Happy 2009!

Happy 2009 everybody! Best of luck in the new year!

Merry Christmas

I'll be in and out of Internet contact until around 12/27. Have a fun, safe holiday and I'll see you later...

Industry: ABit to exit the motherboard market?

TweakTown is reporting that ABit is leaving the motherboard market on 12/31/2008. Things have been bleak for the once beloved motherboard maker for quite some time, but with a lack of products shipping and all signs pointing towards failed product launches, the best outlooks are all pretty bleak. Perhaps ABit will be able to reorganize itself as a company hawking more consumer-oriented wares like Soyo... But with just a few weeks to go, the death watch awaits the news.

Unless things change, this will count for my eulogy. The recent boards were pretty much fine, but the fondness I have for the NF7-S v2.0 and BP6 does not fade with time. Of course, your capacitors did, but to be fair you were not alone...

Another Out Of Band MS08-078

This is going to be short as it's already covered well elsewhere and this is late... Microsoft has another out-of-band patch as of 12/17, MS08-078 affecting all versions of IE on all supported OSes except Server 2008 for IA-32/x64. Zero-day exploits are already going on. Get this one patched ASAP.

I'd normally say "use Firefox" or some other browser whenever possible, but Firefox and Opera are also currently suffering vulnerabilities. Firefox 3.0.5 resolves the issues. While not quite as sever as the zero-day exploit on IE, these are noteworthy as cross-platform.

Dust Bunnies are Evil

I know this seems like a mundane task that most of us are admonished to do on a regular basis, but it really does need to be repeated: Blow your computers cases out once in a while, especially if they get dusty.

We all know that heat sinks and fans lose their effectiveness when dusty leading to potential overheating, but there's a worse possibility. I ran into a system last week that had dust bunnies in it-- nothing out of the ordinary, except that one of them had lodged itself into the video card's tiny fan. The user reported a blue screen indicating video driver failure. I was busy and asked him to reboot since this was a first time thing. He came back shortly after reporting that it happened again, and now the system couldn't POST. A single dust bunny had lodged in a tight fan, causing the fan to jam, burning out the motor. The video card (a Quadra, unfortunately) then overheated to the point of death. Odd stuff like this can absolutely happen, without showing general signs of overheating.

To be fair, the opposite is true. It's possible you might dislodge some conductive dust which might land in an inopportune spot, causing problems. That can typically be fixed pretty easily with a second cleaning. A burnt out video card, northbridge, etc. can be a lot more costly.

Windows XP domain migration tip: Overwrite the Default User profile

For all of you guys out there tasked with migrating users from a previous authentication domain (or workgroup) to a new domain know that when a user logs in with the new credentials, a new profile will be created and all of the user's previous settings and files will remain in the old profile.

You can go in after the fact and clean this up or use some other tricks (like using the FAST wizard, treating the old profile as the old computer and new profile as the new) but I've found something faster. I'm probably boneheaded for not hearing of this sooner, but I did a 7k workstation migration at an old job and they never tried anything this simple and relatively foolproof.

Go into Documents and Settings (typically on c:) and locate the Default User profile. It's hidden with stock XP settings, so you need to turn on the option to show hidden files and folders. Under normal circumstances, this profile gets stamped out as a template for new users. You can twiddle with this to make bulk changes to new users, but we'll use it for a slightly more nefarious purpose.

Go ahead and back up Default User, as we'll be replacing the entire profile. You never know-- you might want it later.

Take the user's existing profile and copy it, renaming it as... you guessed it, Default User.

Now go ahead and perform your domain migration. Upon first login, the user's old, familiar profile will 'stamp' itself into the new one. The only 'gotchas' are that you can only do this for one account per computer and if your users have limited drive space and large profiles, you might run short on hard drive space with essentially 3 copies of the profile hanging out there. Still, this is a very easy migration method, and you can remove the old copies once you're sure the user is happy with the migration.

This should work just fine on Windows 2000, and I assume Vista as well. I just haven't tested it.

Windows 7 Rumors and "Teaser"

GeekSmack has apparently found somebody willing to brave the wrath of Microsoft's lawyers, and broken cover with a video of Windows 7's boot screen. This doesn't really show much besides a slicker animation than Vista, but it does indicate serious progress if they're already tweaking the "nice to haves" vs. the core changes and updates.

Betas of Windows 7 are likely to be released in January, so a 2009 timetable for Windows 7 is starting to look a lot more likely.

Dezombiefication

OK, I'll admit the blog has been quiet of late. 2+ weeks without an update is inexcusable, so I might as well give the excuse. I was finally able to get an early Christmas present of a new Xbox 360. There's a tremendous back-catalog I'm going through now. Combine that with a fervor to finish out the last few PS2 games before the platform quiesces in January and a few other fun projects on the side, I would be busy enough...

But alas, I've been sick twice in the last month and on top of that slammed at work. I'll try to do better in future. In more fun news, Core i7 has been overclocked to 5510 MHz!!