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.
Links
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:
Links
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:
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.
Update 13th August 2010
In the mean time I’ve recognized that the fan on the left side was blocked by dust. To remove the dust it’s needed to open your notenbook. You have to release quite a lot screws to achieve this, instructions can be found on the internet. After removing the dust from the fan the notebook works much more stable.
Additionally I’ve installed a SSD hard disc. This is pretty cool, you will recognize a noticeable difference:
Putting a SSD into your notebook, a thing I can really recommend.
Links
If you are using the Cisco CPN Client software together with a Cisco PIX 500 Series Security Appliances you will run into trouble when you upgrade your 32bit Windows installation to a 64bit version since the Cisco CPN Client is only supported for 32bit Windows versions.
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 