Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

You might be wondering why you would want to do that? Simple. Laptops with slow hard drives or desktops with slow hard drives. ReadyBoost might consider your thumbdrive to be too slow to use for ReadyBoost but you can override it if you want. It can make the difference between a usable laptop and an unusable laptop with Vista. For example, an IBM Thinkpad 600E that has had the MMC-2 CPU package replaced with a Pentium 3 CPU.

I found the "override" reference here in the comments section.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Let Vista test the ReadyBoost media, and check the "Do not retest this device" checkbox.
2. Unplug the device
3. Launch Regedit and drill down to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMgmt
4. Find the key related to your device (the device vendor/name is in the key)
5. Change the following values: Device Status 0x02, ReadSpeedKBs 0x1000, WriteSpeedKBs 0x1000
6. Plug the device back in, right click on it, open 'Properties' and enable the cache.

This program does the opposite of VMWare's Converter 2.0/3.0 and will take a VMWare image and make it usable under Microsoft's Virtual PC/Server.

Very handy when going back and forth between virtual platform providers.

I wrote about it a few days about but now the autotuning problems are starting to hit the Microsoft blogs here.

It is basically what I wrote about, but with more technical details about it.

Basically, if you are having problems with your Vista machine "talking" to devices on your network, turn off auto-tuning briefly to see if that cures the problem, then go find what device doesn't handle RFC-1323 properly.

Turning off auto-tuning is a simple command line command (running with Admin rights):
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Catalyst Beta Software Suite (32 bit)
37.1MB in size
Build: 8.31.100.3.2.1
Released: Dec. 13, 2006

64-bit also available.

Download from here.

I have not tested them yet on my Mobile X1400. Earlier versions were, well, a bit buggy.

I had a heck of a time installing the new update to the Motorola Q and that was due to having older copies of P2K.sys and multiple 'ghost' modem entries in my registry on my old laptop. The MSU.EXE program would do the initial scan and find the phone, and then once it put the phone into the black screen IPL 'flash mode', Windows would not find the right drivers for the "new" device the phone became. It technically registers with the Flash interface under a different USB id, but it was always stalling and failing.

The key to getting it working was running "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Motorola Shared\MotPCSDrivers\Motorola Driver Installer.exe" and selecting "Clean and reinstall", and then rebooting so that the proper versions of the .INF files and .SYS files are used.

Once I did that, the install completed.

First impressions after 24 hours of use:
Bluetooth serial port applications work without locking up.
Battery life is much improved, I believe, due to the radio firmware changes.
Overall screen performance has improved, even without the GLYPH hacks.
The little 'device' logo no longer looks like a label maker and actually looks like a Q.
The phone shuts down much faster.

I recommend anyone with a Q to do the free upgrade.
Of course you will have to redo the PRL afterwards and reinstall your applications, but I think it is worth it overall.
I just wish someone at Microsoft would invite me into the Crossbow beta.

This is actually kind of funny. I use Virtual PC 2007 when I have to under Vista, but I prefer VMWare Server and version 1.01 seems to run under Vista if you don't mind an initial slow startup. I used the VMWare Converter to take the IE6 VHD from Microsoft and converted it over to a VMWare image.

Since the "hardware" had radically changed, XP said it had to be reactivated, which means they used a Retail version of XP for the VHD. When you try to activate that copy of XP over the internet, it says the key is invalid and that it is an unauthorized copy. I'm not sure why but I found it a bit amusing.

I didn't have a real reason to do this, other than I was curious if it would work or not. Of course, I could always take a snapshot and always revert to the original when the XP install expires, or use my normal test images.

I've been researching some interesting/buggy Vista drivers lately and digging more into the Driver Development toolkits and seeing what an 'end-user' can find with the debugging tools. I found a great page that lists many related KB articles that show you how to do some system sleuthing without a lot of programming background.

This will be part of the new Crossbow update I am sure. If you want WLM on your Smartphone or PocketPC, go here ASAP.

Spotted here.

False alarm: It is just the web client, not a native app.

Make sure not to make the same mistake I did earlier this week. There is a lot of documentation out there from various IBM sites and other places that will say that the the 72W adapter is for "all T series laptops". The unfortunate thing is that all that documentation was published before the T60 came out. You need to 90W adapter.

You need this one and not this one.

I must admit it is pretty cool you can get iGo adapters for them to power up other accessories too.

Using the handy Universal Extractor, I was able to uncompress the .MSI/.EXE from Motorola's site. Looking inside the 'firmwares' directory revealed that there were a decent amount of changes between 01.05.01 and 01.05.06.

I haven't upgraded yet due to not having an XP machine around to load the software on. The software update refuses to load on Vista and even running msu.exe manually is generally frowned upon unless you want to brick your Q. I'll probably use my old Thinkpad 240 to do the dirty work.

Read about it here.

Download it here.

The new noteworthy items are:

1. Support for Windows Mobile smartphones and more Pocket PC devices
2. Enhanced today/home screen: presence status, event notification (missed calls, new chat messages and voicemails)
3. Proxy support: Supports regular HTTP or HTTPS proxies, and authenticating HTTPS/SSL and SOCKS5 proxies

Most everyone has heard that Adobe 8 Reader is out here. When you launch the setup program, the Netopsystems setup launches. Once it extracts the real setup files into a temporary directory, it will ask you run the program.

When you do, you will most likely see "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance." I suspect it is due to the way the symlinks have moved around inside user profiles.

There are three ways to get around this:

#1. Run the setup program in XP SP2 compatibility mode.
#2. Set your temporary directory to something outside of your user profile, for instance, "C:\TEMP"
#3. Locate where the NetOps has extracted the Adobe files and run the setup manually from that directory.

Overall, Adobe 8 seems less bloated and has a few security fixes that are still unpatched in version 7.

This update leaked to the web a few days early on Motorola's site and it looks like it was pulled until tomorrow (12-12-06) for the launch of the Black Q. I'm curious about the version number - obviously a hex number, but I'm curious if 06.0B.0B references the build date or a reference to black. If it is a build date, it would mean 11-11-2006.

Anyway, you can catch the discussion about the new release here.

If you happen to read this post tonight, there are plenty of secondary links from that site that host the new build, or you can wait until tomorrow.

Other people have noted that the overall speed of the phone has improved and that the Bluetooth serial port is working properly again, which was apparently broken in the older build.

Get back all those fancy features you were missing ever since you upgraded to Vista.
You can download the binaries here.

Exciting.
Check out the story here.

I'll finally be able to upgrade my home lab from Beta 2 to RTM and see what has changed.