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Warning – Dell Inspiron 8500 Video BIOS Flash

So, a warning to all users of Dell Inspiron 8500 Laptops with the GeForce 4200 Go video card. Do not attempt to flash the bios on this video card using the Dell utility from their website. It doesnt work, and will brick your video card. When you download the utility, it appears to be nice and safe and made by nVidia. However, after you start it – it’ll tell you it’ll take a few seconds to flash. After minutes and even hours, that message won’t change. You have thus killed the bios on the video card. You can kill/close the fladhing program window, and still resume your windows activities but the system will not boot up again.

You have been warned

Update : Just looked at the download page again, it still says “Recommended”. I recommend you ignore this patch till they fix it. I’m talking to Dell support, and will update this entry with any information.

Update : Spoke to dell. They replaced the video card on the machine for free, and they will be investigating the bios update on the site that reads recommended. Thank you dell.

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How To Redirect Permanently with PHP

Hi,

To do a permanent redirection using PHP, for whatever SEO needs you may have, the code is

<?php
//Standard 404.php file

//Looking for my tnmailserver?
if(strpos($_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”], “/Projects/TNMailServer-Full.aspx”) !== FALSE)
{
header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(“Location: /TNMailServer”);
exit(0);
}
?>

The exit is importantly, especially if you still have other code below this snippet performing other checks, or showing the standard 404 page.

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Rooney and Ronaldo, following Donovan?

So,

Today’s game should have been a white wash for Chelsea. Theres really no excuse why Manchester United couldnt hit Chelsea for 6 afer the special one’s departure. And thus, i think i’ve come to a psuedo conclusion on something. I think that some talented players, fade once in a while. I dont know why it is, but it appears that they peak, and then fade. I don’t know if they fade forever downwards, or if its a phase thing with life, like a planetary alignment issue that triggers some weird neutrons in their brains.

Take, for example, Landon Donovan. FIFA Young Player winner for 2002’s world cup. He had a terrific run in that world cup, and then with the MLS in that period of time. But since then he’s gone down, and i’d say he looked like the worst USA player on the field when USA played Brazil earlier this month.

Since Landon is older than Rooney, and Ronaldo – it’s quiet possible that my theory is plausible. Maybe these two stars are fading now. If i remember correctly, my biggest hero Jurgen Klinsmann went through this patch after departing from Tottenham to go to Bayern Munich. If my memory serves me right, he faded between 97 and just before the start of the 98 world cup. Although he scored 3 goals in the 98 world cup, he was hardly stellar. And then he was gone for almost a decade, before coming back as a coach in full form. Maybe he hasnt taken a job recently due to another slump.

So, maybe thats why Ronaldo, Rooney and Donovan suck recently ? Maybe in a few years they’ll come back for a facinating season or two ?

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VMWare and Virtual Server

For ages now, I’ve been wanting to switch from Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 (mvs2k5) to VMWare Server.

Why? Well, at first I started off with a few production Windows Servers (Exchange, Development for clients and a few Windows XP machines to connect to customer’s VPN’s) and this worked beautifully well on mvs2k5. Using Microsoft’s recommendations of using fixed sized vhd’s and “virtual” SCSI adapters, things were just looking spectacular.

However, with the latest version of mvs2k5, i couldn’t get Fedora 7, Slackware 12, or Ubuntu 7.04 to install on mvs2k5 despite Microsoft saying they added Linux support. This is my problem. I need to be able to test Linux and other open source technologies without busting open real hardware.

Thus, VMWare is my only real hope, since it supports Windows stuff, and Linux stuff, and VMWare’s technology works differently. For a start, each of the virtual machines runs in its own process space, so you can kind of see where the memory and cpu utilization is going – which you can’t with mvs2k5.
So, i decided that my Dual Core 3.4Ghz machine with 4gb of RAM shouldn’t be wasted just for Windows Virtual machines, and started my quest in converting everything to VMWare.

Not so good. The conversions for my current Windows machines have problems. If you have WPA Activated virtual machines, you’d have to re-activate – which I’m ok with if everything worked out fine But it didn’t. It’s a painfully slow process. I also couldn’t get the VMWare tools to work right on these converted machines. My first machine i converted (my development machine that i use constantly), worked fine – if a bit sluggish – in Remote Desktop mode, but over the VM Console, I couldn’t get my mouse to work, and it was really slow. If I wasn’t so obsessed with stuff working right, this would be ok. But i need things to work right so I can be sure that the machines environment is safe.

So for this reason, my rule (for now) will be let Windows Virtual machines, built on mvs2k5, stay on that platform till its life cycle ends. I’ll just have to bite the bullet and use two physical machines for now. I’ve desperately needed Linux virtual machines to test out my latest version of TNMailserver in which my project is getting sadly old without updates.

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Site Launched!

So finally, i officially launched the new look techie.org site tonight. After, wow, 4 years of the same old tripe I get a new look to techie.org, and a functional change too with this blog. I plan on keeping the content fresh with at least a new How To on something or the other every month, along with knowledge sharing on whatever i find strange in the world of IT.

The site will primarily be a resource for my Mail server project TNMailServer and any other new projects I come with – such as my infamous TNDomain Management system (which i am using in production in house). But in addition to techie stuff, I will be putting in my two cents for my other passion in life, football (or as Americans call it, “saaker”) and maybe a few of my pictures I take when I get time off to play.

Enjoy, and thanks for visiting techie.org!

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Slow Vista RDP Session to Windows 2003 R2 64 bit

So, finally, some intense Googling found the solution to my problem of having a sluggish, laggy slow connection from a Vista machine to a Windows 2003 R2 64Bit machine. Something to do with Vista’s RDP client trying to tune something. Either case, this is the fix.

Open a command shell with admin access on the vista box, and type in

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

I’m not quiet sure yet as to any side effects, but all i know is that this fixes my problem in trying to trouble shoot probelms quickly on clients servers that are running 64bit Win2k3