Disabling Hybrid Hard Disks in Windows 7

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My Dell Latitude D830 shipped with a 120 GB “hybrid” hard disk, in my case a Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD. These disks integrated 256 MB of flash memory on them to help the OS spin down the drive and speed certain operations through the use of ReadyDrive on Vista and Windows 7. In practice, this setup works terribly. Disk I/O slows to a crawl as everything is funneled through the ReadyDrive cache, and everything on the machine suffers. For a guy like me that does a lot of photo editing on my laptop this has to end. To disable the hybrid hard disk modes on Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 do this: Start->Run, and run “gpedit.msc” Computer Configuration -> …

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Dell Latitude D830 Overheating

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Laptops, when they get too hot, start throttling the CPU and other components (GPU, etc.) to reduce heat. Of course, this is annoying when you’re trying to use the CPU for something, like photo editing. My Dell Latitude D830 has a fan to cool the CPU & chipsets, but inspecting it yesterday revealed that for all the noise it was making it wasn’t pushing much air through. I use my laptop everywhere, every day, so it’s not surprising that it’s sucked things up into the vent. Figuring I had nothing to lose I took my upright vacuum’s hose attachment to the D830’s fan vent & heat sink last night. Using my fingers to plug the other sections of the back …

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links for 2009-11-03

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BLDGBLOG: A Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik Interesting interview with a geoscientist working on the Yucca Mountain project in the US.

Security vs. Usability

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It’s always a trade-off.  Anybody who says otherwise is selling you something or clueless. Also see: scissors. (compliments to my friend Steve Tanner for whipping up a slider in Visual Studio 2008)

Fearing Computers

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Good post over at marco.org on why Microsoft Windows Vista hasn’t sold well. The most striking paragraph: Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. They’ve learned to ignore our pressures to always get the latest versions of everything because our upgrades frequently break their software and workflow. They expect unreliable functionality, shoddy software workmanship, unnecessary complexity, broken promises from software marketers, and degrading hostility from their office’s IT staff. It isn’t just …

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USB Cell Phone Booster

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I’m looking for a portable way to boost cell phone signals when I’m in places that I only get a bar or so of reception and can’t maintain a connection. By “portable” I mean I’ve been considering going as far as mounting an inexpensive repeater in my Jeep. ThinkGeek sells a “USB Cellphone Booster” which looks intriguing, and I’ve seen other versions of it specifically for in-car use. Has anybody used one of these? Do they work? They’re out of stock, which is probably a good sign.

Underpromise & Overdeliver

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Everything Sysadmin has an interesting post that ends up talking about the whole “underpromise and overdeliver” strategy. I’ve always had a rocky relationship with that strategy, mainly because I really think people just need to stop acting like they’re heroes on Star Trek and get better at time estimation. Certainly when there’s doubt about how long something will take it’s better to overestimate, because that way the promises your customers made to their customers, coworkers, or boss aren’t lies because of you. It also helps to give yourself a little breathing room, so that if something urgent comes up you can deal with that and still deliver. The trick is just not to overdo it. People aren’t dumb, and consistent …

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Architects vs. Engineers

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“An architect knows something about everything. An engineer knows everything about one thing.” – Matthew Frederick, “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”

links for 2009-09-04

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Stop the Presses!!! AT&T announces iPhone MMS. | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com This also means iPhone OS 3.1 will ship on or before 9/25, as 3.0 doesn't have MMS support.

links for 2009-09-03

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Release Notes: Architecture Specific Support "In a virtual environment, timekeeping for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 64-bit kernels can be problematic, since time is kept by counting timer interrupts. De- and re-scheduling the virtual machine can cause a delay in these interrupts, resulting in a timekeeping discrepancy. This kernel release reconfigures the timekeeping algorithm to keep time based on a time-elapsed counter." This is good news for VMs. Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog Holy crap — 67 TB of SATA for $7867. Go DiY!

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