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Under the Group Policy in Windows XP Pro you can set a machine to apply its Automatic Updates but notify the user before an automatic reboot.  Under Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update look for “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations”.

If the Windows Advantage Validation Tool fails to install you can visit http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/whyValidate.aspx and validate manually via the web browser.  The page will request that you install the necessary ActiveX component and then you will be able to install Windows updates without the Validation Tool showing up as a separate update.

Unable to do a clean installation, I was upgrading my last Win2k user last week.  All went well with the exception of the fact that this week they came back to me complaining that their USB flash drive was inaccessible in My Computer.  With hardware working properly and the drive accessible in Disk Management, I was at a loss.  I finally went through an entire Windows Repair and Diagnostic Startup, individually enabling the services necessary for disk access and drive assignment.  Nothing worked until I remembered that I had removed Daemon Tools, a piece of software that assigns drive letters to ISO files, from their previous install.  Daemon Tools installs two (or three, note the wildcard) driver files in %systemroot%\system32\drivers named secdrv.sys and spdt*.sys respectively.  Removing these files and simply rebooting restored normal access and drive letter assignment to any and all mounted USB devices.

Recently I tried to convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS only to find that I could not obtain permission to the convert.exe utility.  Whatever the cause of that annoyance, I wished to force a conversion after the machine’s next reboot.  It was only after I had booted into Safe Mode with Command Prompt that I was able to obtain the access I needed to the convert.exe utility.

If you have a Sony Vaio that repeatedly blue screens going into hibernation or standby and you are at your wit’s end try disabling the HDAUDIO SoftV92 Data Fax Modem with SmartCP device.  After applying all of the special-request patches from Microsoft and all of the latest drivers from Sony, this was the only step that resolved the issue for me on a VGN-SZ491N.

This was the last straw with Sony for me.  First it was their horrible tech support, then their dismantling of the direct EDU sales division.  Add in all the evidence of horrible driver and hardware interaction, experienced in this instance and a multitude of others over the course of 2 years, and I can’t in good conscience advocate a purchase of their product.

dd has a progress report function that is accessible when it is passed a USR1 signal.  While your dd job is running, run kill -USR1 <dd PID> and that should provide how far and how fast dd is running.

If you have a Windows XP machine that belongs to the domain and you attempt to set a Firewall rule to allow Remote Desktop through, don’t use the default subnet setting if you wish to accept those connections from your subnet.

I’ve had consistently rejected connections when using this setting and connecting from the same subnet.  Instead, I found that manually specifying the subnet as a custom rule setting works consistently.

Oddly, this is only an issue on the Princeton domain, and is likely the result of a Group Policy trickle-down.