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Well on one lovely weekend when there were clear blue skies (big deal here in London), I thought what better way to spend the day then mess up the MCE and stay indoors all day to fix it. And how does one go about doing that? Well here is what I did and lessons learned (hopefully) :). Firstly, just because there is a new update for the BIOS don’t be compelled to update it (as I did), remember the age old advice, don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. So, when I update the BIOS, which of course was not required, Windows for some reason did not like that and it stopped booting up - I would get a blue screen. Could not even boot up in safe mode, and the recovery console did not help, so all in all the machine was hosed if I may say. ...

A few of you have asked me to upload some pics here of the MCE; and here they are - sorry it took a while, but better late than never. In case you are curious, this is my MCE configuration . Me and Karan assembling the box - as you can see we just finished screwing in the motherboard ...

Creating PDF’s is relatively easy these days, but I have found so many instances, where I wanted to convert to other formats from PDF’s for some reason or the other, and till I stumbled upon PDF Conversion Central it was not possible (as far as I knew), without too much trouble. But now I can convert it to word documents, RSS, html, xml, etc - even audio formats - cool. ...

If you have been thinking of getting a new machine or upgrading your existing one, you might want to hold off a bit on that if you can for another few months as it seems like Windows Vista (what was called as Longhorn), will have some pretty hefty hardware requirements - e.g. you would need a AGP with at least 128 mb RAM (preferably 256 mb). If you want to run the 64 bit edition, then as the smallest memory chunk that a program can allocate increases, the overall memory usage also goes up, which means you need double the memory of 32 bit. So if you are using 1 gb for 32 bit, you need to get 2 gb for the same load for 64 bit. For most geeks these requirements is not an issue, but what of your average joe who cannot afford these or even understands what it means? ...

Google offers more than a dozen services, but most are hidden. The GoogleX interface makes all of Google’s goodies, such as Gmail, Froogle, Maps, etc, easily accessible and looks like the Mac OS X toolbar. This was originally designed by a Google researcher, but the toolbar disappeared shortly after being posted on the Google Labs site. I have this up on my sandbox - check it out. (originally leeched from Zilos ). ...

Thanks to Neil for pointing this one out, I think I have to agree with the sentiments on the new pricing. :)

I got this via a colleague of mine and thought I should spread the warning. I don’t forward chain letters, but send this link to other folks, what helps is the pictures, so you know what to look out for. UPDATE: Here is another story (by Guardian) send my a colleague which has pictures for the ATM for UK, where these scams have been around for the last couple of years. It is always good to see the pictures carefully and keep an eye out. ...

It has been long overdue and now its finally present. Vista has something called the Secure Startup Volume Encryption which will work on computers with the Trusted Module Platform (TPM) chip. Here, all except the bare minimum of the boot volume is encrypted and at boot time the TPM transparently allows access to the drive. If someone either removed the hard disk and puts it in a different machine or attempts to boot from a different OS, the disk will be unreadable without a password. There is no GUI for this in Beta 1 but the service is there. ...

I have an old server which right now is running Windows 2000 Server and I want to install Linux on it. Unfortunately, I cannot boot from a CD as the BIOS was on a different partition (this is an old Compaq machine), and there is no way for me to get into that now. Also, I don’t have any floppies lying around that I can use. Which means I was stuck. But, I came across an article by Marc Herbert which details how to install Linux for someone exactly in my situation - without any CD, floppy or USB-Key . ...

I love the way the San Jose Mercury News portray the blacklisting of CNet by Google for a year - “Google is using a baseball bat to swat a fly on its own forehead.” All, this happened because of the story Google balances privacy reach published by CNet where one of the reporters found out a lot of private information about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt including where he lives, his wifes name, how much money he makes, what political fund raisers he contributes to, etc. ...

If you are hosting, your Indigo service in IIS, then you need a .svc file which basically tells IIS what assembly do you want to wire up to handle the request. Seems like on RC1 Beta 1 and another prior build (June CTP - I think, not sure though), there is a bug in the parser. Lets look at the example which in some places does break and in others does not break: ...

Check it out here .

A colleague of mine, pointed this out and seems like MS has released the Beta 1 for Longhorn (now called Vista), on MSDN . If you are universal subscriber you can download it. But, its a hefty 2.GB d/l! Below is my screen shot from my login. ...

Don’t have the time or technical expertise to secure and manage a computer on a daily basis? Windows OneCare is a comprehensive PC health service that helps make your PC experience hassle-free. This includes comprehensive PC health checks including antivirus, firewall, anti-spyware.

Do you want to see Google on the Moon? Well, check it out .

From OSNews: Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn . They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches. ...

If not, then what do you think of this one ?

I had this very irritating issue with the remote control of Media Center, where mostly whatever key I pressed, got pressed more than once (even though I pressed it once); it it would cause things like as you move around - very irritating as you would skip over channels you wanted to change or navigate to music or pictures, etc. But it seems like this issue of Stickiness is because there are two buffer overruns in the eHome infrared receiver ( read Q331913 ), and although Microsoft has this patch to fix it, I would recommend installing the new Update Rollup1 for the eHome receiver as the earlier patch was released in 2002 and even though I have MCE 2005 it was a suspect of not fixing the issue (mind you I did not do extensive testing). ...

Mike Calligaro talks about the Mobile team’s decision on using Persistent Storage in Windows Mobile 5.0 - first time ever for a Pocket PC (Smart phones already have this since 2002); and how this will affect you as a end user - as it talks about RAM vs. Battery life - both things which are very dear to our hearts. ...

If you want to find out more from a class diagram perspective on what the new API’s are especially for the new managed messaging, state and notification API’s in Windows Mobile 5, then check out the class diagram. Click on the thumbnail to see the full one.

Well, we have a very nagging problem on the MCE, Live TV, Recorded TV, Music, Radio - all was fine, the only issue was whenever we saw a DVD, even with the MCE and Windows volume all the way to maximum, the sound was not loud enough to hear and quite often we had to switch on the sub-titles just to follow what is going on. Finally, though it seems I have found a fix - and it seems to be working. I was using the AC3 filter and the DTS/5.1 encoding. In the AC3 Config, you need to change the preset default to an aptly one names Loud, which fixes the issue. ...

I came across two Desktop management programs - Konfabulator and SmartBar XP and want to know what your review on them are? Some of the reviews I read talked about SmartBar being slow and others raving about how Konfabulator is pretty neat. What do you think? ...

My colleague, Chris Periris has an article where he talks about how to host an indigo servince in various forms. In case you did not know Indigo can be hosted in various surrogate processes (in addition to itself) such as IIS, EXE, NT Service, COM+, etc.

Even if you are not interested in this phone, you should go over and read this listing on eBay. And yes, my lovely wife Meenakshi (and not she has not started blogging yet) has this phone …. ahem …. which I gave her … hopefully she is not reading this…. :o) ...

Now that I am not sleeping and read my earlier post (*grin*) about MSMQ (ver. 3.5) and Indigo, I would like to clarify a couple of things. One, you don’t have to have MSMQ 3.5 installed, only if you want to use MSMQ (i.e a queue channel). If you are using tcp, udp, http, etc, then you don’t need this. And two, if you do install MSMQ, then on Windows 2003 Server you need to install the SP1 first. Also, you might want to get the checked build on a dev box as that has debug info. ...