There are a few basic guides:

• powerex’s guide where you format with an HP tool
• ziggywas’ tip to format with PeToUSB
• (The following step to those 2 summaries is to just use the Acronis Rescue disk creator)

There’s only one small catch. Setting the first boot device to “Removeable Device” doesn’t include your usb stick. Boot with your USB stick and find the list of hard drives in the boot menu, then move your stick up to first place. Then go back to the boot priority menu and you should see your actual flash drive listed, make that first and you’re good to go.

Oh and FYI, Acronis can’t access the Windows network on the EEE PC, nor can it access my big external drive (which doesn’t make sense). =/

I did find this one interesting tidbit of info:

Update:  For whatever reason, Acronis v10 or 11 + EeePC 900 does not like being plugged into an Ethernet Switch (hanging off a router) for Recovery – it can’t find a network or any network shares – in fact Acronis sees it as “cable unplugged”.  I plugged the 900 directly into a router port, bypassing the Ethernet Switch, and Acronis found the Network.  Done. [Source]

I’m plugged directly into a router and it’s still not working. But maybe using a cross-wired cable would do the trick.

I used this little freeware app called iDump. Download using the “Executeable only” link. Take that file that you downloaded and put it on your iPod with Windows Explorer/My Computer. Open it up and it should show you your songs.

• I spent $150 for keyless entry when you can buy them online with instructions for only $35 USD.
• I was offered $200 to replace each Xenon HID headlight and passed. Lucky I did because I found a pair of Philips lights online for $88 USD.
• Probably a whole number of other things that are way over priced, yet easy to do it yourself.

Look it up before getting stuff from the dealer. This is obvious for some people, of course… but it might help others.

The new iPod’s play podcasts continuously, so if you decide to go to sleep with an hour-long podcast going and fall asleep, you’ll wake up with a whole bunch more podcasts marked as played that you never actually listened to.

The solution:
Go to the main menu, then change the Shuffle setting from “Off” to something else. I picked “Albums”. This stopped my podcasts from playing over and over again.

One day, many years ago I spent an entire day on the phone with numerous Telus tech support people. Our internet was down and we needed it up because we were hosting a couple websites and email servers that needed to be up in order to do business.

I spent the whole day listening to them tell me to do things like reset the modem (each tech ran me through the same steps), and then go to this one site on their network to set our MAC addresses to our IP (or something like that). Every tech basically told me to click the submit (or refresh) button on the site to send the info to Telus. The techs themselves did it every 5 minutes or so themselves.

I call again near the end of the day and I finally get ahold of a young guy with some brains. He tells me that I was supposed to click the button and then just wait – up to 15-20 minutes and then the internet just starts to work. Apparently none of the other techs knew this, even though it is the first step to getting someone online.

So in short, I spent the whole day without the internet and losing business, on the phone with tech support because the techs didn’t know about one specific, simple feature. I switched from Telus to Radiant immediately the next day.

I’m trying to solve a problem where my computer at work takes forever to become usable after logging onto windows.

Edit: For lazy people, the end result was mapped drives were slowing boot time significantly. The following tweaks helped only with the delay between logging in and seeing the taskbar.

First thing I tried was various performance tweaks from TweakXP.

Read more »

Toby Thain has made a free plugin for Photoshop that lets you save graphics as .ico files. It’s not over the top like some plugins, its just real basic save as, pick the sizes, etc. Download it here.

I decided to work on making my music blog better tonight.

New features:

• AJAX search bar (in the header)
• The ability to rate artists, with highest rated stats on the sidebar
• An archives page
• A “browse” page where you can browse artists alphabetically
• A tags page for browsing genres
• Some new posts

Tricks

• Using TrendMicro Security Server
• Speedup downloading large attachments in Thunderbird
• Use hMailServer to share email across a home network

Spam

• Installing ASSP with hMailServer
• Use ASSP with hMailServer
• Add ASSP multiple report buttons in Microsoft Outlook

Dealing with Problems

• Very large mailbox crashes hmailserver

Important: This does not work if you are behind a proxy, which includes antivirus firewalls and such.

• Right click on the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
• Go to properties, turn off “read-only“
• Open the file using Notepad or any text editor
• Add a line to the bottom of the file with the IP and domain
• When you are done, don’t forget to turn read-only back on again

Ex.

Use the IP of the new server and then the domain you want that IP to resolve to.

Now you can browse to that domain and it will resolve to the new IP even though the DNS hasn’t been updated yet.