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As of about 10pm last night, I am now running the 1.03.87 Firmware on my router. So far everything has been stable and there have been no drop offs in the speed. Its not definitive yet, but its looking hopeful. My speed appears to have slightly increased from 1.6MB/s to 1.8MB/s, but I don’t want to count my chickens, so to speak. I will keep you updated.

Related to the issues I and many other people have been having with the Sky/Netgear router having an inconsistent connection to the net, Sky are rolling out a firmware update to address this and other issues. Currently not all exchanges have the update yet; the current firmware is 1.02.28 and the new one is 1.03.87. You can check to see what firmware you have on the main landing page of your own box.

SkyUser.co.uk are going to be getting their hands on the file direct from Sky, hopefully some time this week, so those that haven’t had it roll out automatically yet can update if they want to. As soon as its available I shall upgrade my router and let you know how it goes. The instructions for manually updating are here if you want to give it a go yourself.

When I wrote my last post about Vista and the 4GB error, I forgot all about one of the best programs out there: vLite. This little program can slipstream and configure your Vista installs, so for those of you getting the ol’ 0×0000007E error when installing Vista, use vLite to make a slipstreamed DVD. And now for something completely not quite so different…

I rebooted my computer last night and as it came back up it ran a CheckDisk on my C: drive. I wasn’t too concerned at first as this does sometimes happen, but is nothing to worry about. Imagine my surprise when it started to throw up a shit load of errors relating to corrupt files and indexes. I sat there chewing on my fingers for a good 10 minutes before it finished and rebooted my machine. It has restarted ok and hasn’t done it again since, but it was enough to worry me. I’m pretty sure I can hear the disk starting to struggle and boot seems to be a fair amount slower than it used to be. Also, the drive is at least a couple of years old (bought back when it was £100 for 300GB), so whilst the computer is still working I ordered another hard drive.

The issue I had when ordering a new drive, was space Vs. speed. My current disk is a 300GB Seagate drive (I have a second identical one in the computer for all the junk I download), but I fancied giving the WD Raptor drives a go. The biggest Raptor drive available is 150GB, so exactly 1/2 my current space, and I tend to use a fair proportion of the space with games (I like me driving sims!). Also, the cost of the Raptor is currently about £120, whereas I could get a 1TB drive for £150. In the end I decided to go with the Raptor, just for the giggles of having a 10,000 rpm drive.

Now I have a new drive on the way, I had to upgrade my version of Acronis True Image to the latest version (11). For those that don’t know, Acronis is disk imaging software, in the same vein as Norton Ghost, but a whole deal easier to use and much more robust. I use it in my current workplace for making images of standard builds which I can then sysprep and distribute as needed. Which brings me nicely onto one more thing: the Sysprep tool.

For those people who have never heard of it, Sysprep is a tool included with Windows to make distributing images of disks “real simple like”. What it does is strip the hardware id’s out of the install of Windows you’re running, allowing you to create a hardware neutral image with your 3rd party imaging software. Its a really great and powerful tool, which allows you to build a system once, with all the software you need on it, without having to worry about making a separate image for each hardware variant you might possibly have. For example, here I have a CADS machine build, a Project Management build and then a couple of test builds. There are a few restrictions (at least on the Windows 2000/XP version. I’ve not done my reading on the Vista version yet) which means you have to have the same number of processors in each machine, and the drive interface has to be the same, i.e. IDE or SCSI. Although having said that, I have successfully installed an IDE image on a SATA interface and it seems happy.

Now that my better half has her own PC, I decided that it is probably a good idea to get a NAS unit so our music and other files can be shared between the two PC’s easily. The guy I work with bought a Netgear NV+ 1TB unit for something like £550. Whilst its fun to play with stuff like RAID 5, its a bit of an extreme solution for me (and him if I’m honest). However, it did mean he was getting rid of his Dlink NAS, so I bought it off of him. Its got space for 2 disks (both SATA) and can be set up as RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring) or JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). It had a pair of 500GB Samsung drives included so I set it up as a RAID 1 volume of 500GB so I have data redundancy. I’ve also enabled the email option so that it will email me if a disk fails. Wicked cool huh? No? Just me then…

Anyway, as the NAS has a gigabit link, I bought a gigabit switch to connect the print server and PC’s to so they have full speed. So far I have to say I am very happy. I have yet set up Media Center again pointing a the NAS for the music but should imagine its going to take a while, as I have somewhere in the region of 6750 songs. But hey, thats what nighttime is for!