Windows Support Mode

After spending several hours repairing my wife's grandmother's computer from a trojan infection, I realized that, unless I want to spend more time on support, there needs to be a better solution for helping family members on their computers.

In this case, me wife's Grandmother has several behaviors that increase the likelihood that she will be infected.

1. She installs random software that she downloads from the Internet.


2. She often runs her programs using "Run as Administrator"

I am tempted to remove Windows from these computers, and install Ubuntu, but I think that this would be a steep learning curve for her, and I would still need to set up a way for her to run windows programs (Wine or VMWare)

If I had more time to dedicate to support, I could change her account to a non-Administrator account level.  But then, everytime she wanted to install some softeare, or run a Windows Update that prompts for administrator access, I would have to do that.  Unfortunately, we are local to her, and I don't have the time to manage all of these things remotely.

Windows Home Server Restore

Last weekend, I decided to upgrade the hard drive on our Dell XPS m1330.  I was pleasently surprised how easy it was to remove and replace the hard drive from the laptop.  Since I use Windows Home Server to back up all of our computers, I was expecting a similarly easy time to restore the data to the new hard drive.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

I booted the computer with the Window Home Server PC restore CD, with the laptop connected to the network, and attempted to have the restore software find the sever, but the software wasn't able to find the server.  It turns out that the restore CD didn't have the drivers for the ethernet interface.  The restore software can load any needed drivers from a floppy or usb drive.  I copied the contents of the CD that contains the drivers for the m1330 onto a thumb drive, and when the software searched for any needed drivers, it wasn't able to find any.

It turns out that Dell didn't put the ATA or ethernet drivers on the driver CD for the m1330.  I was able to download those drivers manually and put them on a thumb drive, and was able to restore the data to the new drive.

Now, I will just label the and keep the thumb drive for whenever I need to restore that computer

Chrome to Phone

Chrome to Phone is a pretty cool project.  With this Chrome extension and Android applicaiton, you can send links to web pages to your phone.  I use this for:

• Sending a location from Google Maps to your phone, where you can easily get start navigating to the destination


• Sending web page url to the phone, where it can be viewed

Xbox 360 "slim"

My wife and kids bought me  a new Xbox 360 "slim" for Father's Day.  So far, I like the hardware, especially how much quieter it is when compared to my older Xbox 360.

The setup/transfer went pretty easy, especially since the software to transfer data from the old hard drive is included on the new Xbox.  (You do need to purchase the Xbox 360 transfer cable.)  All content was transferred, except for the games that had been installed on the hard drive.  Even though the content was transferred, it was still licensed to my old Xbox.  (The DRM on the Xbox licenses content to the Xbox where the content was purchased, and the Xbox Live account.)

Since I want the content to be playable when my Xbox Live account is not logged in, I needed to transfer the licenses to the new Xbox.  Microsoft has a tool where you can transfer the licenses for your content to a different Xbox.  Unfortunately, after you transfer the licenses, you need to redownload the content.  The download manager on the Xbox only allows 30 items to be added to the queue.  So I re-downloaded the games, but haven't redownloaded the Rock Band tracks that I had purchased.

I do like the hardware on the new Xbox, for reasons other than how silent it runs.  Since HDMI and toslink optical are on board, I can now use HDMI and digital audio.  (There wasn't room with the placement of the ports to use both before.)

WordPress 3.0

Version 3.0 of WordPress was just released, and I have painlessly upgraded my blogs.  There are a few features that I am looking forward to using.

• Ability to host multiple blogs on the same WordPress installation (I still need to see if it supports multiple domain, so my blogs don't have to be on the same domain.)


• Ability to upgrade plugins in a batch.

http://v.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21

HP Home Server Easter Egg

I took a look at my HP MediaSmart ex470 this morning, and I noticed that the drive lights were all blinking on and off in about a 1 second interval.  I was hoping that this wasn't an indication that all 4 drives or the motherboard was dying, and the manual didn't describe an error state that would cause the lights to blink in this pattern.

I then found this page that describes the easter egg that HP put into their software.  Somehow, this got enabled on my server.  (Maybe this gets enabled on Father's Day.)

Automatic WordPress Backup

In this post, I mentioned that I was using Wordpress Database Backup to backup the databases from my WordPress installations.  I was using this too email myself the dumps of the databases.

I have switched to using the Automatic WordPress Backup.  This plugin will backup the themes, plugins, configuration files, uploaded files, and the dump of the database, to an Amazon S3 bucket.  You can configure the plugin to keep a number days or weeks of backups.