Windows 7: Pleasant surprise

I have installed the release candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate Build 7100 on my system, which is running a 2.6 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 and 1.5 GB of RAM. I also have a GeForce FX 5200 PCI card with 256 MB of video memory. I am cautious to make substantial claims until I've run it for awhile and installed more applications but Windows 7 runs exceptionally well on my system. There have been no problems so far. Although I honestly believe it will begin to run slower if I install more applications and add media to the drive, I think what 7 brings to the table may be the best things Microsoft could have presented at this point. Personally, I think it's been weeks since I've run any application(for non-research purposes) other than a media player, a word processor, or a web browser. Practically everything can be run from a browser these days. Windows 7 is a fast and efficient version of Windows that is perfect for the computing future. Granted, Google's Chrome OS will probably be a worthwhile competitor, especially at the price of free, but 7 is probably the best Microsoft could have done while retaining it's identity.

VMware Server 2 Resize partitions

I discovered that on VMware Server 2, you can resize a SCSI drive after you have already set up a Virtual machine, but cannot do the same with an IDE drive. I suppose this is more of a mini-blog.

Ubuntu 9.04 Device Manager

I recently noticed that all relevant documentation I've seen refers user to either System>Preferences>Hardware Information
(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=472267)
or
System>Administration>Device Manager (Beginning Ubuntu Linux 4th Ed.)

when referring to the location of the Device Manager. I currently have a standard installation of Ubuntu 9.04 and the Device Manager was not installed. You must install it by accessing Synaptic Package Manager and selecting gnome-device-manager. It will also prompt you to install the libgnome-device-manger0. Then, after the package has been installed, it will be available in Applications>System Tools. Another option for accessing this information is the command lspci at the command line.

More on VMware Server 2 and Network Adapters

After posting my last blog yesterday, another problem presented itself. While all the systems in our lab are essentially identical, some other factor caused problems on a number of the dual-boot installations in VMware. In the process of correcting the problem with Vista and it's network adapter, the emulated Intel adapter was not detected by XP. The student who was having the problem attempted to fix it by adding the line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "vlance"

in addition to the line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

However, the two commands conflict with one another. Eventually, I realized the solution was to add a second network adapter, ethernet1. By doing this each operating system recognizes one of the two NICs, the one that is compatible with the operating system. When completed, the segment of the .vmx configuration file dealing with the network adapters was as follows:

ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.allowGuestConnectionControl = "FALSE"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.features = "1"
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"
ethernet0.networkName = "Bridged"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet1.present = "TRUE"
ethernet1.allowGuestConnectionControl = "FALSE"
ethernet1.virtualDev = "vlance"
ethernet1.features = "1"
ethernet1.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"
ethernet1.networkName = "Bridged"
ethernet1.addressType = "generated"

I only tried this with two adapters, but presumably this could be done for all 3 available virtual adapters so that any operating system with a supported adapter would detect 1 of the 3 possible network adapters.

VMware Dual Boot

I created a Virtual Machine in VMware on Monday and installed Windows XP onto it. Afterwards, I added a second hard drive and installed Windows Vista Business on that drive. I then booted up Vista and had an unexpected problem. The network adapter wasn't working! I had installed Vista on another Virtual Machine last week and didn't have any problems, so I was wondering what the problem was. As it turns out, it was as simple as changing the Guest OS option in the Virtual Machine configuration. Unfortunately, before you power on, you have to set this option to correspond with the OS you are going to use. Other people had problems with their network adapter in Vista but it was for a different reason. A solution was presented by our instructor. If you cannot get the network adapter to work, try shutting down the console, opening the .vmx file that corresponds with it and look for a line that says 'ethernet0.virtualDev' If it does not exist, you can write it in. There are three types of network adapters recognized by VMware: e1000, vmxnet, and vlance. Try each one. The complete line should look like this: ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

Disabled .exe files

If you suspect that you are infected with malware and you can't run antivirus or malware removal software, try changing the extension of the executable file(.exe or .com) into a screensaver(.scr). Screensaver files can run as executables and it may circumvent the malware's attempt at disabling your software.