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I’ve seen two of these come through the office. Apparently the capacitors with an X on top are potential problems, the ones with Ks on top are okay. The Inquirer wrote about it back in July:

Dell told the INQUIRER it had “recently” discovered “a potential quality issue related to a capacitor on an isolated number of the system boards installed in OptiPlex SX270 and GX270 small form factor and small desktop systems.”

The problem, said Dell, “is isolated to a subset of specific capacitors from a supplier used for system boards manufactured from April 2003 to February 2004.”

Read more…

CEE contributed this handy guide to building some simple data redundancy into your Linux machine. For machines that can spare the performance hit of software RAID this method offers you a little bit of extra backup insurance. What’s more, with both drives bootable you’ll be up and running again in no time!

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Just to indicate how utterly clueless I can be sometimes, I’ve only just learned that a number of motherboards that ship with SATA support also come with built-in hardware RAID. While no substitute for an independent RAID controller, this will definitely still come in handy!

As of version 7, Splus now requires an individual license key generated based on the hardware address of the machine. Software Sales distributes instructions on how to obtain the hostid of the machine, which is really just the hardware address with all separating characters removed between octets. Just for reference though, I’ve posted the instructions I’ve received below.

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Here’s a handy list of the fixed POSIX names are mapped to NT internal devices in Cygwin. I’ve clipped the useful/common ones.

/dev/fd0 \device\floppy0
/dev/scd0 \device\cdrom0
/dev/sda \device\harddisk0\partition0 (whole disk)
/dev/sda1 \device\harddisk0\partition1 (first partition)
/dev/sda15 \device\harddisk0\partition15 (fifteenth partition)
/dev/sdb \device\harddisk1\partition0
/dev/sdb1 \device\harddisk1\partition1

I buy a lot of drives. This guide to the latest high capacity offerings may come in handy.

Updates to the Windows Installer Agent back in June broke the ability to perform a Windows Update via the Runas command. Currently there is no fix offered by Microsoft. I’ve tried a number of tricks but found that the only one that will work consistently is if you trigger an Automatic Update detection cycle. The process is described in Microsoft’s knowledgebase. You can use Runas to launch an Explorer process and then access My Computer’s properties from there to follow-through on the knowledgebase instructions.