Perhaps not a very interesting thing for a blog but I have spent some time on "system maintenance" leading to some thing I want to share with you.
I have a former PC running Windows 2003 server. It is a 450 Mhz PII with 512 Mb of RAM. Figures you would reject for a workstation but 2003 server (enterprise) runs like a charm. For a SOHO development environment it makes a perfect web/SQL server. Booting takes some time but when it is running performance is perfect. As the machine is not needed on a 7*24 base I switch it off regularly. Instead of a system shutdown I hibernate the system from a remote desktop. Always worked like a charm, never let me down, I even upgraded from beta to release using a remote desktop and a remote DVD player.
Yesterday I did something really stupid. In the machine was still an unused TV-card (Miro thing, more on that later), I removed the card to transfer it to a workstation. The stupid thing was that I had, as always, hibernated the system. Switching it on gave a very clear error message : "memory signature changed, system will not restore from hibernation". The only option was to reboot but the thing had gone really bananas. Every booting attempt led to an automatic reset somewhere in the booting process. I reset the bios of the PC and unplugged the tapestreamer, being the 3d IDE device. 2003 booted, asked in a dialog why the system had unexpectedly crashed (you can pick a reason, power failure is an option, stupidity isn't), took quite some time to rebuild the Active Directory Indices, reported that the clock was wrong and that the tapedrive wasn't working. I set the clock, shut down once more to connect the tape, rebooted and now my server is back in bussiness without any notable damage. I was already very impressed by the performance and reliability of 2003 (not to mention the functionality), after this experience I am fully convinced.
The Miro card was a disaster. It was originally designed for W98, NT 4. On the Pinnacle (the company who bought Miro) site XP software, PCTV version 5.5, can be downloaded. Which is presented as an upgrade on version 4.0. But I didn't have a 4.0 neither did the Pinnacle site. It took me 15 pages of Google to find a 4.0. Guess what happened when I finally got to installing the 5.5 upgrade: "Please uninstall the previous 4.0 version before installing this one" Aaargh.... And the bottom line was that the software did not even work, it reported an interrupt conflict. The device manager didn't agree. I left it for what it was, had real work to do.
My development machine needed some attention to. Quite often it almost froze while the disk drive was rattling like hell. Something the XP disk-defragmenter could not cure. I downloaded a trial of disk-keeper. Marvelous tool. It is fast, in 10 minutes my system was running like a fresh install. And it is very easy to use, the feature I like best is the "screen saver mode". When your screensaver pops up disk-keeper will defragment your disk. Simple easy and very efficient. Absolutely recommended.
The last thing of "system-maintenance" I did was polish up my web-log. There are a lot of skins you can choose, I took the dnj-skin. Great to be junkie !
Blog on.
Peter