I created a Project Server 2007 VM from a Demo Showcase virtual server (DS-SRV-02). Not too much of a problem.
When trying to use the tasks/timesheet Outlook Add-in, I hit an error containing “Unable to open shim database version registry key – v2.0.50727.00000″
This KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918642 and the associated hot-fix cured the problem.
…and I don’t mean Sugar Mountain in North Berwick or Thorntons.
I spotted this neat diagram on Scott Hanselman’s blog. Figure out each of the circles, get into that sweet spot and hey-presto, you’re golden..
Sorry but I don’t know who to credit as the author
“Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today.” – M K Ghandi
You just want to play with some Geckel – just to see how cool it is – kind of like an animal Post-It. No more having to hold up the SpiderPig.
Whereas a Meerkat family stuck in your garden must just be so creepy (note they’re spring mounted so you’ll swear they move) – almost as weird as a Meerkat Solar Bird Bath. We clearly have no shame when it comes to taking the mick out of the animal kingdom.
Yes – I do growl at work too.
Especially when my favorite little puppy, Vista, messes a little in the corner each day. Viola…
My beef is with the 100% CPU usage and high disk activity. I have developed the habit of hibernating my PC overnight (it does similar things after standing-by) - after coming back to life, it spends an age (in computer terms) sorting something out but what is that something? Using perfmon I can see that it is a svchost process – that’s not helpful in itself as, like concealer, svchost can cover a multitude of sins.
Looking at the same process id in the disk usage (which was also very busy) we can see that, for some reason, Vista is consuming shed-loads of data from a Virtual PC VHD on my external hard disk but where is is going? If it was stuffing it into my ReadyBoost cache to speed me up, that would be cool, but there is no sign of equivalent writes to my speed stick. No doubt Vista is doing something really clever and important which, if I read some piece of documentation somewhere, should be head-slappingly obviously beneficial for me.
But all I want is to switch on my PC and go. This becomes important if, in an important scenario like, say, presenting to a potential customer, you expect to wake up your snoozing laptop and knock them bandy – maybe, maybe not.
The point – practice any Vista operating scenario which is going to be important for you. Go through the steps from (literally) switching on your PC. Then, hopefully, no surprises.
…with your back to a wall.
Take 5 paces – that’s about 5 metres.
On a sheet of paper, draw a line.
Imagine your starting point as the centre of the earth,
the line you drew represents the surface of the earth.
- on this scale;
New Zealand is 10 metres or around 30 feet away through the wall,
the ‘edge of space’ would be about 78mm above your line - that’s less than the width of your palm,
all the moisture content in the atmosphere and almost all of our weather is contained within 15mm of your line,
an airliner will typically fly no higher than just over 8mm from the line,
the deepest part of the ocean will be just over 8mm below the line,
the average depth of the North Atlantic Ocean is around 2.5mm,
in the North Atlantic, the Gulf Stream which keeps us relatively warm for this latitude, is 1mm deep and on average 77mm wide
the Greenland ice sheet is about 2.5mm at it’s deepest and is approx 1.8m long and less than a metre wide.
Our world is so big, so strong and yet so very fragile.
You don’t get many of these to the pound.
IE on Vista – no fuss, continued working OK, closed down OK – done.
Again the BBC shows itself to be fully partial on the subject of climate change. They steadfastly refuse to do any real journalism and instead parrot supportive reports and inject ‘climate change’ as an offending influence on almost any observable phenomenon, natural or otherwise.
This BBC report on solar influence on climatic conditions concludes with the accusatorial “Drs Svensmark and Friis-Christensen could not be reached for comment.” rather than referring to Svensmark’s updated paper which specifically looks at aspects of later data.
Richard Black must commit to publishing, with equal prominence, Svensmark’s response if it comes.
Ranting Stan is a bit miffed with the Royal Society over the issue.
Recent posts have highlighted PartnerBot as a “cool Turing-esque innovation” which will “quickly signpost to information you need”. In a quiet moment I posed it these puzzlers…
Maybe the army of elves on the other end were tired?
Ouch – this hurt (a little bit). Partly because I like Vista and you don’t like it when your cute little puppy bites you. Mostly it hurt because I had to spend a few hours fumbling about like an idiot until I stumbled upon the solution.
Last night an app appeared to hang – not good but I expected Vista to coral the errant code and restore normality. Then this..
Ooops. Hmmmm – restart and see what happens appears to be the advice. Did that, and did it again. The restart (safe mode, regular, safe mode ) didn’t get me further forward. Uninstall the app that crashed - couldn’t (in safe mode or otherwise). All these operations took a lonnngggg time to run – uber-frustration! Next piece of advice, restore to a restore point (I am now very happy that I am running with restore points). Result…
Nope – that route is closed to me. The same happens with all selected restore points offered to me. A weighty sense of doom sets in. Sod it – what next? Mega-hhmmmm, look in the system configuration – check memory for problems, that sounds like a desperate straw to clutch at. Let’s check the disks while we’re at it ( a good old-fashioned CHKDSK) this lets me clutch at two straws at the same time 
. Well I never – look at that…
4 bad sectors (in old money). The whole disk checking cycle took hours – fair enough. When that finished, restart – enter time warp, all is as was before the drama started!!!
Good, goood… yes but, well, no, I don’t think that it’s too much to expect that the brand, spanking new OS from Microsoft would deal (relatively) elegantly with something simple like a disk problem – whether created by the errant app or just by bad disk sectors. Not good enough. I still love my puppy but now I know it has a slightly shadowy side.
