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April 20, 2009 by mensming.
I just got this in my inbox — quite a deal if you are looking to tryout JIRA or Confluence.
For this week only, we’re offering a special 5-user “starter” license of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. We’re calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it’s our way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, we’re going to donate every penny to charity, so please help us spread the word!
The Atlassian Foundation is donating all proceeds to Room to Read, a charity that helps the world’s future entrepreneurs by building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.
Get all the details at www.atlassian.com/starter. Hurry, offer ends on 24 April 2009.
Posted in IT, test tools, jira, bug tracking | No Comments »
January 17, 2009 by mensming.
On January 1, Washington state started a program promoting free recycling of computers, monitors and other electronics. Over the years, I have acquired a large number of electronics which I no longer use or that no longer work.
Details of the program can be found at the 1-800-Recycle site. The site makes it easy to find locations that will accept what you need to recycle.
Posted in IT, personal | No Comments »
January 6, 2009 by mensming.
For Christmas, we gave my kids a new machine. I bought a bare-bones machine from TigerDirect. We wrapped each component separately, so I did not assemble it until Christmas day. I assembled the machine without incident. Powered up. Then - nothing. The CPU fan would spin for less than a second. Nothing else. Machine did not power up.
I did some research and arrived at three possibilities for the cause. From least likely (and least expensive) to most likely, they were:
The first item was easy to eliminate. I disconnected the power switch from the mother board and used a screw driver to simulate powering up the machine. Same issue.
It was a long shot but an improperly seated CPU was said to cause some models of motherboards to automatically power down. I had used a spare heat sink / fan I had around. It was "new" in the sense I had never used it. However, I did not trust it since it had sat on a shelf and had probably been battered about. So, when I was able, I bought a much better heat sink / fan and installed it. Powered on. Same issue.
I bought a new power supply (actually a much better power supply) and installed it. Powered up. And it worked.
FYI - TigerDirect makes it very easy to get a return authorization.
Posted in IT, personal | No Comments »
November 30, 2008 by mensming.
A little over a year ago, my mother purchased a Compaq Presario C500 laptop. Her needs for a laptop are primarily web browsing and other light processing. This machine is more than adequate for her needs. I was in town visiting right after she bought the machine and asked me to look at the machine because it was "so slow". I booted it up — it took a very long time. It came with Windows Vista and only 512MB of RAM. The fact that this machine was sold in this configuration is appalling. The amount of RAM in this machine makes it impossible to run Vista. I brought the machine home with me, purchased a copy of Windows XP and installed it on the laptop. It was a snappy machine. I shipped it back and Mom was pleased with her laptop.
A couple weeks ago, I got a call regarding this machine. A grandchild had used the machine and it was now running slow and the malware protection software was going nuts. Mom took it to a local shop to wipe it and reinstall Windows XP. This so called "professional" sent it back to her saying only Vista works with the machine and she should call HP to get a copy of Vista. Sigh. I told her to ship the machine back to me with the XP disk and I would get it back up and running. It took less than 5 minutes on the web to find the "trick" needed to install Windows XP on the machine. Below is what I did - just so I will know what to do next time this machine is shipped back to me.
I installed the following software to help my mother:
I now wanted to update all of the drivers and re-enable native SATA support. This ended up being a little more difficult - many of the solutions I found on the web did not work. With that caveat, this is what worked for me.
Hopefully, this write up will save you (or myself, next time I need to do this) some time.
Posted in IT | 7 Comments »
March 17, 2008 by mensming.
We were having an occasional hang issue with a Dell Server running Windows Storage Server. We monitored the processes on the server. We disabled as many services as possible. We kept trying to narrow down the issue. Nothing helped.
Eventually, our web searches pointed to a feature on these Dell machines with the name “TCP Offload Engine” (TOE). In the driver settings we disabled the TOE feature. Problem persisted. More research. Some people indicated that disabling the settings in the driver was not enough. A licensing key needed to be removed from the mother board. Suddenly, this has become hardware maintenance. This is where the power of a site like Flickr becomes apparent. After some additional web searching, we came across a couple of links showing exactly what needed to be done, step-by-step, with photos on Flickr. What sounded scary at first became simple as we followed the instructions on a development server.
FYI - this did not solve our problems. We ended up re-writing the section of code accessing the storage server and the problem went away. Sigh…
Posted in IT | No Comments »