Category Archives: Work

[HOWTO] upgrading M4400 (RAM, CPU, SSD, BIOS)

NOTE: you can also view all the entries in this Q & A series… I received the following question on my previous post about upgrading a Dell M4400 laptop: Q. Great J.D. Thank you. I also have an M4400. I purchased it a year or so ago so that I could have a portable solution as I explore 3D graphics programs such as 3DSMax etc…Based on your above post (and a few others) I have purchased a qx9300 quad core processor,

Fixing Warning: date() [function.date] in PHP 5.3 [solved]

If you recently upgraded to a newer version of PHP, like PHP 5.3, you may be getting some errors similar to this in your PHP scripts: Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘America/Chicago’ for […]  instead

DELETE a Recovery Partition when Disk Management won’t let you

Today I was preparing a 2.5″ SATA laptop hard drive for use in my wife’s mini-PC. The hard drive I was attempting to use came from an old Acer laptop. I connected the hard drive via a USB enclosure and attempted to clear out the old partitions and reformat. Unfortunately I found that the Windows 7 Disk Management interface would not allow me to delete the “System Recovery” partition. Here is how I went about deleting that protected partition so I could

Best AdSense colors, formats and font sizes (and WordPress)

Here are some helpful resources on the topic, in order from most helpful first to not quite as helpful last 😉 #1 My FAVORITE AdSense WordPress plugin It is simple, effective and powerful. But best of all it is FREE! 🙂 WordPress › Quick Adsense « WordPress Pluginshttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-adsense/Quick Adsense is an Ads management WordPress plugin. It offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Adsense or any Ads code into a blog post. Besides, it can randomly place the… Tips

Power Supply RMA help report: PC P&C, Thermaltake, Corsair

Today was RMA day for me. Three failed power supplies. Three RMAs requested. UPDATES posted below… Here’s the low down on each one: Three Power Supplies, Three RMA Procedures Power supply #1 PC Power & Cooling 1kw Brand: PC Power & Cooling (now owned by OCZ, who knew?!) Model: Turbo-Cool 1 Kilowatt Watts: 1,000 Death by: failure on the 12v power connector RMA procedure and responsiveness: easy to fill out form, immediate notification of request received, RMA granted 1 hour

1030 Got error 28 from storage engine mysql [solved]

If you receive an error from your MySQL databaser server that reads: #1030 Got error 28 from storage engine Then  you will want to check and make sure your server has sufficient free space. One of my servers gave this error and it was because the drive  that MySQL was installed on had no more free space. So, I repeat, if you get this error check and make sure you have free space! After freeing up some space everything started working

Lenovo X220 i7 with eGPU! (diy ViDock)

My new Lenovo X220 laptop should be arriving soon. While it has a nice i7 CPU, it only has only has an integrated Intel HD 3000  for the video card 🙁  This severely limits 3D performance, therefore I will be adding something known as a DIY eGPU -or- DIY ViDock. This is a simple little project that is similar to the commercial “ViDock” product but at a lower cost and potentially with more capabilities. Basically it is connecting a desktop video card

FREE performance monitoring tools for ESXi

FREE (and pay) performance monitoring tools for ESXi (retain weeks of data, not just an hour) If you have used ESXi much you have probably realized it only shows you one hour worth of performance data. Sure this is handy for checking real time performance but it really stinks when you need to analyze performance during the week/month/year. So, as I find tools for overcoming this limit and helping in ESXi performance monitoring I will post the links here.  🙂