No, this post is not about my Fuze.  My Fuze has actually been a very good phone.  It has yet to really piss me off, especially like the 8525 did on a daily basis to me.

Today I got the urge to play with some different Windows Mobile builds, and since I have had my 8525 laying around not doing anything, I figured it would be the perfect little test platform.

As a side note; from what I saw from Windows Mobile 6.5 I didn’t care for it.  I like what HTC is doing with their TouchFlo interface MUCH better then the stock WM 6.5 scrolly interface.

Aside from that the OS seemed fine… but the hardware…. oh how the hardware pissed me off so badly I wanted to throw it against the wall again and again.  With in the hour I played with it, the phone randomly locked up on me… and when I reset it, the device acted like it was a HARD reset.  All the stuff I had done (thankfully not much really) was gone?!  WTF?!

I am thoroughly convinced this was not a ROM issue as there are hundreds of other people using this ROM with out issue.  I am positive that this is a hardware issue.  I believe that there is something very wrong in the land of the 8525.  Who knows what it is… I want to blame it on the Samsung processor and accompanying chipset, but I have absolutely zero proof to back that up… it’s just a theory.

The 8125, which I loved, had a Texas Instruments processor.  The 8525 had a Samsung, and my Fuze has a Qualcomm.  I have also seen other Windows Mobile (Verizon) phones with Qualcomms, and they always felt so much faster then the Samsung and even TI counterparts.  I think that the Fuze is really benefitting from the Qualcomm as it always feels snappy, and can go for a week or more with out a reboot.  That is iPhone-stability-level right there.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this.  I am just posting up some experiences I had today which further push me to believe that the 8525 line of HTC devices had a lot more problems then just underpowered hardware.

I’m thinking of a fitting way to destroy the 8525.  Perhaps some shotgun blasts?  God forsaken hardware…

On June 16th the new Ghostbusters Video Game came out.

Being a HUGE fan of the series for the majority of my childhood, I decided to do something fairly rare (in my world at least), and that was to actually purchase the game.

Luckily it was made available on Steam, which I already have an account on and is where I’ve been buying the majority of the [few] game I actually purchase.  Steam has so many advantages to it, I feel it really adds value to a game when you can buy it through Steam.

But anyway, I was playing some Ghostbusters tonight having a complete blast.  After destroying the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, it was time to return to the Ghostbusters HQ.

Upon arriving I decided to take the spare down time I had and explore the HQ a bit.  I mean, what child of the 80’s WOUDLN’T want to walk around the GB HQ?  And let me tell yah, they got it PERFECT.  Not only the HQ really but the whole game is done very very very well and you can really tell while playing it that they put a lot of time in to the story and game play to make it an authentic and enjoyable experience.

During my wondering around I noticed Winston hunched over a computer screen.  I looked at the computer screen and started laughing… here is what I saw (cropped image):

I know it’s a little hard to see… but it is the final screen from the absolutely ABYSMAL original Nintendo Ghostbusters video game!  Complete with misspellings and completely fucked grammar.  I couldn’t help but laugh, and it really made me appreciate the detail put in to this game even more… even giving a little jab to the complete abomination known as Ghostbusters on the Nintendo.

I’d also like to say that if you’re a fan of the movies, a child of the 80’s, you will LOVE this game and I really suggest you buy it to show your support for projects such as this one.  The game isn’t just a game, it feels like you’re part of the movie.  It really makes you want to get out your little plastic proton pack with yellow foam confinement beam, run around the backyard, and bust some ghosts!

So I finally caved and signed up for a Facebook account.  I like to think my account was the one that put Facebook over top of MySpace, but I doubt it.

Why did I finally get one?

Was it because of certain people hounding me about it?

Nah… as much as he wishes 😉

It started off because I wanted to look at other people’s picture, which you can’t do unless you have a profile AND are their “friend”.  So off I went.

Now that I have actually used it, I am ashamed to say I actually like it.  Not only is it a very nicely developed web app, but it is actually somewhat useful.  I have already stayed in better contact with my sister who lives far far away now (miss yah), and got me in touch with friends I hadn’t spoken with for a long time.

Unfortunately it has also allowed people to find me who I rather not have contact with, but for them, there’s the ignore button.

The ability to easily share photos with friends, set up events, and just generally stay in touch is surprisingly useful.

So here, I finally admit it.  Facebook isn’t all bad, and it is somewhat handy.  So, if you haven’t tried it yet, get on the bandwagon finally and get yourself an account.

Around a year ago I wrote about getting 800mb of space back after installing SP1, and I come to you today with a similar tip for SP2!

This one is not as dramatic as 800mb, but I did gain back around 400mb of disk space.

Just as with SP1, this works by removing backup files made during the service pack install, making it prememnant and impossible to remove.  Just keep that one fact in mind.

Just pop open your favorite command prompt, and issue compcln

It will ask you to confirm, and then it’ll get to work.  After a couple minutes you’ll have your reclaimed space!  (And a permenent SP2 install!)

For nearly all servers you don’t really need to worry about configuring this since most servers can keep their time by themselves.

But every once in a while you run in to one of those black sheep servers that seems to lose time every time you turn around.  The particularly annoying thing is that if the server’s time is incorrect, all computers attached to that domain will be incorrect.  This can make troubleshooting difficult if you’re going off of times in logs, and log times are completely wrong.  I ran across such a server today.  I KNOW I have set this server’s time in the past and it seems every time I get back around to checking it, it’s is out of sync by 10, 15, 30 minutes, or even more then an hour!

So after digging around and trying a couple different things, I came across some instructions and a handy utility that got the server’s time sync’ing to the NTP’s time servers reguarlarly to ensure the server never loses time again, which I’ll share with you.

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Trying to not be a negative nancy, I decided to post up a quick article on a great experience I had today with Dell’s customer support.

A client called me saying their server wasn’t booting.  I went out there and to make a long story short (about an hour of troubleshooting), I determine 1 of their 4 sticks of ram was faulty.

I called Dell support and with in 2 minutes I was speaking with a live rep.  I told him I had some bad ram, and he said no problem… took maybe another 5 minutes of him typing things up, and he is over nighting me a stick of ram to replace the faulty one.

I loved the whole experience.  It was incredibly simple and they didn’t treat me like an idiot and make me run a bunch of bullshit diagnostics that I had already done my self troubleshooting and figuring out which stick it was.  They took my word for it.

I wish all service calls went like this.  Simple, to the point, and gets the problem resolved.

I’ve also had similar great experiences with HP’s support.  Dell and HP are both winners in my book for having excellent support centers!

Maybe Acer should take notes and get their act together.

IPCop is a really neat open source project that can basically transform any old computer with 2 NIC’s in it in to a hardware firewall, VPN server, and Web Filter, among many other useful things.

We use it quite a lot where I work and we’re always looking for the smaller, better IPCop box.

The most recent version we went with was a 1U half-depth rack mount server from the guys over at abmx.com.  This unit was both cheap, and met our needs of a rack-mountable IPCop machine.

The slight downside to this machine was there was no CD-Rom drive in it as our past IPCop boxes have had.  In addition, there was no IDE port on the motherboard (only SATA), and we didn’t have a SATA CD-Rom drive hanging around the office, so I set out to figure out how to install IPCop from a USB drive.

After a ton of searching I came across some instructions, which I will post for you in case you ever want to do the same.

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Well, I played around with the Windows 7 beta a while back, but not too much.

Recently the Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 came out, so I decided to pop it in and see what is new, and what I’ve found is painfully disappointing in most cases.

Microsoft is continuing in their tradition of dumbing-down their operating systems to the lowest common denominator, making power users such as myself feeling…  well… feeling like Micorsoft is calling us dumb.

Case and point; first thing I do to any machine I own running Vista (or Win 7 now) is to disable Windows Defender, and Windows Firewall.  These are 2 services I have never ever once found useful, and ALWAYS end up being a pain in the ass at some point, and they generally slow down your computer.  So, I went ahead and axed both of these services as usual by first disabling them in the control panel, then disabling their actual service from starting up.

So, a while after I did that I was getting stuff set up, and went to enable Remote Desktop, and what do I see when I try and enable it…

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