the last word

The easy part of getting a new computer up and running is over. The major apps are loaded. The hardware is all working, save the 3 TB disks that await a RAID controller. Now is the time for all the fiddly bits: configuring email clients, loading the little apps, configuring web sites in Dreamweaver, loading… [Read More]

The Serial-Attached SCSI BIOS takes about a minute to run. In order to speed up the boot time. I disabled it in the BIOS. The computer wouldn’t boot. I re-enabled it. Still wouldn’t boot. I added it back into the boot sequence, and resigned myself to looking at it every time I rebooted. I ran… [Read More]

I installed two 2 TB hard disks as placeholders and configured them as a single 4 TB spanned volume. I put the swap file on that volume. I ordered a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) that would support the 3 TB drives, and got to work on getting the machine to boot without the 250 GB… [Read More]

The new workstation arrived yesterday. Big box. Inside, nicely packed, under a cardboard tray with the keyboard, software, cables, and mouse, was the computer. Big computer. Honkin’ big computer. Normally, I open up a new machine before powering it on to make sure nothing has slipped loose in the journey, but the Dell machines have… [Read More]

What’s an OONE? I just made it up. Remember that OOBE was an “Out of Box Experience”, which encompasses the user’s initial contact with the product. Since Windows 7 Service Pack 1 doesn’t arrive in a box, but rather is downloaded from the Internet, it can’t have an OOBE. It can, however, have a Off… [Read More]