You may have been wondering like me that no telnet command is available in Windows 7 and Vista after a fresh installation. Sometimes it’s still useful.
But it’s still available, only disabled:
Open your control panel
Select programs
Select “Turn windows features on or off” on the left side
Within the box enable [x] Telnet Client
When looking into these disabled windows features, there are features like:
You have been looking for a low cost 19″ rack solution for your living room? Then you should check the LackRack homepage. It comes with many tips and tricks for your low cost 19″ living room rack
It’s a shame, but Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/2008 doesn’t support compiling several .c / .cpp files in parallel when working with a dual/multi core CPU. Especially when e.g. compiling on a Intel Core i7 with quad core and hyper threading this is really annoying. In Visual Studio 2010 this will be supported… But many many people want to work with Visual Studio 2005/2008 and get advantage of their powerful multi core CPU’s.
For this reason you can get the MPCL Plugin, it enables support for compiling several files in parallel on all your cores. It’s not for free but the price is fair.
I often experienced the problem that a click on the network neighborhood in Windows needs very long. This may have several reasons. I recognized that in my case it is related with the VMWare Workstation installation.
VMWare Workstation installs two virtual network adapters, one is used for host-only networking and the other for NAT networking. This virtual adapters may cause the network neighborhood to become very slow.
To come around this annoying slow network neighborhood I know two possibilities:
If you only use bridged networking for your virtual machines
=> disable both network adapters in the control panel
If you use host-only or NAT for your virtual machines
=>disable the “Client for Microsoft Networks” and “File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks” protocols in the properties of the two virtual network adapters
Recently my several years old Dell Latitude D820 began to freeze several times, around 1 time a day. It happened never all the years before. The last half year I’ve upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate and purchased new 4GB RAM, but the freezes started a few weeks ago. This is why I think the problem is not related with Windows 7. For checking the hardware I’ve used the Dell diagnostic tool without detecting and problems.
One time a blue screen was displayed with a memory parity error. So I’ve tried to remove first one RAM and after still having freezes the other one. Still with the problem.
After reading many posts which said this may not only be a problem of the RAM, it may be also a problem of:
motherboard
graphics card
WLAN (WiFi) card
…
Removing the WLAN card isn’t difficult, so I did. Furthermore I’ve disabled everything with WLAN and Bluetooth in the BIOS. Afterwards the notebook was running without problems for a few days.
Today I’ve put the WLAN card back into the Notebook (BIOS settings still disabled) and after a few hours a freeze happened again with crazy graphics output.
It seems that the WLAN card causes this problem in my case. It’s not 100 percent proofed but I’ll do further checks and reports.
Update 28th January 2010
Since the last crash after a few hours putting the WLAN card back in the Notebook it runs stable now. WLAN and Bluetooth is still disabled in the BIOS. It really looks that WLAN or Bluetooth causes the problem in my case.
Ciscos AnyConnect VPN Client will support 64bit versions but it will not work together Cisco PIX 500 Series. Furthermore the 500 Series has reached it’s end of life date.
Searching the solution for a different solution I first came across the Shrew Soft VPN Client. It’s a free software and should be able to import Ciscos .PCF configuration files. But my .PCF file could not be imported and the client did not tell the exact problem.
After some further research I found the NCP Secure Entry Client. It’s available for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP for 32 and 64bit. I’ve tried the evaluation version and it imported my .PCF file without any issues and also the VPN connection was immediately established. The price is about 80 EUR for a single user license.
I guess the Shrew Software VPN Client will also work together with the Cisco PIX but I did not make any further tries.
One restriction of the NCP Secure Entry Client is the missing possibility of tunneling IPSec over TCP (transparent tunneling). In certain firewall environments this may be needed. UDP Encapsulation seems to be supported but in my tests I could not get a connection. For more information refer to the knowledgebase of the NCP Secure Entry Client.
According to Cisco(Cisco VPN Client FAQ) there are no plans to provide 64-bit support for the Cisco CPN Client so the only option to get a VPN connection to your PIX is one of the mentioned third party clients mentioned above.
Another possibility is to install the Cisco CPN Client in a virtual machine but for my use case this is not a suitable possibility.
The world is not yet completely ready for 64bit – always keep that in mind
A simple and free tool for private usage is available from simplie Software. It lets you run short and long benchmarks of your hard discs and compare the result with other hard discs from a database.
For me it is a sufficient tool as I wanted to compare the overall performance of two different hard discs.
There is also a online shop to buy the software for commercial use.
The bigger CF cards and mega pixels of digital photo cameras get, the more you want to have the pictures copied to your notebook/desktop, for sure. After I got my Canon 5D MKII with 21 mega-pixels I really want to have the speed increased it takes to copy pictures to my notebook. With my very old card reader it takes about half an our to copy. Ok, firewire sounds really fast and my notebook has a firewire port, so I decided to get a firewire CF card reader…
So I went to a local photo store and purchased a Hama firewire CF card reader. Back at home I recognized that the firewire cable doesn’t fit into the firewire port of my Dell Latitude notebook. Went to a PC cable store and got a cable from firewire 400 to firewire 800. Fine, everything fits now put Windows 7 did not detect anything on the firewire port.
After searching the Internet I found out that firewire CF card readers need at least 6-pin firewire ports because they need the power supply from the firewire port. If you have a 4 pin port – like me – you can not use firewire CF card readers. Unfortunately I did not get this information from my friendly photo store…
Furthermore firewire doesn’t make sense until you have firewire 800. Theoretically there is no speed between firewire 400 and USB2.0.
As a result I’ll by a new USB2.0 CF card reader for my notebook.
I decided to upgrade my Dell Latitude D820 notebook from 2GB to 4GB memory so I went into a store, purchased 4 GB RAM and put them into my notebook. By the way, Windows 7 Ultimate is running on this notebook since a few weeks very well. What happened?
First boot
Screen stays blank and the three LED’s on the keyboard were blinking.
Second boot
Removed 2GB and booted again, everything correct.
Third boot
Put 2GB back again and notebook booted with the message:
The amount of system memory has changed.
If you did not change your memory…
To resolve this issue, try to reseat the memory.
Huuuu what? Never seen such a message before in my “IT-life”. Tried several things, rebooted several times. Result was the same. While goggling on the desktop I did not watch the notebook. When I come back to the notebook an additional message appeared:
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility
Press F5 to run onboard diagnostics.
So I pressed F5 for the diagnostics just to see what will happen. After running the diagnostics the notebook booted fine and recognized the new memory.
If you see this strange message also after you upgrade your memory just wait a little bit until the next message appears. Very strange behavior, indeed. But now it works, memory for the masses
One issue is that you will only be able to use about 3.3GB of your 4.0GB, for details check this blog entry:
My Windows 7 32-bit installation reports 4.00GB installed, but only 3.25GB are usable. The reason why Windows is not able to access all the 4GB is kind of hardware restriction. For details refer to the Microsoft Help and Support article:
