, Spotify, wimp
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The WHS Media Connect Configuration Add-In has been updated to version 1.0.0.2. It now uses the %ProgramFiles% environment variable instead of hard-coding to \Program Files\. Should now also work with non-english languages of WHS.
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The 31337 guys over at 4Hak3rs have written a guide for Quick & Easy Windows Home Server Backup and Restore. The WHS have duplication support for your data, but not the actual OS itself. So in the event of a disaster (or OS meltdown) you need to reinstall the WHS OS from a supplied restore DVD. All your data is still intact, but all your settings, users, add-ins etc are lost and needs to be reinstalled/recreated.
The above mentioned guide tells you how to create a new restore DVD from your existing setup so that you can roll back to what ever setup you have now.
Great news for all the HP MediaSmart owners (yes this tip is only for use since it makes use of the built in flash boot that’s in hardware).
I går falt dommen i den svenske tingretten. De fire medlemmene i The Pirate Bay ble dømt til å betale 30 millioner svenske kroner i erstatning samt ett år i fengsel. Selve utfallet var vel ikke særlig overraskende. Det hersker vel liten tvil om at nettstedet er laget for å distribuere “piratvare”.
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I often need to sort a generic list on some arbitrary property. After writing the code a couple of times I decided to make it more generic using generics and some reflection. Oh, I know that reflection if costly and this is not a good way to sort large lists, but I typically work with small lists.
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