Vista Lanyard and comment moderation

I was reading James Senior's blog today and his post on:
Views on Vista : Vista Lanyard Competition

Reading through the comments to this post really made me laugh. It just proves there are some crazy ass people out there on the web. Prime example (posted re: how often do you wear a lanyard? in order to win a Windows Vista lanyard).

Quote: "seXXI said:
i never use lanyard of any kind and i use mac. and i don want any of those becouse if i wear one i will look like a computer freak and some guy will definitely gimme a kick

so wear them yourself smart guy"

LoL :-D

Maybe he should moderate his comments. Or maybe he does moderate them, and found these comments as funny as I did.

Bootable USB BartPE

As part of my (never ending, it seems) quest to upgrade my HDD to a 160GB SATA, and install Vista, I recently struggled through booting to a USB stick.

The reason being: If I have an internal HDD in my M400 (the current 80GB) and a secondary HDD in the multi-bay (the new 160GB) I have no CD-Rom capability, which I'll need to boot BartPE and GHOST. I wanted to GHOST from my 80GB to the 160GB so I can keep working, while using the 80GB to try out Vista.

So after much trial and error I followed the following process:
1. Format the USB stick with the HPUSBFW utility (which HP have removed from their download site, but I managed to find here.)
2. Run pe2usb.cmd -f F: to build a BartPE installation on the USB disk (where F: is the drive letter of the USB disk).
3. Change the M400 BIOS setting to boot to USB first. Surprisingly enough this is done through a Windows Control Panel applet. Quite nice really.

So after getting this to work, I can now boot to my 512MB USB key, which runs BartPE and GHOST. So I GHOSTed my HDD (disk-to-disk) and set about changing the drives around, so the 160GB was internal, and what'dya know I ran into another snag.

The 80GB drive is held in a Toshiba drive case, presumably to protect from vibrations etc, and there's a sticker on it which warns against removing the drive from the case. There's only four screws holding the drive into the case, so I thought "no worries" I'll just remove the disk and swap them over. That would have been easy had I not cross-threaded one of the screws when I tried to get it out :-(

I'm now in the search of a suitable tool to remove the offending screw, and/or a Toshiba disk case to store the 2nd HDD in. I'm sure I'll get Vista running one day...

Firefox 2.0

I've been using Firefox as my primary browser (again) for a few months now, and am quite impressed with it. I downloaded Firefox 2.0 today and it looks really nice so far. I like the Ctrl-ScrollWheel zoom feature, as I use that in Office products quite a lot. It's hot on the heels of the IE7 release, which is no coincidence I'm sure.

Update: OK, so I'm less sold on Firefox 2.0 after a few days serious use. It seems to have a few bugs still. The firefox.exe task seems to run as a zombie after shutdown, meaning you can't start Firefox again until you kill it. Not good. Others are finding similar problems, it seems.