Code Syntax Highlighting for Blogger

I was envious how nice my friend, Arnoud's PowerShell blog was showing up the code and decided to look for something similar in Blogger. After a bit of searching, I found a very nice open-source tool Called SyntaxHighlighter. There is a great instruction page here.

PowerTab for PowerShell

A friend of mine had mentioned to me this cool free PowerShell addon, which takes tabbing into a whole new level. You can download "PowerTab" from ThePowerShellGuy.com

A bit of registry with PowerShell

I was trying some PowerShell commands to see how it works with Registry. I liked of course how I can browse registry by simply typing:

Registry:

And the way I prefer it with Get-ChildItem (gci)

gci HKLM:\Software\microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

But of course when I type that it shows me the registry keys under that path

SKC VC Name ;
--- -- ---- -------- 
3 1 OptionalComponents {(default)} 

If I actually wanted to see the content, the command to use is Get-ItemProperty (gp)

gp hklm:\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run\

Kernel and Hardware Abstraction Layer : KHALMNPR.EXE
Adobe Reader Speed Launcher : "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\Reader_sl.exe"
atchk : "C:\Program Files\Intel\AMT\atchk.exe"

I removed the PSxxx properties from the results above.


So, what if I wanted remove the registry entry for Adobe Reader Speed Launcher?

Remove-ItemProperty does that:
remove-itemproperty hklm:\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run -name "Adobe Reader Speed Launcher"

Is there an alias for that? We can use Get-Alias (gal) to find out

gal | where {$_.Definition -eq "Remove-ItemProperty"} |select name 


Name
------
rp

Note that, we removed something directly under Run key. If we wanted to create a key or delete it, we would not use "*-ItemProperty" but "new-item (ni)" and "remove-item (ri)" respectively:

ni hklm:\software\blahblah
ri hklm:\software\blahblah

Interestingly, if you wanted to search for "blahblah" with gci using a filter like this:

gci hklm:\Software -include "blah*"

it would not work as registry key is a 'path'. So you would use something like

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.name -match "blah"}

or

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.PsPath -match "blah"}

Notice that -match (regexp search) works but -like (pattern search... more like -eq) does not:

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.name -like "blah*"}

returns nothing.

I was curious to find out why; so I typed

gci hklm:\software\ |where {$_.name -match "blah*"} |fl *

and reason is clear:
Name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\blahblah

So, changing above search pattern to "*blah*" works:

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.name -like "*blah*"}

PowerShell bits and pieces - Search for a file

I am taking some notes while discovering how to do simple things in PowerShell. What better place to store these than this blog?

Searching for a file:

Assume, We are searching for Remote Desktop Client File. I know that it's called mstsc.exe (and in fact I have a pretty good idea where it is) but assuming we don't have a clue about it's location. We would want to go to root of the drive and start searching from there. In DOS, I would run the following from the root of the drive

dir /s mstsc.exe

In PowerShell:

gci -recurse -filter mstsc.exe -EA SilentlyContinue|ft directory,name -auto

If you are not at root, add c:\

gci c:\ -recurse -filter mstsc.exe -EA SilentlyContinue|ft directory,name -auto

gci is short for Get-ChildItem (or ls or dir)

-recurse is like /s in DOS; goes recursively into subdirectories

-filter is very efficient because provider filters the results before they are passed to powershell

-EA is short for ErrorAction, which tells PowerShell what to do when there is an error. You are likely to hit access denied errors when searching. Options include

• SilentlyContinue. Suppresses the error message and continues executing the command.
• Continue. Displays the error message and continues executing the command. "Continue" is the default value.
• Inquire. Displays the error message and prompts you for confirmation before continuing execution. This value is rarely used.
• Stop. Displays the error message and stops executing the command.

Then we are piping results to FormatTable using column names and telling it to Auto Size

A couple of notes on this...

1) If the file we are searching for may be hidden, then we would want to add -force parameter when searching.

2) ErrorAction is a common parameter to PowerShell commands; not specific to Get-ChildItem. If you would like to get the explanation for a parameter of Get-ChildItem; you could type

get-help gci -parameter force

If you wanted to find out which other commands have "force" parameter; you would omit the command name like this:

get-help * -parameter force

None of these would work for ErrorAction as it's a common parameter. So, you would simply type

get-help ErrorAction

and you will notice that one of the help files is about_CommonParameters

get-help about_CommonParameters -detailed

That prints the information about ErrorAction I copied above.

Time to give PowerShell another try

Today, I transferred our pictures and videos from the weekend to my PC and then diligently started tagging them... I accumulated more than 10K pictures @year since my daughter was born. It's clear that I need a lot of Tagging to do. Then it occurred to me that I could possible use the folder structure I've been using to do some of the tagging.

I use the following structure for media files

Root |

|Audio

|Video

|Pics

| {Year}

|{Month}

|{Event}

So, I could probably tag all my pics with at least year and month information and possibly add event too... and I thought PowerShell should be perfect for such file manipulations. There is a slight problem though. I am not sure how to code it... Well that brings us to our subject matter.

I was very excited when MS announced MSH (Microsoft Shell), which later was renamed to PowerShell. The moment I heard that it did not have any remote capabilities, I thought it would not go far. I still wanted to give it a shot but syntax was terse; I did not like it.

Windows 7 is out with PowerShell 2 and I have changed my mind about it; I think it's time to give it another try. There are a couple of reasons I think it's valuable to learn it:

• Resources are not scarce: There is now a large enough community coding in powershell; which means it's possible to find resources
• .Net!: I've been reading 'learning C#' books, and understanding whole that .net world makes understand PowerShell easier. It works the other way too.
• MS Emphasis on PowerShell: Microsoft seems to be going full speed in making Powershell the premium scripting language for all products as well as OS.
• It really is powerful: The more I read about it, the more I understand how powerful it is. Well, I still do not like the syntax but I am used to Perl; I am sure I can get used to it too :p

No, I have not yet figured out the language fully, although I am more comfortable with it now that I read some material. I encountered Keith Hill's blog, there are tons of useful material there and even better, he has compiled his "Effective Windows Powershell" posts into a single pdf file. I just finished reading it and found it quite useful.

I will probably post the solution I come up with about the original tagging issue, but right now I am just trying to take in as much as I can before going all out scripting. Who would think PowerShell could be fun too? :p

Windows - First Report

So far, I am loving it. It seems to be a rock solid build, at least as fast as Vista. New taskbar takes sometime to get used to but after that seems more intuitive. The only annoyance I noticed is when an application prompts user, it does not stick out and there is not an easy way for user to tell it is pending for action unless that user clicks that group.

For example, if I am downloading, say Citrix ICA client and switch to another application, I would not know download finished and it's waiting for me to click "run" button unless I pay extra attention to it.

On my laptop, I also noticed an interesting situation which was not there until the final build. When I simply close the screen, I expect it to go to sleep mode. It seems to do that but every time I put the screen back up; it displays a dos window as if it is booting and even asks me if I would like to boot from the CD if I have one in the tray. If I click the "Suspend" button though, this does not happen.

Lastly, I did upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium from Vista Home edition, and noticed that a couple of application got broken. Newsleecher is one of them; I had to re-enter activation code. PowerDVD is another one; which simply launches and disappears immediately without any messages.

The new action center is a great way of finding out solutions to problems. I see some gusvc error as in the form

Log Name: Application

Source: gusvc

Date: 8/18/2009 4:22:10 PM

Event ID: 0

Task Category: None

Level: Information

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: XXXX

Description:

The description for Event ID 0 from source gusvc cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

Service stopped

Event Xml:

0

4

0

0x80000000000000

18655

Application

XXXX

Service stopped

but not sure what's wrong with Google Updater. It did not seem to be affecting any functionality in Picasa or Chrome (from which I am typing this).

The other error, which again does not seem to be breaking anything I use is from Adobe (suprise?) Air

Log Name: Application

Source: SideBySide

Date: 8/15/2009 4:03:48 PM

Event ID: 63

Task Category: None

Level: Error

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: XXXX

Description:

Activation context generation failed for "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe AIR\Versions\1.0\Adobe AIR.dll".Error in manifest or policy file "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe AIR\Versions\1.0\Adobe AIR.dll" on line 3. The value "MAJOR_VERSION.MINOR_VERSION.BUILD_NUMBER_MAJOR.BUILD_NUMBER_MINOR" of attribute "version" in element "assemblyIdentity" is invalid.

Other than these little annoyances, it's working like a champ!

Is this cool or what?

Tony Darnell of www.deepastronomy.com has masterfully edited this and some more on his youtube page.

The 40 most popular SA tools

Sunbelt's NTSYSADMIN was one of my favorite lists for years. These folks gathered a list of 40 most popular SA tools. Take a look.

Passwords

Recently, I encountered a common issue in programming. My perl application needs to use a service account to pass some parameters to another application. One of these params is a password. So, question is how do I pass the password to the other application while securing it from people who can view the source code...

I will not go into details of the solution I came up with but discuss the "password issue" we face everyday. In today's world, almost every site requires username/pwd, give you the same simple password recovery options etc.

So, if someone is trying to hack into your account; the first thing they will try is the 'password recovery' option of the site. Some sites allow you to create your own question; but most don't. The answer to these common questions may not be that difficult to find out considering how much of our information is exposed.

What's worse? It's common knowledge that people use the same password most of the time on web sites. Assume you have a password and make it unique for each site. Much better safety but that approach is not fail-proof either if you think about the possibility that a couple of your passwords may be exposed and someone may figure out your system...

How about using a say MD5 (now broken and not safe) or SHA1 hash instead of password? Well, good thing about hash is that it's one way function. So, if you are not using the same password; then the hashes you will use will be unique for each site.

Sounds great; right? Guess what? Most sites; even the very respectable financial ones have restrictions on your password that will make them quite unsecure.

Take a look at Microsoft's often cited "Strong Password: How to create and use them"

Following is from American Express Password Change Page:

Your Password should:

• Contain 6 to 8 characters - at least one letter and one number (not case sensitive)
  
• Contain no spaces or special characters (e.g., &, >, *, $, @)
  
• Be different from your User ID and your last Password

Check any password you create with these rules against Microsoft's Password Checker

Not surprisingly; you cannot get a strong password with these restrictions.

Only 6-8 chars, and not even case sensitive?

You cannot use any special characters??

What were they thinking ???

How about storing passwords? Well, long story short; it seems that Passpack is leading the pack. Check that one out...

Bypassing Internet Censorship

It was interesting to see how much content leaked out of Iran although government censorship. Today I saw an article about psiphon, a software (guide here) that helps circumvent censorship. More information is available at their site: psiphon.ca

There is also an informative guide there titled "Everyone's guide to bypassing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide".

Vista Sleep Problems

Vista on my Fragbox2 PC has a problem with sleep mode. When I click the Start > "Power button", it works for a couple of seconds; then I hear a "click" and HD and most of the PC shutsdown but fan keeps on running.

I could not remember if I had updated the firmware on it since I bought it last year but I suspected my Asus P5E-VM DO had something to do with this. Unfortunately, I failed to find anything on Asus forums.

Today, I was trying to locate what key was causing PowerDVD registration reminder to pop-up via Sysinternal Procmon and noticed that my Philips camcorder was constantly querying registry. I decided to disable it.

So, I ran Start > msconfig and while there started to clean up other unnecessary stuff like pesky Adobe Acrobat's acrobat_sl.exe.

That's when I looked closer at two Logitech start-up processes:

• SetPoint.exe
• KHALMNPR.exe

I knew that they belong to my Logitech G7 software; the only reason I had installed them was to dynamically increase/decrease sensitivity while playing World of Warcraft. As I quit playing it; there was no reason to keep the software. I checked the forums anyway and found out that someone else was complaining about Vista not going to sleep mode with these running.

I disabled them and rebooted. It worked. Vista sleeps happily now :)

Update:

Well, it was not happily ever after :(

I did solve the problem for good though:

Apparently there are two Sleep levels in BIOS; S1 and S3 ( dont know what happened to S2). So, I had to go into BIOS and change sleep level to let it go to 'deep sleep'.

How fast is Google Alerts?

I just got a google alert; which told me that I had blogged "XML++". I recalled that I had created a Google Alert when I heard about the service quite some time ago.

I checked the alert and I had set it to be "comprehensive" and send me alerts "as-it-happens". Hmm, 'as-it-happens'? Judging from the time passed between alert and my previous blog post; it took Google ~1hr to detect my blog entry. That does not sound like 'as-it-happens' to me.

Ps. Umm, and I wonder what's up with the timing? I posted this at 00:20am EDT but see the posted time as T23:06-5:00 ???

XML++

Well I could not find a better title for this post as it touches several different but connected subjects as you will find out below...

I've been an Outlook user for over 10 years and I've used it as my contacts manager until recently. Although, I am guessing very few people use it, one of the features I like is the ability to add a picture.

Times have changed. Facebook has pictures, e-mail and other contact information that I would normally keep in Outlook. Still, I would want to have Outlook as my 'authorative source' as I control what information goes in there.

Grand Central (now known as Google Voice) and gmail also has contacts and now that Google separated Google Contacts as a stand alone product; I decided to take my contacts online.

Problem is importing from Outlook to Google Contacts strips many fields, pictures being one of them. Plus there is no product out there that would import updated Facebook information to Google Contacts.

I am quite surprised that it does not exist actually but understand that Facebook is using some measures (like e-mail address is displayed as a graphics file instead of text; so any software that needs to read it need some sort of ocr capability + it may violate Facebook's terms).

All hope is not lost. There are some applications that partially helps:

• FoneBook is a Facebook application that lets you import some information:
  [Fonebook does not, and will never export phone numbers or email addresses - Facebook does not allow this!! Feel free to join this group to petition for it to change http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47429104064]
  
  [For a Mac version you might want to try AddressBookSync - http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=43678885451]
  
  Fonebook is used to transfer contacts photos and infomation from Facebook™ to Outlook®. If your phone then supports Outlook® synchronization you should be able to have your contacts photos on your phone when they call you!
  
  This application works with both Outlook® 2003 and 2007. It is also know to work with most modern Nokias and all Windows® Smartphones/PDAs.
  
  The application currently copies a contacts photo, profile web address, about me details, status details and if you are using Outlook® 2007 their birthday

• I also found out that apparently there was an application called Facebook Downloader which made it to LifeHacker but it has been taken down by Facebook for violating their terms.
• OutSync lets you select Facebook contacts and select their pics with Outlook
• Gupdate is another facebook application; that attempts to sync Facebook data to Google Contacts. It can also add new contacts if they do not exist. Well, I tried it but it did not seem to do anything for me.
• There is a .NET application by Koushik Dutta, a software developer, that only attempts to import pictures from Facebook to Google Contacts. Source Code is available too.

On that last note, Koushik was referring to Google Data API & Facebook Toolkit which brings me to the real reason I am blogging this. While digging thru the Google Data API, I saw a link to "The Annotated XML Specification", written by one of the XML co-authors, Tim Bray in 1998.

I was reading thru it, and found the annotations extremely helpful. So, I googled to find more on Tim Bray and found his blog "ongoing"; It's quite entertaining and enlightening.

One of his recent blog entries titled "Nastiness"; his observations and recommendation are simply awesome. He is thinking very clearly and communicating well. I am adding his blog to my Google Reader (so should you :p )!

That article actually dragged me into the incident blog and I have read some extremely well written, thoughtful articles and comments.

For example:

• Reaction from Sarah Allen, who was there.
• Liz Keogh looks at how talks like this lead to cognitive associations that lead to problems.
• I also loved this comment about "Respect" & it made me reconsider some of the things I do
• Lastly, enjoyed Giles Bowkett's rants

Vista Post-SP2 Black Screen. Is Vista slower?

There are tons of XP vs. Vista posts on web. To be honest, I have a pretty fast PC and never I could care less if Vista is a couple of seconds slower than XP; it's still fast. This post is not looking to make a comparison but it is more about a couple of useful things I discovered when I was looking around post-sp2 upgrade. Here is what happened...

Post-SP2 Black Screen

I've downloaded and installed Vista SP2 on one of my laptops and noticed that there was an extended period of "black" screen during boot time. I did not pay much attention to it but today I noticed the same thing on my desktop post SP2.

Vista Logs

It tickled my curiosity and I started looking around. Soon, I found out that Vista Logs are incredibly detailed and there is abundant information to diagnose such stuff. That is great news because I always hated XP's inability to tell me what was causing slowness during boot. I would sit there and watch for 4-5 mins painfully while my laptop crawls to a start. Of course I tried invaluable Sysinternal tools like Procmon to watch boot process and try to sift thru hundreds of thousands of records which was mostly useless...

So, first I headed to Control Panel to see what was Vista reporting recently:

Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools > Advanced Tools

I have not seen anything in the recent "Performance Issues" section that suggested that I was seeing a degradation of system boot but interestingly enough there was some clue to another issue I was seeing on my Pc recently; it just would not go to Sleep mode...

You will notice that at the bottom of the dialog box; there is a link to the Event Viewer; and that's the beauty of Vista. This basically means that Vista is in fact going thru performance logs and giving you a summary of recent events...

Diagnostics-Performance

To get to Diagnostics-Performance logs, you can click the link above or open up Event Viewer

Start > run > eventvwr.msc then browse to

Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational

Under the Operational, you will see tons of events logged. There a couple of Task Categories.

• Click on "Task Category" and
• Select "Group Events by This Category"

From category names, it's clear that "Boot Performance Monitoring" is the one that should give us the information we are looking for.

In the screenshot above you will notice that; Vista is in fact telling us about the time it took to boot. There is more, if you click the details tab, there is actually a breakdown of boot time! I think this is a very neat feature b/c I still remember how painful it was for me to use a stopwatch to record each phase of XP boot visually and then try to match them to whatever was recorded by extended Group Policy logs and Event Logs... It's all there; in the event logs now.

When I looked at break-down of boot times, it was not easy to tell what some of them were; so I googled and in fact found an article titled "Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets". Well, there is not much there other than what I had already found out but it mentioned two parts of boot time:

MainPathBootTime measures the time it takes for the system to load all drivers and services that are critical to user interaction and get to the Windows desktop where the user can begin doing things.

BootPostBootTime includes all the other drivers and processes that aren’t critical to user interaction and can be loaded with low-priority I/O that always gives preference to user-initiated actions that execute using Normal I/O priority.

I tried to find the follow up writing on ZD net but after spending 20mins to no avail; I gave up.

I filtered by Event ID 100-190:

• On the left pane, right click on "Operational"
• Click "Filter Current Log"
• Replace "" with 100-190

And started to look at boot times. Apparently my boot up time was around 80000milliseconds (ie. 80 seconds) but the latest boot time was a whopping 262sec (4.3mins). Unfortunately, there was no smoking gun; and Windows did not report anything unusual in this case.

This may be OK though; because I remembered that I had also installed Office 2007 SP2 and had not rebooted yet; so this might have been the cause of delay. To be sure, I will need to reboot a couple of times and measure them to see if I was still getting 80secs.

During the investigation, I noticed that at times, some apps (McAfee Antivirus, Rawr etc) were causing delays and Windows were reporting such events. By the way, the same log is also used to determine what is blocking a machine from sleeping or causing delays during shutdown.

Conclusion

So, is Vista slower than XP? Maybe but I don't care. With XP, I could never tell what was causing slowness. Now, at least I have better visibility. Overall, I like Vista more.

Google Chrome Standalone Installer

Google Chrome Standalone (aka offline) installer is available in a openly hidden :) link here:

http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer=126299

This version is probably more suitable for Enterprise environment as it does not attempt to auto-update itself. Auto-Updating / Home-Dialing software is usually a no-no as Enterprise IT would want to control the deployments and phase them in.

Amazing Wallpapers

I just wanted to drop two wallpaper links here that I enjoyed browsing:

• InterfaceLift.com
  
• Graffitiwallpaper.com
  

New URL for my tech blog

Hi,

I stopped updating this blog sometime ago however I kept on blogging on the new address http://AdilHindistan.blogspot.com. I was hoping that Google will come up a with a tool to move the content from one blog to another but as of today I am not aware of any. I would like to do it once such a tool becomes available. In the meantime, I want to make it clear that this blog will continue to exist as a way to access older content but new content will be posted on http://AdilHindistan.blogspot.com.

Thanks,
Adil

RIP: My Falcon Fragbox 2

I bought a Fragbox 2 gaming computer from Falcon Northwest last month. The first time I ran World of Warcraft on it, it felt awesome. Everything was incredibly smooth; I had all the settings in the game maxed up but I was never getting less than 60fps. I thought it was worth the ~$2000 and 2 weeks wait time!

Some specs:

MB: Asus P5E-VM Micro ATX Q35 Motherboard (AS-P5E-VM )

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 - 3.16 GHz 1333 FSB ( INTC2E8500 )

RAM: Crucial 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz ( CR-4GBK2-6400 )

Video: NVidia 8800 GTS 512MB PCIE (NV8800GTS512 )

Storage: Seagate Sata 750GB HD 7200 RPM

ST50EFCS 500 watt power supply ( SS-ST50EFCS )

Two days ago, I was getting ready for Karazhan raid and suddenly my fragbox started to stutter. Everything became slow and at some point it became unresponsive, I was not able to restart it. So, I hard booted it by pressing the power button and all hell broke lose!

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1.Insert your installation disc and restart your computer

2. Choose your language settings, and then click "next"

3. Click "Repair your computer"

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

File:\Windows\System32\config\system

Status: 0xc00000e9

Info: Windows failed to load because the system registry file is missing, or corrupt.

I tried to reboot a couple of times hoping it would clear but it did not seem like the kind. So, after trying safe mode and every other option without moving an inch closer to booting into Windows, I gave up and attempted to reload Windows Vista...

Install seemed to go smoothly but after the reboot; same error showed up. As a last resort, I used the Recovery Disc that came with the Fragbox 2 package. Recovery stalled at 30% and I was prompted to either ignore the errors or abort recovery. I chose to ignore the errors but recovery did not go thru.

I attempted recovery again and to my surprise, it completed this time but no joy after reboot:

Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer.

This error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external usb drive while the drive is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-rom drive that is failing. Make sure any removable storage is properly connected and then restart your computer.

If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer.

File: \Windows\System32\Winload.exe

Status: 0xc00000e9

Info: An unexpected I/O error has occured

At this point, I looked at the warranty document and was happy to see that this:

Falcon Overnight Service

Your Falcon Overnight Service Policy: How It Works

Summary: If your Falcon system should develop a serious hardware problem that we can't solve via telephone technical support, we will pick it up via overnight courier, correct any problem, and overnight it back to you, The Falcon Overnight Service covers any applicable instance within one year of the date of purchase.

So, I sent an e-mail to support@falcon-nw.com with all the details of the issue and steps I have taken and asked them to call me back...

That brings us to today. I called them to follow up and talked to a technician who suggested that I should open up the box and re-seat cables... OK, unscrewing a couple of screws and opening up a box is no big deal but I am sure many people may feel uneasy about doing this. They do not need to know how to do this...

Anyway, I went ahead and re-seat the cables which seemed firmly in place anyway and of course nothing is fixed. Falcon support also told me that I should run some hard drive diagnostics. So, I asked where I would get the diagnostic application and he said he will send me instructions.

It's been a couple of hours since the conversation but they have not yet replied to my e-mail with instructions. I called them up a couple of times already but keep on getting Voice mail. So, I left VMs...and waiting.... Arrrgh!

[ Update - 09/04/2008]

Apparently, Falcon Support team was calling me back...but they were not calling my work number instead of the number I left with them. Anyway, person I talked to was a soft spoken, very kind person. After sorting out the miscommunication, I agreed to follow the instructions to download a Seagate tool and use it to test the drive.

I reseated the cables on the motherboard side and re-ran recovery disc as they suggested; which resulted in the same error. Then I downloaded the Seagate Diagnostic tool from http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS207EURO.iso . 20mins after starting the diagnostic in "Long Test" mode, it stopped at 17% done. Waited for another hour but it was clearly not moving. So, I aborted the process and checked the logs which did not have anything useful about test.

I sent another e-mail to support detailing what I have done and the results. They called me back and and I said "I think at this point, I'd better ship it to you guys'. The sense I get from talking to these guys is that they sure would like to avoid shipping it if possible and work with you to fix it if you are willing to work with them, but they are not 'forcing' you to do that.

I was willing to work with them but I don't think anyone reading this should be worried if they are planning to buy a Fragbox from Falcon and would not be willing to do troubleshooting in case they hit a similar issue.

On the plus side, when I was purchasing the system, they refused to add a second hard drive as the configuration was fixed and they were not willing to modify it. Now that I encountered this issue, I asked the support person if it would be possible to buy a second 750GB Seagate drive from them and would they install it for me. He said yes and told me they could even install a drive that I would ship them if I had any extra. I am waiting for them to confirm the price. I hope it is not too much above market price.

[Update - 09/24/2008]

So, it took Falcon a week to fix issue(s) on my Fragbox 2...

• First they replaced the Seagate 750gig hard drive and added the second 750gig I bought from them.... During testing, they found out that issue did not disappear.
• Then, they replaced motherboard. During test, they realized that one of the RAM chips were defective although it had passed RAM test.
• After replacing RAM, all went well and they installed Windows, updates drivers etc. Falcon creates a Recovery disk. So, that disc did not get created successfully at first but second attempt was successful. Oh, they also print a funny custom DVD cover with my name on it :)

They kept me informed via e-mail updates all along and I told them that although I could not wait to get back on my Fragbox, I would rather a bit and have it tested thoroughly, which they do and at the end they send a list of all checks they performed.

Of course, it sucks that my Fragbox had all these issues only after 2 months but it's clear that they are using the best parts and testing it; so cannot blame them for that. Now that I have a second drive on it, I will be able to use it not just as a gaming (ie. World of Warcraft) computer but as my main workstation at home replacing HP workstation xw6000.

Vista Tweaks

I just encountered a forum entry that talks about tweaking Vista and has an extensive list. Some of them really useless crap in my opinion but there are lots of interesting and useful tweaks also... Eg. Activate hidden admin account by typing
net user administrator activate:yes
or
net user administrator "your pwd" activate:yes
Take a look!

Search Commands from Microsoft Office

Woot! I never liked the ribbons as it made it more difficult for me to find out when I was looking for a command. I found myself going to help and searching many times.

Well, help is here. Microsoft seems to listen! In their www.OfficeLabs.com site, they released a new toy called Search Commands, which makes finding command in office very convenient. Try it out, if you are one of those users annoyed by ribbons.