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• How to enjoy DVD on Apple iPad

  - by user44251

  I believe many people spent a sleepless night yesterday waiting for the new Apple Tablet to come, just a few days ago or perhaps longer I noticed fierce debate about it, its name, size, capacity, processor, main features, price etc. And now, they can take a long breath with the new Apple Tablet named iPad officially released on 28, January, 2010 (Beijing Time). But I know a new battle just begins. iPad, sounds somewhat like iPod and it really shares some similarities in terms of shape like smart, light and portable. It has a 9.7-inch, LED-backlit, IPS display with a remarkable precise Multi-Touch screen. And yet, at just 1.5 lbs and 0.5 inches thin, it's easy to carry and use everywhere. It can greatly facilitates your experience with the web, emails, photos and videos. Right now, it can run almost 140.000 of the apps on the Apple store. It can even run the apps you have downloaded for your iPhone or iPod touch. But so far, I haven't seen any possibility that it can work with DVD, probability there is no built-in DVD-ROM or DVD player which can play DVD directly. As Apple iPad states, the video formats supported are MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), H.264, MOV etc and audio formats accepted are AAC, Proteceted AAC, MP3, AIFF and WAV etc, those are formats that are commonly used with iMac. This could really a hard nut to crack if you want to watch your favourite DVD on this magic Apple iPad. But don't worry, there is still way out, you just need a few steps for ripping and importing DVD movies to Apple iPad with a simple application DVD to iPad converter What's on DVD to iPad Converter for Mac DVD to iPad converter for Mac is a powerful and professional application designed for the newly released Apple iPad which can rip, convert your DVD contents to Apple iPad compatible MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), H.264, MOV etc, and other popular file formats like AVI, WMV, MPG, MKV, VOB, 3GP, FLV etc can also be converted so that you can put on your portable devices like iPod, iPhone, iRiver, BlackBerry etc. Besides, it can also extract audio from DVD videos and save as MP3, AIFF, AAC, WAV etc. Mac DVD to iPad converter has also been enhanced that can run both on PowerPC and Intel (Snow Leopard included). It can offer versatile editing features which allows you to make your own DVD videos. For example, you can cut your DVD to whatever length you like by Trim, crop off unwanted parts from DVD clips by Crop, add special effect like Gray, Emboss and Old film to make your videos more artistic. Besides, its built-in merging feature and batch mode allows you to join several DVD clips into a single one and do batch conversion. And more features can be expected if you afford a few minutes to try.

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• How should I use my new SSD drive?

  - by jasondavis

  I just built a new PC the other day. Specs... Processor: Intel i7-930 quad core CPU CPU Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Motherboard: AsRock X58 Extreme 3 RAM/Memory: 6gb G-Skill tripple channel DDR3 memory (3 sticks of 2gb planning to get another kit to make it 12gb total soon) Operating System Hard drive: Intel X25-M 80GB Mainstream SATA2 Solid State Drive Video Cards: 2 XFX ATI Redeon HD 4650 cards to run 3-4 monitors Case: Lian Li PC-B10 Midtower case Power Supply: Antec TruePower New TP-750 Blue 750W Operating System Windows 7 Pro 64bit Not sure if the specs are helpful at all but I posted them just in case. So I got everything put together and running great so far but I need some advice/ideas/help/tips. I got the SSD drive in hopes of using it strictly for my windows 7 install along with all my other programs I install. I am then going to get another drive or 2 just for data (video,music,photos, etc). So my plan is to just install the new data drives and then in windows 7 I will change my "My documents" "My Music" "My Video" "MY Photos" library's to be located on the data drives instead of the OS SSD drive. I would ultimately like to install all my programs with my windows install on the SSD drive and then create an IMAGE of the drive and then 6 months down the road if things are sluggish I can just wipe the drive and restore my IMAGE with all my programs and settings in tact still. So here are some questions now. 1) How can I verify that TRIM is working on my new SSD? 2) Is there anything above that I missed that I should be doing? I think I once read that there is a page file or some sort of file that windows changes a lot and that it should be moved off f an SSD an onto my data drives. DOes anyone know what I might of heard? If you do can you explain the pros and cons of doing such a thing as well as how to possibly? 3) Any tips or advice to get the best performance from all this, I built a pretty nice system and I just want to make it stay that way as long as I can.

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• Why did Intel drop the Itanium?

  - by Cole Johnson

  I was reading up on the history of the computer and I came along the IA-64 (Itanium) processors. They sounded really interesting and I was confused as to why Intel would decide to drop them. The ability to choose explicitly what 2 instructions you wanted to run in that cycle is a great idea, especially when writing your program in assembly, for example, a faster bootloader. The hundreds of registers should be convincing for any assembly programmer. You could essentially store all the functions variables in the registers if it doesn't call any other ones. The ability to do instructions like this: (qp) xor r1 = r2, r3 ; r1 = r2 XOR r3 (qp) xor r1 = (imm8), r3 ; r1 = (imm8) XOR r3 versus having to do: ; eax = r1 ; ebx = r2 ; ecx = r3 mov eax, ebx ; first put r2 into r1 xor eax, ecx ; then set r1 equivalent to r2 XOR r3 or ; SAME mov eax, (imm32) ; first put (imm32) into r1 xor eax, ecx ; then set r1 equivalent to (imm32) XOR r3 I heard it was because of no backwards x86 comparability, but couldn't thy be fixed by just adding the Pentium circuitry to it and just add a processor flag that would switch it to Itanium mode (like switching to Protected or Long mode) All the great things about it would have surly put them a giant leap ahead of AMD. Any ideas? Sadly this means you will need a very advanced compiler to do this. Or even one per specific model of the CPU. (E.g. a newer version of the Itanium with an extra feature would require different compiler). When I was working on a WinForms (target only had .NET 2.0) project in Visual Studio 2010, I had a compile target of IA-64. That means that there is a .NET runtime that was able to be compiled for IA-64 and a .NET runtime means Windows. Plus, Hamilton's answer mentions Windows NT. Having a full blown OS like Windows NT means that there is a compiler capable of generating IA-64 machine code.

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• Alienware m15x (older model) BSOD investigation

  - by Crishu

  A frined of mine asked me to help him with an Alienware m15x laptop that had a little service history. It was bought in june 2008, serviced in january 2009 for a random fps drop problem, Alienware returned it saying nothing was wrong. The laptop still had hiccups, but after juggling a few drivers and settings, the fps drops weren't as noticeable. Eventually it died in Sept. 2009. It would not boot up locking itself on a white/gray screen. (i think it was overheating .. clocking in 100 degrees Celsius). So back to Alienware it went. They replaced the GPU and all was fine. Up until these blue screens started showing up. One other thing that was updated was the HDD and a Windows 7 reinstall, in August. From then on it seems to have started its BSOD. Could this be the culprit? Why? 0_o The original Windows was Vista but it was upgraded with a digital download/purchase of Windows 7 Home Premium and activated after installing windows. No errors on the old HDD, just on the latest installation. LE:Due note that now the old HDD is used to see if issues re-occur. So please, I am in need of someone who can interpret these windows dump files: Minidump I may have come to some conflicting conclusions. So if someone can clarify each dump/date and the probable cause/error it had; and a final conclusion or solution, we would be very grateful. Also please consult report for other system info I omitted: same link,code: XRWIVLWG If I missed something or if you have any other questions I'll be happy to answer them. Thank you. Good day. Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz Network Adapter Properties: Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN Video Adapter Properties: Driver Description NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX Driver Date 19.08.2009 Driver Version 8.16.11.8681 Driver Provider NVIDIA INF File oem19.inf Hardware ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_060C&SUBSYS_0770152D&REV_A2 Location Information @system32\DRIVERS\pci.sys,#65536;PCI bus %1, device %2, function %3;(1,0,0) PCI Device NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX [NoDB] BIOS String Version 62.92.34.0.8 Installed Drivers nvd3dum (8.16.11.8681), nvwgf2um, nvwgf2um Hard Dik Drive: Model ID ST9120823ASG (**older one 120gb**) Model ID WD32000BEKT (new 320gb with fresh OS)

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• Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 CD 1 cannot boot: freeze at No Emulation

  - by TGP1994

  Hi everyone. I've been interested in the Windows Server line of OSes, so since I apply for DreamSpark, I thought I'd go download it and try it. I just so happened to have an old desktop that I was using awhile ago for Windows XP, so I imaged the drive in preparation for it to be overwritten with the new OS. (This system has an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ processor, and 1GB of RAM.) I tried burning the first disk image on my newer desktop computer, running Windows XP, although the CD burner consistently failed at a particular track area from cd to cd, so it seemed like the burner was toast there. Fortunately, I had a laptop, so I transferred the images over to that, then burned the first disc there. First time around went great, and the burning program reported no errors. I then took the CD over to the computer that I was intending to install Server onto, set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive, then I booted it up. Like normal, after the POST, it printed "Boot from ATAPI CD-Rom: No Emulation", which I was used to seeing with bootable cds. I waited for the "Press any key to continue..." message that I had become so familiar with in windows discs, although I saw none. The computer sat there for about 5 seconds with the cd spinning, then it spun down like it was done reading it. Nothing else happened. No response from the keyboard. I tried again, same result. I then downloaded IMGBurn, and I put the burned cd into the laptop that burned it originally. I also downloaded a fresh image from the dreamspark site. I ran a verify session, and everything checked out. I later tried getting various DOS startup discs, then I tried booting the winnt binary, which supposedly initiates the installation process. Either the shells reported that not enough memory was available (since they would be running in low memory mode), or FreeDOS in particular would report Illegal instructions right away. Is the image corrupt at dreamspark, or am I doing something wrong?

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• What are the most likely bottlenecks determining the performance of CamStudio screen recording?

  - by Steve314

  When doing screen recording, I can get a frame rate of maybe 15 frames per second for the full screen on my 1080p monitor using the XVID codec. I can increase the speed a bit by recording a region, changing screen modes, and tweaking other settings, but I'm curious what hardware upgrades might give me the biggest bang for my buck. My PC is budget, but modern... Athlon 2 X4 645 (3.1GHz, quad core, limited cache) processor. 4GB single channel DDR3 1066 RAM. ASRock motherboard with NVidia GeForce 7025/nForce 630a Chipset. ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card - 512MB on board, not configured to steal system RAM. I dual-boot Windows XP and Windows 7. For the moment, XP is my bigger performance concern as it's still my getting-things-done O/S as opposed to my browser-host O/S. My goal is to make a few programming-related tutorials. For a lot of that I don't need screen recording - I can make up some slides, record audio with the PC switched off, yada yada. When I do need screen recording, I'll mostly be recording Notepad++, Visual Studio or a command prompt. Occasionally, I may be recording some kind of graphics or diagram program and using my pre-Bamboo cheap Wacom tablet - I have the CS2 versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, but I'd much more likely be using Microsoft Paint. Basically, what I'll be recording won't be making huge demands on the machine - but recording a fair number of pixels (720p preferred) will be useful. What's particularly wierd - not so long ago I still had a five-year-old Pentium 4 based PC. And (with the same 1080p monitor) it could record at not far from the same frame rate. So clearly the performance issues are more subtle than just throw-money-at-it. My first guess would be that the main bottleneck is the bandwidth for transferring data to/from the graphics card. Is that likely to be correct? In support of that, see this [Radeon HD 5450 review][1] - the memory bandwidth is only 12.8 GB/s. If you can't get data out of graphics memory quickly, you can't transfer it back to the system memory quickly. Apparently, that's slower than some top-end cards in 2002.

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• iTunes and Hulu Playback Choppy and Slow?

  - by Bart Silverstrim

  Specs: Windows XP, latest updates 1.7 ghz Pentium 4 1 gig ram DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 with 256 meg RAM OpenGL 2.1 The story: Okay, I had an older system laying around that I figured I would try turning into a mini-media system to connect to our TV. I put together a lot of older parts, got it into working order, etc. and hooked it up and voila'...slower, but usable system that displayed to the TV. It could run some things decently. I put in iTunes, it played video okay. Not great, but okay. Played Hulu and since we have a 1Mb download rate, the minimum for their site, there were some choppy moments when watching their shows, but I found that (sadly) changing resolution to 800x600 seemed to help with the issue when running full screen. I downloaded the application called Boxee and installed it. It wouldn't run; apparently the video card in the system supported OpenGL 1.2, and needed at least 1.4. I bought a cheap card, the 5200, with four times the memory in it and support for OpenGL 2.1. Installed, everything seemed fine. iTunes seemed to run fine, the video driver (PNY video card) came with OpenGL 2.1, and Boxee finally ran. I then upgraded to the latest drivers for the video card and ran the DirectX updater from MS. After that, the OpenGL Extension Viewer wouldn't run. It just stayed as an icon in the task bar. Also, any and all videos in iTunes stuttered and went out of sync horribly. Unwatchable. I tried watching Hulu video in Boxee, and it displayed video like it was a series of stills in a very bad powerpoint. Playing straightforward audio-only came through fine, no stutters no hiccups. I tried system restore to roll back updates to pre-directX updates (I thought that seemed to be the time that triggered the weird behavior), no joy. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the video drivers. I installed updated audio drivers (ensoniq audiopci), nothing helped. I finally wiped the drive last night and tried reinstalling everything and restoring my iTunes content via an import from a backup. Fresh install, no updater on the video card or directx. the problem was still there although I haven't tested Hulu, the iTunes player is still stuttering like crazy if I play video, fine if I play audio. I know the processor isn't high in heft, but with one gig of RAM and the fact that it seemed to do okay before I thought that the problem must be software related. Has anyone else run into this sort of issue and have a solution other than "buy a new computer"? What specs seem to work with video at the low end for you? Right now the system is of little use other than keeping my music library and iTunes apps synced with my iPod.

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• How to tune system settings for mongoDB on Linux?

  - by jsh

  Trying to squeeze a lot out of one question here -- please bear with me. Although the MongoDB man pages make several useful recommendations about system settings like ulimit (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/ulimit/), and other production factors (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/administration/production-notes/) they seem mysteriously silent on things like virtual memory and swap settings. The closest we get to a hint is that "...the operating system’s virtual memory subsystem manages MongoDB’s memory..." (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/fundamentals/#does-mongodb-require-a-lot-of-ram). Running the same job - high writes and high reads on about 10,000,000 records in a single collection -- on my 4-processor, 4GB RAM macbook and an 8-core ubuntu box with 64GB RAM I saw dramatically WORSE read performance on the linux box with factory settings, and could hear the disk constantly spinning, indicating high I/O and presumably swapping. Yes, other things were happening on the box, but there was plenty of free RAM, disk space, etc.; furthermore, I did not see evidence that Mongo was expanding to take advantage of all that free RAM as it is touted to do. Linux box default settings were as follows: vm.swappiness =60 vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10 vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs =3000 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=500 I hazarded some guesses looking at docs and blogs for other types of databases (Oracle, MYSQL, etc.), experimented, and adjusted as below. vm.swappiness=10 vm.dirty_background_ratio=5 vm.dirty_ratio=5 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=250 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=500 I saw some immediate apparent improvements in read time. However, when I ran my test jobs again, read performance continued to be painfully sluggish during heavy writes. Then, I REBUILT the collection from an available data source - and suddenly I can read at 1ms or less per record WHILE doing the write job! So the question is really two-fold: 1) What are appropriate VM settings for MongoDB on Linux? 2) (bonus) Does Mongo do some checking or optimization with the OS while data is being built? In other words, if I have built a large data set with suboptimal VM or I/O settings, does Mongo make assumptions during the memory-mapping process that will fail to take advantage of optimizations down the road? Obviously I don't fully grok memory mapping under the hood (I was hoping I wouldn't have to). Any help appreciated...thanks! -j

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• Windows 7 losing one of my displays after restart

  - by j_kubik

  I have an Intel DZ68BC motherboard with Intel HD graphics card using two monitors (on DVI and on HDMI » VGA). My friend asked me to test if his NVIDIA graphics card works well on my computer (at his it was doing some trouble), so I inserted it in my computer, installed the NVIDIA driver and it worked quite well. Then I removed it, uninstalled everything NVIDIA-related I could find and switched monitors back to my Intel card. Since then after every system start/restart, the system sees only monitor on HDMI » VGA connector, completely ignoring the DVI monitor. I noticed that installing the Intel video drivers causes the system to recognize the second monitor if I don't immediately reboot. After a reboot, the system recognizes only the HDMI » VGA monitor. I also tried starting in safe-mode and using DriveSweeper to remove the remains of NVIDIA drivers. While it seems that some drivers were removed, the situation didn't change. Now I am out of ideas and I really wouldn't like to reinstall the system (again...). I also tried restoring the system to the state before this whole story, but it also didn't change anything. EDIT: I am still trying to troubleshoot this problem. The only point that I could start was driver re-instalation. I traced down the part that restores right settings to a call: C:\Users\Jarek\Desktop\GFX_Win7_64_8.15.10.2696\x64\Drv64.exe -driverinf "C:\Users\Jarek\Desktop\GFX_Win7_64_8.15.10.2696\Graphics\igdlh64.inf" -flags 20 -keypath "Software\Intel\Difx64" This call fixes my displays, and as workaround, I will add it for now to my autorun. I am still looking for better solution anyway... EDIT2: Using DriverView i made a list of currently used drivers both before and after fixing my display using above command. Then i compared logs: No drivers were removed by fixing command. Drivers added by fixing command: MS Remote Access serial network driver (asyncmac.sys) security processor (spsys.sys) Drivers that changed base address (indicates driver-reload?) Canonical Display Driver (cdd.dll) Intel Graphics Kernel Mode Driver (igdkmd64.sys) Monitor Driver (monitor.sys) Added drivers seem rather unrelated to the problem to me, reloaded drivers are just a cnsequence of installing new driver file so there is not much to go here... I really cannot make heads or tails out of it...

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• Which hardware to VM ratio for Build-Server virtualization?

  - by Martin

  Let's start with saying that I'm a total noob wrt. to server virtualization. That is, I use VMs often during development, but they're simple desktop machine things for me. Now to my problem: We have two (physical) build servers, one master, one slave running Jenkins to do daily tasks and build (Visual C++ Builds) our release packages for our software. As such these machines are critical to our company, because we do lot's releases and without a controlled environment to create them, we can't ship fixes. (And currently there's no proper backup of these machines in place, because they do not hold any data as such - it just would be a major pain to setup them again should they go bust. (But setting up backup that I'd know would work in case of HW failure would even be more pain, so we have skipped that until now.)) Therefore (and for scaling purposes) we would like to go virtual with these machines. Outsourcing to the cloud is not an option, not at all, so we'll have to use on-premises hardware and VM hosts. Each Build-Server (master or slave) is a fully configured (installs, licenses, shares in case of the master, ...) Windows Server box. I would now ideally like to just convert the (two) existing physical nodes to VM images and run them. Later add more VM slave instances as clones of the existing ones. And here begin my questions: Should I go for one VM per one hardware-box or should I go for something where a single hardware runs multiple VMs? That would mean a single point of failure hardware wise and doesn't seem like a good idea ... or?? Since we're doing C++ compilation with Visual Studio, I assume that during a build the hardware (processor cores + disk) will be fully utilized, so going with more than one build-node per hardware doesn't seem to make much sense?? Wrt. to hardware options, does it make any difference which VM software we use (VMWare, MS, Virtualbox, ... ?) (We're using Windows exclusively for our builds.) Regarding budget: We have a normal small company (20 developers) budget for this. ;-) That is, if it's going to cost a few k$ it's going to cost. If it's free - the better. I strongly prefer solutions where there's no multi-k$ maintenance costs per year.

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• Computer randomly reboots during "intensive activity".

  - by Reznor

  My friend has been playing games on his new build for some time now. However, lately, his computer will randomly reboot out of nowhere, so far only happening in game, and presumably only to happen in game as it happens nowhere else. This can happen in game during play or even in the options. Note, it isn't a crash or blue screen. It's just a normal reboot. This started today, I believe, and has only occured in two games: Dead Space and Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. He has played a handful of games before these, for about a week or so, without this problem. We theorized on two possibilities: Maybe something is overheating? Maybe the power supply is inadequate? These two were quickly dismissed, as all his components were operating at normal temperatures when he got back to his desktop from the reboot, and we all know these parts don't exactly cool down quickly, especially if they get hot enough to trigger a reboot. Besides, I know at-least my motherboard reports processor overheating at start-up, and requests I press f1 to continue into boot. The PSU one was dismissed too. He has an 850w power supply on a rig that was estimated to take only 720 some watts, that's with some overcompensating to be safe. He opened up his case to make sure nothing was seated wrong or in the way. All was fine, but he did notice a sticker on his video card. It had a giant barcode on it and some numbers. Now, I'm used to seeing these stickers, they're the warranty stickers, right, and removal voids the warranty? Yeah, well, we find it odd because this sticker is slapped right over the circuits of the video card, not on a block or anything. Is this normal? Should he remove it? Right now, I am concerned with the memory. Could that be at fault? Here are his specs: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-Bit Intel i7 950 EVGA GeForce 570 GTX 4 GB DDR3 PC10666 dual-channel Corsair RAM Corsair 850w PSU Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Western Digital 1 TB WD1001FALS

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• A Windows Update Prevented Live Discs From Working?

  - by user88311

  First off I'll state my system specs. Acer Aspire M1100 Windows Vista Home Basic 32bit OEM 2 Gigs of DDR2 ram 160Gig hard drive 2.7Ghz AMD Athlon 64 processor ATI Radeon X1250 Graphics card A few days ago my computer did automatic updates and updated windows defender to KB915597 (Definition 1.135.415.0), After which when shutting down and starting up I would receive BSOD with the information BUGCODE_USE_DRIVER and 0x000000FE (0x00000008, 0x00000006, 0x00000006, 0x877330000) upon where my computer would not start up with any USB devices plugged in and it always require me to run startup repair before it started. Upon when I first started it up and was able to fully boot windows, I had no use of the mouse so I was unable to install the fix that the windows solutions center brought up on my screen, so I restarted again and installed the fix hoping it would cease the problem, it did not. Upoon starting up after installing the fix and restarting I was confronted with the BSOD 0x000000FE (0x00000008, 0x00000006, 0x00000006, 0x83291000) at which I found the startup repair could not fix the problem and I restored, as I most like should have in the first place. After going through that I read that simply installing the latest defender version from the microsoft site had fixed this problem for others, so I did that, to find I still received the BSOD's. So in a attempt to find a fix to the problem I went to the microsoft answers site to try to find a way to fix the problem, there I was told to simply disable defender and reboot to see if that fixed the problem, upon doing this my computer would no longer even startup, when I boot normally I get to just when the loading screen finishes and then my computer restarts and when I run startup repair, it runs for about 15 seconds and then my computer restarts as well. I have tried running ubuntu live discs in order to simply access the drive and simply copy and paste the 2 month old physical backup I have of my C drive to the C drive, but whenever I run the live OS when it gets to the end of the load screen and is about to boot, the computer again restarts, yet if I put in a gparted disc, I am able to boot it fully, although it does not give me access to the file system just partition managing and when I attempt to access the internet through it, the computer once again restarts. So my question is, how could the update and what has happened prevent me from running the live OS's properly?

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• What server setup for a small web development company? [closed]

  - by Giordano

  I co-own a company with a friend of mine and we have decided to buy a new server to support our business (our current server is an Asus EEE Box, working great but too limited :) ). I should mention that we are web developers but occasionally we do small-office sys admin. Thus, 99% of time we work on GNU/Linux (mainly Ubuntu) but from time to time we need to setup a Windows environment to assist some customers (e.g. setup a temporary SQL Server 2008). Our requirements: Low budget: we don't want the cheapest solution out there but we can't afford to spend too much. Budget could be ~1000-1500€ (before VAT) Robustness: we would like to setup a RAID array and maybe have an external disk where we can store backups Virtualization: we need to be able to setup few servers for development. The scenario is something like this (~8 appliances running in parallel): Redmine + GIT server Bacula server FTP server 3-4 virtual appliances that could be set up on demand to test our applications or support a customer. The appliances could be: LAMP, Tomcat+PostgreSQL, SQL Server Support: if something breaks down it shouldn't be too difficult to find a replacement. Now, given the main requirements, there are some doubts we need to clarify: Do you suggest to buy a prepackaged solution (for example a customized Dell PowerEdge T110 or T310) or to assemble the server by ourselves (buy the separate components)? What RAID configuration do you suggest? I was thinking of RAID1 (probably cheaper) or RAID5. should we buy a hardware RAID controller or is it ok to use a software RAID (mdadm)? In case, which controller do you suggest? What processor do you suggest (Intel Xeon, i3, i5, i7, AMD)? How much RAM? (I was thinking at least 8GB, ~1GB per appliance) What virtualization software do you recommend? VMWare seems to be the best choice, but what about XEN or KVM? We don't want to buy licenses at the moment so we would like to consider only free options. What OS do you recommend? We know Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo very well (we would like to use Ubuntu Server), however it seems a lot of people goes for CentOS. Thanks in advance if you can help us with this! It's our first "serious" server so many doubts popped up :) Please feel free to add further recommendations if you have some to share ;) Have a nice day

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• Where is my app.config for SSIS?

  Sometimes when working with SSIS you need to add or change settings in the .NET application configuration file, which can be a bit confusing when you are building a SSIS package not an application. First of all lets review a couple of examples where you may need to do this. You are using referencing an assembly in a Script Task that uses Enterprise Library (aka EntLib), so you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings, perhaps for the logging application block. You are using using Enterprise Library in a custom task or component, and again you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings. You are using a web service with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 and hosting the proxy in SSIS, in an assembly used by your package, and need to add the configuration sections and settings. You need to change behaviours of the .NET framework which can be influenced by a configuration file, such as the System.Net.Mail default SMTP settings. Perhaps you wish to configure System.Net and the httpWebRequest header for parsing unsafe header (useUnsafeHeaderParsing), which will change the way the HTTP Connection manager behaves. You are consuming a WCF service and wish to specify the endpoint in configuration. There are no doubt plenty more examples but each of these requires us to identify the correct configuration file and and make the relevant changes. There are actually several configuration files, each used by a different execution host depending on how you are working with the SSIS package. The folders we need to look in will actually vary depending on the version of SQL Server as well as the processor architecture, but most are all what we can call the Binn folder. The SQL Server 2005 Binn folder is at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\, compared to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ for SQL Server 2008. If you are on a 64-bit machine then you will see C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for the 32-bit executables and C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for 64-bit, so be sure to check all relevant locations. Of course SQL Server 2008 may have a C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ on a 64-bit machine too. To recap, the version of SQL Server determines if you look in the 90 or 100 sub-folder under SQL Server in Program Files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\nn\) . If you are running a 64-bit operating system then you will have two instances program files, C:\Program Files (x86)\ for 32-bit and  C:\Program Files\ for 64-bit. You may wish to check both depending on what you are doing, but this is covered more under each section below. There are a total of five specific configuration files that you may need to change, each one is detailed below: DTExec.exe.config DTExec.exe is the standalone command line tool used for executing SSIS packages, and therefore it is an execution host with an app.config file. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTExec.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. DtsDebugHost.exe.config DtsDebugHost.exe is the execution host used by Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio when executing a package from the designer in debug mode, which is the default behaviour. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DtsDebugHost.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. This may surprise some people as Visual Studio is only 32-bit, but thankfully the debugger supports both. This can be set in the project properties, see the Run64BitRuntime property (true or false) in the Debugging pane of the Project Properties. dtshost.exe.config dtshost.exe is the execution host used by what I think of as the built-in features of SQL Server such as SQL Server Agent e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\dtshost.exe.config This file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders devenv.exe.config Something slightly different is devenv.exe which is Visual Studio. This configuration file may also need changing if you need a feature at design-time such as in a Task Editor or Connection Manager editor. Visual Studio 2005 for SQL Server 2005  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio 2008 for SQL Server 2008  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio is only available for 32-bit so on a 64-bit machine you will have to look in C:\Program Files (x86)\ only. DTExecUI.exe.config The DTExec UI tool can also have a configuration file and these cab be found under the Tools folders for SQL Sever as shown below. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe A configuration file may not exist, but if you can find the matching executable you know you are in the right place so can go ahead and add a new file yourself. In summary we have covered the assembly configuration files for all of the standard methods of building and running a SSIS package, but obviously if you are working programmatically you will need to make the relevant modifications to your program’s app.config as well.

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• Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider

  - by Gopinath

  If you going to buy iPhone 4S on a two year contract in USA, Europe or Australia you may not find it expensive. But if you are planning to buy it in any other parts of the world, you will definitely feel the heat of ridiculous iPhone 4S price. In India iPhone 4S costs approximately costs $1000 which is 30% more than the price tag of an unlocked iPhone sold in USA. Personally I love iPhones as there is no match for the user experience provided by Apple as well as the wide range of really meaning applications available for iPhone. But it breaks heart to spend $1000 for a phone and I’m forced to look at alternates available in the market. Here are the four iPhone 4S alternates available in almost all the countries where we can buy iPhone 4S Google Galaxy Nexus The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s own Android smartphone manufactured by Samsung and sold under the brand name of Google Nexus. Galaxy Nexus is the pure Android phone available in the market without any bloat software or custom user interfaces like other Androids available in the market. Galaxy Nexus is also the first Android phone to be shipped with the latest version of Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. This phone is the benchmark for the rest of Android phones that are going to enter the market soon. In the words of Google this smartphone is called as “Galaxy Nexus: Simple. Beautiful. Beyond Smart.”.  BGR review summarizes the phone as This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favourite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry. Samsung Galaxy S II The one single company that is able to sell more smartphones than Apple is Samsung. Samsung recently displaced Apple from the top smartphone seller spot and occupied it with loads of pride. Samsung’s Galaxy S II fits as one the best alternatives to Apple’s iPhone 4S with it’s beautiful design and remarkable performance. Engadget summarizes Samsung Galaxy S2 review as It’s the best Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it might well be the best smartphone, period. Of course, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, no matter how stupendously thin the device that carries it may be, and we also can’t say for sure that the Galaxy S II would justify a long-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to another. Nonetheless, if you’re asking us what smartphone to buy today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II would be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Nokia Lumia 800 Here comes unexpected Windows Phone in to the boxing ring. May be they are not as great as Androids available in the market today, but they are picking up very quickly. Especially the Nokia Lumia 800 seems to be first ever Windows Phone 7 aimed at competing serious with Androids and iPhones available in the market. There are reports that Nokia Lumia 800 is outselling all Androids in UK and few high profile tech blogs are calling it as the king of Windows Phone. Considering this phone while evaluating the alternative of iPhone 4S will not disappoint you. We assure. Droid RAZR Remember the Motorola Driod that swept entire Android market share couple of years ago? The first two version of Motorola Droids were the best in the market and they out performed almost every other Android phone those days. The invasion of Samsung Androids, Motorola lost it charm. With the recent release of Droid RAZR, Motorola seems to be in the right direction to reclaiming the prestige. Droid RAZR is the thinnest smartphone available in the market and it’s beauty is not just skin deep. Here is a review of the phone from Engadget blog the RAZR’s beauty is not only skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make sure this sleek number is ready to run with the big boys. It kept pace with, and in some cases clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies in the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a perfectly viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey Rezound and Galaxy Nexus Further Reading So we have seen the four alternates of iPhone 4S available in the market and I personally love to buy a Samsung smartphone if I’m don’t have money to afford an iPhone 4S. If you are interested in deep diving into the alternates, here few links that help you do more research Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs. Motorola Droid RAZR: How Their Specs Compare by Huffington Post Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Nexus Galaxy: Spec Smackdown by PC World Browser Speed Test: Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II – by Gizmodo iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S II by pocket lint Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II by techie buzz This article titled,Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Where is my app.config for SSIS?

  Sometimes when working with SSIS you need to add or change settings in the .NET application configuration file, which can be a bit confusing when you are building a SSIS package not an application. First of all lets review a couple of examples where you may need to do this. You are using referencing an assembly in a Script Task that uses Enterprise Library (aka EntLib), so you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings, perhaps for the logging application block. You are using using Enterprise Library in a custom task or component, and again you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings. You are using a web service with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 and hosting the proxy in SSIS, in an assembly used by your package, and need to add the configuration sections and settings. You need to change behaviours of the .NET framework which can be influenced by a configuration file, such as the System.Net.Mail default SMTP settings. Perhaps you wish to configure System.Net and the httpWebRequest header for parsing unsafe header (useUnsafeHeaderParsing), which will change the way the HTTP Connection manager behaves. You are consuming a WCF service and wish to specify the endpoint in configuration. There are no doubt plenty more examples but each of these requires us to identify the correct configuration file and and make the relevant changes. There are actually several configuration files, each used by a different execution host depending on how you are working with the SSIS package. The folders we need to look in will actually vary depending on the version of SQL Server as well as the processor architecture, but most are all what we can call the Binn folder. The SQL Server 2005 Binn folder is at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\, compared to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ for SQL Server 2008. If you are on a 64-bit machine then you will see C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for the 32-bit executables and C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for 64-bit, so be sure to check all relevant locations. Of course SQL Server 2008 may have a C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ on a 64-bit machine too. To recap, the version of SQL Server determines if you look in the 90 or 100 sub-folder under SQL Server in Program Files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\nn\) . If you are running a 64-bit operating system then you will have two instances program files, C:\Program Files (x86)\ for 32-bit and  C:\Program Files\ for 64-bit. You may wish to check both depending on what you are doing, but this is covered more under each section below. There are a total of five specific configuration files that you may need to change, each one is detailed below: DTExec.exe.config DTExec.exe is the standalone command line tool used for executing SSIS packages, and therefore it is an execution host with an app.config file. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTExec.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. DtsDebugHost.exe.config DtsDebugHost.exe is the execution host used by Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio when executing a package from the designer in debug mode, which is the default behaviour. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DtsDebugHost.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. This may surprise some people as Visual Studio is only 32-bit, but thankfully the debugger supports both. This can be set in the project properties, see the Run64BitRuntime property (true or false) in the Debugging pane of the Project Properties. dtshost.exe.config dtshost.exe is the execution host used by what I think of as the built-in features of SQL Server such as SQL Server Agent e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\dtshost.exe.config This file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders devenv.exe.config Something slightly different is devenv.exe which is Visual Studio. This configuration file may also need changing if you need a feature at design-time such as in a Task Editor or Connection Manager editor. Visual Studio 2005 for SQL Server 2005  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio 2008 for SQL Server 2008  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio is only available for 32-bit so on a 64-bit machine you will have to look in C:\Program Files (x86)\ only. DTExecUI.exe.config The DTExec UI tool can also have a configuration file and these cab be found under the Tools folders for SQL Sever as shown below. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe A configuration file may not exist, but if you can find the matching executable you know you are in the right place so can go ahead and add a new file yourself. In summary we have covered the assembly configuration files for all of the standard methods of building and running a SSIS package, but obviously if you are working programmatically you will need to make the relevant modifications to your program’s app.config as well.

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• Diagnose PC Hardware Problems with an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  So your PC randomly shuts down or gives you the blue screen of death, but you can’t figure out what’s wrong. The problem could be bad memory or hardware related, and thankfully the Ubuntu Live CD has some tools to help you figure it out. Test your RAM with memtest86+ RAM problems are difficult to diagnose—they can range from annoying program crashes, or crippling reboot loops. Even if you’re not having problems, when you install new RAM it’s a good idea to thoroughly test it. The Ubuntu Live CD includes a tool called Memtest86+ that will do just that—test your computer’s RAM! Unlike many of the Live CD tools that we’ve looked at so far, Memtest86+ has to be run outside of a graphical Ubuntu session. Fortunately, it only takes a few keystrokes. Note: If you used UNetbootin to create an Ubuntu flash drive, then memtest86+ will not be available. We recommend using the Universal USB Installer from Pendrivelinux instead (persistence is possible with Universal USB Installer, but not mandatory). Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive. You will be greeted with this screen: Use the down arrow key to select the Test memory option and hit Enter. Memtest86+ will immediately start testing your RAM. If you suspect that a certain part of memory is the problem, you can select certain portions of memory by pressing “c” and changing that option. You can also select specific tests to run. However, the default settings of Memtest86+ will exhaustively test your memory, so we recommend leaving the settings alone. Memtest86+ will run a variety of tests that can take some time to complete, so start it running before you go to bed to give it adequate time. Test your CPU with cpuburn Random shutdowns – especially when doing computationally intensive tasks – can be a sign of a faulty CPU, power supply, or cooling system. A utility called cpuburn can help you determine if one of these pieces of hardware is the problem. Note: cpuburn is designed to stress test your computer – it will run it fast and cause the CPU to heat up, which may exacerbate small problems that otherwise would be minor. It is a powerful diagnostic tool, but should be used with caution. Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive, and choose to run Ubuntu from the CD or USB drive. When the desktop environment loads up, open the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on the System menu in the top-left of the screen, then selecting Administration, and then Synaptic Package Manager. Cpuburn is in the universe repository. To enable the universe repository, click on Settings in the menu at the top, and then Repositories. Add a checkmark in the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click close. In the main Synaptic window, click the Reload button. After the package list has reloaded and the search index has been rebuilt, enter “cpuburn” in the Quick search text box. Click the checkbox in the left column, and select Mark for Installation. Click the Apply button near the top of the window. As cpuburn installs, it will caution you about the possible dangers of its use. Assuming you wish to take the risk (and if your computer is randomly restarting constantly, it’s probably worth it), open a terminal window by clicking on the Applications menu in the top-left of the screen and then selection Applications > Terminal. Cpuburn includes a number of tools to test different types of CPUs. If your CPU is more than six years old, see the full list; for modern AMD CPUs, use the terminal command burnK7 and for modern Intel processors, use the terminal command burnP6 Our processor is an Intel, so we ran burnP6. Once it started up, it immediately pushed the CPU up to 99.7% total usage, according to the Linux utility “top”. If your computer is having a CPU, power supply, or cooling problem, then your computer is likely to shutdown within ten or fifteen minutes. Because of the strain this program puts on your computer, we don’t recommend leaving it running overnight – if there’s a problem, it should crop up relatively quickly. Cpuburn’s tools, including burnP6, have no interface; once they start running, they will start driving your CPU until you stop them. To stop a program like burnP6, press Ctrl+C in the terminal window that is running the program. Conclusion The Ubuntu Live CD provides two great testing tools to diagnose a tricky computer problem, or to stress test a new computer. While they are advanced tools that should be used with caution, they’re extremely useful and easy enough that anyone can use them. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash DriveAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuHow to Share folders with your Ubuntu Virtual Machine (guest)Building a New Computer – Part 3: Setting it Up TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• SQL SERVER – Beginning of SQL Server Architecture – Terminology – Guest Post

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server Architecture is a very deep subject. Covering it in a single post is an almost impossible task. However, this subject is very popular topic among beginners and advanced users.  I have requested my friend Anil Kumar who is expert in SQL Domain to help me write  a simple post about Beginning SQL Server Architecture. As stated earlier this subject is very deep subject and in this first article series he has covered basic terminologies. In future article he will explore the subject further down. Anil Kumar Yadav is Trainer, SQL Domain, Koenig Solutions. Koenig is a premier IT training firm that provides several IT certifications, such as Oracle 11g, Server+, RHCA, SQL Server Training, Prince2 Foundation etc. In this Article we will discuss about MS SQL Server architecture. The major components of SQL Server are: Relational Engine Storage Engine SQL OS Now we will discuss and understand each one of them. 1) Relational Engine: Also called as the query processor, Relational Engine includes the components of SQL Server that determine what your query exactly needs to do and the best way to do it. It manages the execution of queries as it requests data from the storage engine and processes the results returned. Different Tasks of Relational Engine: Query Processing Memory Management Thread and Task Management Buffer Management Distributed Query Processing 2) Storage Engine: Storage Engine is responsible for storage and retrieval of the data on to the storage system (Disk, SAN etc.). to understand more, let’s focus on the following diagram. When we talk about any database in SQL server, there are 2 types of files that are created at the disk level – Data file and Log file. Data file physically stores the data in data pages. Log files that are also known as write ahead logs, are used for storing transactions performed on the database. Let’s understand data file and log file in more details: Data File: Data File stores data in the form of Data Page (8KB) and these data pages are logically organized in extents. Extents: Extents are logical units in the database. They are a combination of 8 data pages i.e. 64 KB forms an extent. Extents can be of two types, Mixed and Uniform. Mixed extents hold different types of pages like index, System, Object data etc. On the other hand, Uniform extents are dedicated to only one type. Pages: As we should know what type of data pages can be stored in SQL Server, below mentioned are some of them: Data Page: It holds the data entered by the user but not the data which is of type text, ntext, nvarchar(max), varchar(max), varbinary(max), image and xml data. Index: It stores the index entries. Text/Image: It stores LOB ( Large Object data) like text, ntext, varchar(max), nvarchar(max),  varbinary(max), image and xml data. GAM & SGAM (Global Allocation Map & Shared Global Allocation Map): They are used for saving information related to the allocation of extents. PFS (Page Free Space): Information related to page allocation and unused space available on pages. IAM (Index Allocation Map): Information pertaining to extents that are used by a table or index per allocation unit. BCM (Bulk Changed Map): Keeps information about the extents changed in a Bulk Operation. DCM (Differential Change Map): This is the information of extents that have modified since the last BACKUP DATABASE statement as per allocation unit. Log File: It also known as write ahead log. It stores modification to the database (DML and DDL). Sufficient information is logged to be able to: Roll back transactions if requested Recover the database in case of failure Write Ahead Logging is used to create log entries Transaction logs are written in chronological order in a circular way Truncation policy for logs is based on the recovery model SQL OS: This lies between the host machine (Windows OS) and SQL Server. All the activities performed on database engine are taken care of by SQL OS. It is a highly configurable operating system with powerful API (application programming interface), enabling automatic locality and advanced parallelism. SQL OS provides various operating system services, such as memory management deals with buffer pool, log buffer and deadlock detection using the blocking and locking structure. Other services include exception handling, hosting for external components like Common Language Runtime, CLR etc. I guess this brief article gives you an idea about the various terminologies used related to SQL Server Architecture. In future articles we will explore them further. Guest Author  The author of the article is Anil Kumar Yadav is Trainer, SQL Domain, Koenig Solutions. Koenig is a premier IT training firm that provides several IT certifications, such as Oracle 11g, Server+, RHCA, SQL Server Training, Prince2 Foundation etc. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• Review of Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7

  - by mbcrump

  I recently acquired a Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 device from AT&T and wanted to share what I thought of it as an end-user. Before I get started, here are several of my write-ups for the Windows Phone 7. You may want to check out the second article titled: Hands-on WP7 Review of Prototype Hardware. From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 Hands-on : Windows Phone 7 Review on Prototype Hardware. Deploying your Windows Phone 7 Application to the actual hardware. Profile your Windows Phone 7 Application for Free Submitting a Windows Phone 7 Application to the Market. Samsung Focus i917 Phone Size: Perfect! I have been carrying around a Dell Streak (Android) and it is about half the size. It is really nice to have a phone that fits in your pocket without a lot of extra bulk. I bought a case for the Focus and it is still a perfect size.  The phone just feels right. Screen: It has a beautiful Super AMOLED 480x800 screen. I only wish it supported a higher resolution. The colors are beautiful especially in an Xbox Live Game.   3G: I use AT&T and I've had spotty reception. This really can't be blamed on the phone as much as the actual carrier. Battery: I've had excellent battery life compared to my iPhone and Android devices. I usually use my phone throughout the day on and off and still have a charge at the end of the day.  Camera/Video: I'm still looking for the option to send the video to YouTube or the Image to Twitter. The images look good, but the phone needs a forward facing camera. I like the iPhone/Android (Dell Streak) camera better. Built-in Speaker: Sounds great. It’s not a wimpy speaker that you cannot hear.  CPU: Very smooth transitioning from one screen to another. The prototype Windows Phone 7 that I had, was no where near as smooth. (It was also running a slower processor though). OS: I actually like the OS but a few things could be better. CONS: Copy and Paste (Supposed to come in the next update) We need more apps (Pandora missing was a big one for me and Slacker’s advertisement sucks!). As time passes, and more developers get on board then this will be fixed. The browser needs some major work. I have tried to make cross-platform (WP7, Android, iPhone and iPad) web apps and the browser that ships with WP7 just can’t handle it.  Apps need to be organized better. Instead of throw them all on one screen, it would help to allow the user to create categories. PROS: Hands down the best gaming experience on a phone. I have all three major phones (iphone, android and wp7). Nothing compares to the gaming experience on the WP7. The phone just works. I’ve had a LOT of glitches with my Android device. I’ve had maybe 2 with my WP7 device. Exchange and Office support are great. Nice integration with Twitter/Facebook and social media. Easy to navigate and find the information you need on one screen. Let’s look at a few pictures and we will wrap up with my final thoughts on the phone. WP7 Home Screen. Back of the phone is as stylish. It is hard to see due to the shadow but it is a very thin phone. What’s included? Manuals Ear buds Data Cable plus Power Adapter Phone Click a picture to enlarge So, what are my final thoughts on the Phone/OS? I love the Samsung Focus and would recommend it to anyone looking for a WP7 device. Like any first generation product, you need to give it a little while to mature. Right now the phone is missing several features that we are all used to using. That doesn’t mean a year from now it will be in the same situation. (I sure hope we won’t). If you are looking to get into mobile development, I believe WP7 is the easiest platform to develop from. This is especially true if you have a background in Silverlight or WPF.    Subscribe to my feed

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• Information Indepth Newsletter - Linux Edition

  - by Paulo Folgado

  INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTERLinux Edition February 2011 Stay Connected:  NEWS Now Available: Oracle Linux 6 Get the latest release of Oracle Linux 6, which includes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.Download Oracle Linux 6 Read More Customers Succeed by Using Oracle Exadata with Oracle Linux Watch IT executives from Bank of America, Linkshare, and Johns Hopkins as they talk about the business challenges they faced and why they chose to use Oracle Linux along with Oracle Exadata as the solution. Watch Now Video Interview: Oracle Senior Vice President Wim Coekaerts Watch Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, as he talks about use cases for Oracle VM Templates as well as the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Linux.Watch Now Hot Off the Press: Migrate Your IBM AIX Environment to Oracle Linux This new white paper provides recommendations for planning and implementing the migration of applications from an IBM Power System running AIX to Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 Server with Intel Xeon 7560 Processor running Oracle Linux 5.5.Read More  Back to Top BLOGOSPHERE Just Launched: The Oracle Linux Blog Follow our new Oracle Linux blog  to hear the latest updates, product news, upcoming events, and all the latest happenings, directly from the Linux team at Oracle. Back to Top TECH DIVE NEW: Linux/Oracle Solaris CommandComparo Site from Oracle Technology NetworkThis site gives equivalent command syntax in Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 for common administrative tasks--focusing particularly on tasks that have tricky syntax or that you frequently need to double check. It acts as a quick reference for administrators who operate in these two OS environments. Free Download: Oracle Linux Release 5.6Did you know that by using Oracle Linux 5.5 or 5.6 along with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, you can get all the benefits of Linux mainline kernel 2.6.32 and more, right now, without the need to reinstall or migrate to a new operating system such as RHEL6?Read Release NotesDownload Oracle Linux 5.6 LSB 4.0 Certification Completed for Oracle Linux 5.5Oracle Linux 5.5 with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel successfully completed the LSB 4.0 certification.  Back to Top WEBCASTS Boost Your Linux Performance with Oracle's Enhancements in Infiniband and RDSRegister to hear Director of Kernel Engineering Chris Mason cover scalability and performance improvements in Linux environment. Get the Facts Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise KernelSVP Wim Coekaerts and Senior Director Monica Kumar cover the facts about and benefits of using Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.  View Other Webcasts on Demand   Back to Top EVENTS Collaborate 2011April 10-14 Orlando, Florida Cloud Summit Events, WorldwideVarious dates (check the city for date/time of event) Datacenter Efficiency Events WorldwideThese events include Linux and Oracle VM sessions.Various dates (check the city for date/time of event) Virtualization Events in North America Find an Oracle Event  Back to Top EDUCATION Get Oracle Linux Certified from Oracle University Oracle University offers courses in both Oracle Linux and the administration of Oracle Database on Linux.  Back to Top CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Pella Corporation Improves IT Performance and Efficiency with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM To improve IT performance and efficiency and lower operational costs, Pella Corporation, has standardized on Oracle VM and Oracle Linux. Read More Disney Store Deploys POS in 330 Stores and 7 Countries on Oracle Linux Disney Store is running 1,500 registers worldwide on a broad Oracle technology software stack including Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Linux. Read More Back to Top PARTNER SPOTLIGHT Emulex and Oracle Announce Data Integrity Features The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel provides data integrity checking between Oracle Database applications and Emulex 8Gb/s LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. Read More Dell Inc. Dell Inc. tested and validated configurations support Oracle Linux. Back to Top STAY IN TOUCH Follow @ORCL_Linux on Twitter for the latest penguin tweets Bookmark Oracle.com/Linux Read the Oracle Linux blog Back to Top  Oracle Information InDepth newsletters bring targeted news, articles, customer stories, and special offers to business people who want to find out how to streamline enterprise information management, measure results, improve business processes, and communicate a single truth to their constituents. Please send questions or comments to [email protected]. For answers to questions about subscribing, unsubscribing, and managing your Oracle e-mail communications preferences, please see the Oracle E-Mail Communications page. Copyright © 2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. 

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c : Enterprise Controller High Availability (EC HA)

  - by Anand Akela

  Contributed by Mahesh sharma, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center team In Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c we introduced a new feature to make the Enterprise Controllers highly available. With EC HA if the hardware crashes, or if the Enterprise Controller services and/or the remote database stop responding, then the enterprise services are immediately restarted on the other standby Enterprise Controller without administrative intervention. In today's post, I'll briefly describe EC HA, look at some of the prerequisites and then show some screen shots of how the Enterprise Controller is represented in the BUI. In my next post, I'll show you how to install the EC in a HA environment and some of the new commands. What is EC HA? Enterprise Controller High Availability (EC HA) provides an active/standby fail-over solution for two or more Ops Center Enterprise Controllers, all within an Oracle Clusterware framework. This allows EC resources to relocate to a standby if the hardware crashes, or if certain services fail. It is also possible to manually relocate the services if maintenance on the active EC is required. When the EC services are relocated to the standby, EC services are interrupted only for the period it takes for the EC services to stop on the active node and to start back up on a standby node. What are the prerequisites? To install EC in a HA framework an understanding of the prerequisites are required. There are many possibilities on how these prerequisites can be installed and configured - we will not discuss these in this post. However, best practices should be applied when installing and configuring, I would suggest that you get expert help if you are not familiar with them. Lets briefly look at each of these prerequisites in turn: Hardware : Servers are required to host the active and standby node(s). As the nodes will be in a clustered environment, they need to be the same model and configured identically. The nodes should have the same processor class, number of cores, memory, network cards, for example. Operating System : We can use Solaris 10 9/10 or higher, Solaris 11, OEL 5.5 or higher on x86 or Sparc Network : There are a number of requirements for network cards in clusterware, and cables should be networked identically on all the nodes. We must also consider IP allocation for public / private and Virtual IP's (VIP's). Storage : Shared storage will be required for the cluster voting disks, Oracle Cluster Register (OCR) and the EC's libraries. Clusterware : Oracle Clusterware version 11.2.0.3 or later is required. This can be downloaded from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html Remote Database : Oracle RDBMS 11.1.0.x or later is required. This can be downloaded from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html For detailed information on how to install EC HA , please read : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E27363_01/doc.121/e25140/install_config-shared.htm#OPCSO242 For detailed instructions on installing Oracle Clusterware, please read : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e17214/chklist.htm#BHACBGII For detailed instructions on installing the remote Oracle database have a read of: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/documentation/index.html The schematic diagram below gives a visual view of how the prerequisites are connected. When a fail-over occurs the Enterprise Controller resources and the VIP are relocated to one of the standby nodes. The standby node then becomes active and all Ops Center services are resumed. Connecting to the Enterprise Controller from your favourite browser. Let's presume we have installed and configured all the prerequisites, and installed Ops Center on the active and standby nodes. We can now connect to the active node from a browser i.e. http://<active_node1>/, this will redirect us to the virtual IP address (VIP). The VIP is the IP address that moves with the Enterprise Controller resource. Once you log on and view the assets, you will see some new symbols, these represent that the nodes are cluster members, with one being an active member and the other a standby member in this case. If you connect to the standby node, the browser will redirect you to a splash page, indicating that you have connected to the standby node. Hope you find this topic interesting. Next time I will post about how to install the Enterprise Controller in the HA frame work. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Editing sqlcmdvariable nodes in SSDT Publish Profile files using msbuild

  - by jamiet

  Publish profile files are a new feature of SSDT database projects that enable you to package up all environment-specific properties into a single file for use at publish time; I have written about them before at Publish Profile Files in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and if it wasn’t obvious from that blog post, I’m a big fan! As I have used Publish Profile files more and more I have realised that there may be times when you need to edit those Publish profile files during your build process, you may think of such an operation as a kind of pre-processor step. In my case I have a sqlcmd variable called DeployTag, it holds a value representing the current build number that later gets inserted into a table using a Post-Deployment script (that’s a technique that I wrote about in Implementing SQL Server solutions using Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects – a compendium of project experiences – search for “Putting a build number into the DB”). Here are the contents of my Publish Profile file (simplified for demo purposes) : Notice that DeployTag defaults to “UNKNOWN”. On my current project we are using msbuild scripts to control what gets built and what I want to do is take the build number from our build engine and edit the Publish profile files accordingly. Here is the pertinent portion of the the msbuild script I came up with to do that:   <ItemGroup>     <Namespaces Include="myns">       <Prefix>myns</Prefix>       <Uri>http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003</Uri>     </Namespaces>   </ItemGroup>   <Target Name="UpdateBuildNumber">     <ItemGroup>       <SSDTPublishFiles Include="$(DESTINATION)\**\$(CONFIGURATION)\**\*.publish.xml" />     </ItemGroup>     <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Xml.XmlFile Condition="%(SSDTPublishFiles.Identity) != ''"                                        TaskAction="UpdateElement"                                        File="%(SSDTPublishFiles.Identity)"                                        Namespaces="@(Namespaces)"                                         XPath="//myns:SqlCmdVariable[@Include='DeployTag']/myns:Value"                                         InnerText="$(BuildNumber)"/>   </Target> The important bits here are the definition of the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003: and the XPath expression //myns:SqlCmdVariable[@Include='DeployTag']/myns:Value: Some extra info: I use a fantastic tool called XMLPad to discover/test XPath expressions, read more at XMLPad – a new tool in my developer utility belt MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Xml.XmlFile is a msbuild task used to edit XML files and is available from Mike Fourie’s MSBuild Extension Pack I’m using a property called $(BuildNumber) to hold the value to substitute into the file and also $(DESTINATION)\**\$(CONFIGURATION)\**\*.publish.xml to define an ItemGroup all of my Publish Profile files. Populating those properties is basic msbuild stuff and is therefore outside the scope of this blog post however if you want to learn more check out MSBuild properties & How To: Use Wildcards to Build All Files in a Directory. Hope this is useful! @Jamiet

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• How to Use Steam In-Home Streaming

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Steam’s In-Home Streaming is now available to everyone, allowing you to stream PC games from one PC to another PC on the same local network. Use your gaming PC to power your laptops and home theater system. This feature doesn’t allow you to stream games over the Internet, only the same local network. Even if you tricked Steam, you probably wouldn’t get good streaming performance over the Internet. Why Stream? When you use Steam In-Home streaming, one PC sends its video and audio to another PC. The other PC views the video and audio like it’s watching a movie, sending back mouse, keyboard, and controller input to the other PC. This allows you to have a fast gaming PC power your gaming experience on slower PCs. For example, you could play graphically demanding games on a laptop in another room of your house, even if that laptop has slower integrated graphics. You could connect a slower PC to your television and use your gaming PC without hauling it into a different room in your house. Streaming also enables cross-platform compatibility. You could have a Windows gaming PC and stream games to a Mac or Linux system. This will be Valve’s official solution for compatibility with old Windows-only games on the Linux (Steam OS) Steam Machines arriving later this year. NVIDIA offers their own game streaming solution, but it requires certain NVIDIA graphics hardware and can only stream to an NVIDIA Shield device. How to Get Started In-Home Streaming is simple to use and doesn’t require any complex configuration — or any configuration, really. First, log into the Steam program on a Windows PC. This should ideally be a powerful gaming PC with a powerful CPU and fast graphics hardware. Install the games you want to stream if you haven’t already — you’ll be streaming from your PC, not from Valve’s servers. (Valve will eventually allow you to stream games from Mac OS X, Linux, and Steam OS systems, but that feature isn’t yet available. You can still stream games to these other operating systems.) Next, log into Steam on another computer on the same network with the same Steam username. Both computers have to be on the same subnet of the same local network. You’ll see the games installed on your other PC in the Steam client’s library. Click the Stream button to start streaming a game from your other PC. The game will launch on your host PC, and it will send its audio and video to the PC in front of you. Your input on the client will be sent back to the server. Be sure to update Steam on both computers if you don’t see this feature. Use the Steam > Check for Updates option within Steam and install the latest update. Updating to the latest graphics drivers for your computer’s hardware is always a good idea, too. Improving Performance Here’s what Valve recommends for good streaming performance: Host PC: A quad-core CPU for the computer running the game, minimum. The computer needs enough processor power to run the game, compress the video and audio, and send it over the network with low latency. Streaming Client: A GPU that supports hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding on the client PC. This hardware is included on all recent laptops and PCs. Ifyou have an older PC or netbook, it may not be able to decode the video stream quickly enough. Network Hardware: A wired network connection is ideal. You may have success with wireless N or AC networks with good signals, but this isn’t guaranteed. Game Settings: While streaming a game, visit the game’s setting screen and lower the resolution or turn off VSync to speed things up. In-Home Steaming Settings: On the host PC, click Steam > Settings and select In-Home Streaming to view the In-Home Streaming settings. You can modify your streaming settings to improve performance and reduce latency. Feel free to experiment with the options here and see how they affect performance — they should be self-explanatory. Check Valve’s In-Home Streaming documentation for troubleshooting information. You can also try streaming non-Steam games. Click Games > Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library on your host PC and add a PC game you have installed elsewhere on your system. You can then try streaming it from your client PC. Valve says this “may work but is not officially supported.” Image Credit: Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr, Milestoned on Flickr

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• Searching for the Perfect Developer&rsquo;s Laptop.

  - by mbcrump

  I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the  Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it.   Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color :  GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech.  =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2  Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below.  Subscribe to my feed

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