Antec P160

Features:

• 1.2mm anodized aluminum delivers increased rigidity and a finish that won't lose its luster.
• Swiveling front control panel
  - Swivels up to 45 degrees.
  - Connectors: 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.Link) and 2 x audio jacks.
  - LED temperature display with two built-in sensors
• Windowed side panel
• Removable motherboard tray.
• Accommodates any ATX12V power supply
• 10 drive bays
  - Color-coordinated CD-ROM & floppy drive covers
  a. 4 external 5.25"
  b. 2 external 3.5"
  c. 4 internal 3.5"
  - Rubber mounting grommets in hard drive trays
• Cooling capacity:
  a: 1 x 120mm low speed fan
  b: 1 x 120mm fan mount
• Fan Specs:
  -RPM: 1600
  -CFM: 56.13
  -dB(A): 28
• Built-in washable air filter
• Removable Side Panel
• Fits motherboards up to Standard ATX

DIY Workstation / Gaming Rig

Last winter I decided to upgrade my 6-yr old Dell 733 Mhz figuring it was long overdue. What got me started was a Christmas wish list over on ExtremeTech. Here's the specs:

• Antec Anodized Aluminum Mid-Tower (P160)
• Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (nVidia 4) motherboard
• AMD Athalon 64-bit X2 dual core (4200)
• Twin nVidia GEForce 6600GT cards
• 4 Gb memory
• Two Seagate Barracuda 250 Gb IDE drives (still can add a pair of SATA 3/Gbs drives with dual RAID)
• Dell 20-in flat panel HD monitor

It turned into a long afternoon/evening to get everything installed and ready but I was pleased that it booted up perfectly the first time I turned it on...

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Vista Pre-RC1 (build 5536)

Since my Beta 2 was acting very flakey I decided to format the partition and try a newer version. It installed cleanly and came up with no problems. One issue I discovered is that avast! antivirus (free for home use) does not work on build 5536. After installing and rebooting, you'll get a message that Windows Vista has disabled a faulty driver. Hunting around on avast!'s forums I found out that someone claims MS made a mistake in "banning" avast!'s driver and it would be corrected for the RC1 release coming soon.

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DotNetNuke (DNN) Error "Invalid attempt to read when no data is present"

When upgrading from 4.3.1 to 4.3.2 I encountered the above error. A few posts in the DNN Forums suggested there were problems with the portals defined. In my case, I had one portal defined with id of zero (0) yet there was also a portal id one (1) called “My Website” with most other columns null. I started the 4.x journey with 4.0.2 and checking there I found only one row in Portals. So....perhaps the upgrade to 4.3.1 did something? Anyway, I had just tried my cookbook approach to upgrading posted about here so I simply deleted the database, recopied, fixed the aliases then deleted the spurious row. When I first hit the site it ran through the upgrade perfectly then I clicked the link at the bottom of the upgrade report page and was “in like Flynn”.

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How to upgrade a DotNetNuke (DNN) site

I've got a pretty simple “cookbook” way to upgrade (or test upgrade) a DNN site which I thought I'd share. I'm using 4.x which means SQL Server 2005 and VS.NET 2005.

1. Unzip the download to a new directory
2. Make the new directory a virtual web share
3. Copy/paste either development.config or release.config and rename to web.config
4. Compare the old web.config to the new web.config (using a tool like WinMerge) and copy over the database connection string (edit to use new database name from step #5) and machine key.
5. Copy the database - while only SQL Server needs to be running to use the site, to take advantage of the new copy database feature you must have SQL Server Agent and SQL Server Integration Services running.
6. Open the Portal Alias table and fix up the URLs to match the new directory setup in step #2.
7. Fire up a browser and hit the new URL - upgrade should kick off automatically and leave you with a link to the home page.

Now go cut the grass or whatever chores you've been putting off.

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How to hack MDAC 2.8 off of a machine

I can't take credit for this as I found the tip here. Basically the preferred method is to have the MDAC installer for what you want *removed* and using a couple of less-known setup switches:

1. use the /T switch to specify a temporary folder to extract the files in the setup
2. use the /C switch to only copy the files out

Also, it's good to use the MDAC Component Checker to verify which version you have installed. Then grab the standalone installer for that version, unpack it, run the uninstall, reboot and you're good to go.

I downloaded the mdac_typ.exe and used a command prompt to execute the following:

mdac_typ /t:C:\mdac /c

I then switched to the C:\mdac directory just created and executed the following to uninstall:

dasetup /u

I happened to be running this on a Windows 2000 machine and after the reboot Windows Protection kicked in and tried to restore stuff. I cancelled it then tried Component Checker again and promptly got an error because MSXML wasn't installed. I then ran the install for the version of MDAC I wanted (2.7 SP1 Refresh). After it finished, I tried Component Checker again and it told me that version of MDAC installed was indeed 2.7 SP1 Refresh.

As with any undocumented hacks like this, your mileage may vary.

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Vista Beta 2 not a good host for Virtual PC?

I posted here how easy it was to get Virtual PC running on Vista. I figured it was a great way to tryout Vista (my office/email/messaging desktop) while still being productive with VMs containing specific development environments. However, after about a week of use, I've decided I'm better off booting into XP to run VMs. I've been experiencing “lockups” of up to 1 minute or more which make effective work impossible. For example, clicking down through directories on the C:\ drive and suddenly Explorer hangs for a while. Sometimes, I'll see the network activity icon going, other times not. If anybody has tips to share, please do!!

My host machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000 760 M (2.0 Ghz) with 2.0 Gb of RAM. The VMs are running from a USB 2.0 attached 5600 RPM drive - I know, 7200 would be better. The images are all VPC 2004 SP1 with up-to-date VM additions updated. The kicker is the same image runs well when I boot into XP and run them there. Given everything identical except the host OS I can only “blame” Vista Beta 2 as the culprit.

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