So in one night, on two separate occasions I decide to look up a cast member of each show I was watching. Each time with only about 8-10 minutes left in the show. This is what I find.

Wondering how old the Renee Walker character is from 24:

Wondering why Michael Johnson quit Celebrity Apprentice:

• 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What I’ve applied so far:

• Correcting System Hang at Startup
• Speed up boot by disabling unused ports
• Very Slow boot when networking

Related to the issue but wasn’t possible for me to use:

• Speed-up log-in tremendously! (The field he said to remove was already cleared for me)

What I’ve done on my own that didn’t solve the issue:

• Defrag
• Registry Repair
• Registry Defrag
• Disabling unneeded startup apps with msconfig

End result:

I no longer have to wait so long staring at the wallpaper before windows starts to load. However I judge performance on how soon it takes to open firefox as soon as I can click on it, and it still seems pretty slow. I definately sped up the login process, but the opening firefox part is slower than it should be still. I have a feeling it has to do with my ATI drivers or something. I will try the bootvis tool that I heard about to see if that tells me what’s slowing things down.

Update:

Upon further investigation I noticed that mup.sys was using up the most boot time. I researched it and determine it’s related to mapped drives. There is one share that I have mapped to my PC and it connects to a computer that is always offline in the mornings when I turn on my computer. Bootvis has referenced that share specifically and told me that it was slowing the boot time down.

Also it said the Acrotray (Acrobat Speed Launcher I believe) took a chunk of time away from startup as well.

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

• 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