The three red lights of death have claimed another two victims who are near and dear to me.  This weekend I received a phone call from my cousin informing me that my services would be required to penny fix his red ringed Xbox 360.  Then, last night I received a text message from this fellow informing me that he too has finally seen the dark days of the Xbox 360’s RROD.  Be strong gents, my heart is with you.

I’ve been saying for a while now that if I find something I like, I’ll blog about it, but only after using it for a couple of weeks.  Much like this fellow, I have a tendency to try something out, rave about how great it is, and then never use it again.  So here it is, my first Certified Awesome post and it’s about the redesigned taskbar that’s in Windows 7.  The Windows 7 pre-beta comes with the same old Vista taskbar, but there are ways to unlock the new one.  The new taskbar is more like a dock, but the live thumbnails of the running applications are fantastic.  They’re a bit clearer than in Vista, and you can even close windows right from the live thumbnail in the taskbar.

Other things I like are the ability to pin a running application to the taskbar, as well as the context sensitive pop out menus (jump lists) that you can open from the taskbar shortcut.  For example, if you have Notepad pinned to your taskbar, the jump list will contain the recently opened text files.  This comes in handy if you’re frequently opening the same log files.

Last but not least is the updated notification area (or system tray if you prefer).  Rather than “hiding” rarely used icons, there’s actually a new area where you drag them to, and that area is only shown on your command. It’s kind of like the old way of having to click the little arrow and it slides out to show your unused icons, but it’s more of a static type of window that opens up above the taskbar.  You also have the option to suppress balloon notifications for any application you would like to ignore.

Did I mention that you can also drag your taskbar items and system tray icons, allowing you to re-order them to your liking?

All in all, this much needed update to the Windows taskbar is proving to be pretty fantastic, and I already hate using the old Vista taskbar now that I’ve been spoiled by the new one.  Keep up the good work Microsoft, I can’t wait to get my hands on a Windows 7 build that will have the fully functioning peek feature.

Rogers has recently lowered their Blackberry Enterprise Server rate plans significantly.  It used to cost $60 for 25MB, and since the release of the Blackberry Bold, they’ve now got a much more reasonable plan, at $45 for 300MB.  Where’s Bell in all this?  Still screwing me with my $60 for 30MB plan.  After I read about Rogers’ new BES plans, I decided to check out Bell’s site, to make sure they still sucked before I went off on a rant.  Aside from Bell’s BES plans still being as bad as always, I also found this quote referring to their System Access Fee being higher than the other Canadian providers underneath the list of plans:

System Access Fees are charged by all wireless companies to help pay for the network and the ongoing software, technology and other upgrades to that network. Generally, the higher the fee, the greater the opportunity to invest in network quality to enhance your experience. Just one more reason to choose Bell.

Really?  You’re telling me that I have to pay a higher SAF to access a network that’s only used by a limited number of carriers in North America, when the rest of the world uses GSM?  And that’s supposed to be better?  Bell, you’re not Ferrari, you can’t charge higher prices and just claim you have better products to justify it.  I mean, where’s the Blackberry Bold on Bell?  Oh wait, they’re still using the crap-tastic CDMA network which only certain phones (which were released on GSM first) get ported over to, and it’s usually months later!  I guess that because I can’t take my phone over to Rogers, and because it’ll cost me $400 to terminate my contract, they can charge whatever they want.  Maybe they should put that on their web site so that people can really understand why they’re being screwed.

Looking for version 7.2.6001.784 of the Windows Update agent?  Sure you are!  If the Windows Update site isn’t giving it to you (they haven’t rolled it out to everyone yet), you can still update by grabbing the standalone installer from one of the URL’s below.  After you install it, you can check that your version is up to date on the Version tab of the Properties page for the wuauclt.exe file located in C:\Windows\System32.  The update is supposed to reduce the amount of time it takes the agent to check for updates, which should help out if your clients are checking with a WSUS server at least once a day.

Download Links:
Windows Update Agent 7.2.6001.784 (x86)
Windows Update Agent 7.2.6001.784 (x64)

Imagine my surprise when I was driving down Fanshawe Park Road and saw a sign stating that a TigerDirect warehouse is coming soon!  I better start saving now so I can spend it all when it opens.  No more paying for shipping and waiting for stuff to be delivered!

Ever wonder why there’s no option anywhere in the Windows Vista Control Panel to disable hibernation?  Me too.  If you want to disable hibernation support permanently so that Windows isn’t storing hiberfile.sys the size of your physical memory on your system drive, go to a command prompt and run the following command:

powercfg –h off

This will turn off hibernation support and free up a few GB’s of space on your system drive.  The actual amount of space savings should be equal to the amount of physical memory in your system.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m always on the hunt for awesome admin tools.  Today I read a post on 4sysops.com about FlexTK Express.  This tool allows you to perform many different file management operations like disk analysis, batch copying, searching based on multiple criteria, duplicate searching, and a whole lot more.  I don’t spend a lot of my time managing files but I do occasionally go on a file organization/cleanup rampage and this tool will definitely come in handy.  I tested it out briefly and my initial impressions of it are fantastic.  The interface is lightning fast, and the searching and the disk usage analyzer were quick.  If you perform a lot of manual file operations I suggest you try out FlexTK Express.

I’ve installed service pack 6 on the BES and everything seems to be running like a champ.  The upgrade went smoothly without problems, and was pretty speedy to install. The HTML mail on the Blackberry is surprisingly fantastic. Downloading images is quick and renders quite well on the Blackberry. It’s nice to have rich text and images instead of plain old stinky text and overly long web addresses that fill the entire screen.

A giant fly is getting ready to infiltrate the building across the street.

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last few days, it’s that setting your SATA controller to standard IDE mode in the BIOS is the best way to go, unless there’s some specific reason that you need to run it in AHCI mode.  Setting it to AHCI mode just because you can is crazy.  It’s much more hassle than it’s worth.  Case in point:  I had set up a machine, everything was working fine.  After converting the two SATA disks to Dynamic disks in Windows Server 2003 x64, and setting the volume up as a mirror, the system now hangs at the BIOS.  I figured it was a problem with one of the drives, so I replaced the suspect drive, converted it to Dynamic, created the mirror, and again it hangs at the BIOS.  Well screw it.  I’ve switched it to IDE mode and I’m loading Windows from scratch so I don’t have to deal with the headache that is AHCI.