I just upgraded my work laptop from Windows XP to Windows Vista. As XP doesn’t support SATA hard drives natively I had changed the drive to “compatibility mode” in the BIOS – thus making it look like a “normal” IDE disk. This made it work, but with a slight performance penalty.

However… Before installing Vista I forgot to change the setting back.

“No problem!” I thought. “I’ll just change it now, Windows will see a new drive controller, and I’ll be back in business.”

Great thought. Only it didn’t work. The machine starts to boot, and then crashes out to the good ol’ Blue Screen of Death. It seems that at install time, Vista disables the drivers that it doesn’t actually need to boot the system up. This is great, unless you do something like this. It could also happen if, for example, you buy a new machine and use Ghost or True Image to clone the disk into the new machine. (Okay, so if you’re running Vista it’s most likely to be on a SATA disk already, but it could happen!)

Turns out there is an easy solution:

• Change the drive setting to compatibility mode.
• Boot up and log in.
• Run regedit.
• Look for HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci.
• Change the value of the “Start” entry to “0″ (zero).
• Close regedit and reboot.
• Change the BIOS setting back to native AHCI.

Of course, your milage may vary, and I recommend taking a backup of the registry key before making changes to it. While you’re at it, clone the entire disk, just in case. And if you break it, congratulations, you now own both pieces.

The web site has been too stable for too long, and we just can’t have that. In the name of keeping things interesting (for me!) I have moved all the content into a Google site, part of the hosted application suite. Too good – no more server maintenance for me to do!

I’ve also moved all the photos from the old site over to SmugMug, so some posts with embedded pics might not display correctly. I’ll fix those as I get around to it.

Over the last couple of days I’d noticed that my Treo 750 kept turning itself on. Switch it off, it comes back straight away. Idle timeout, it turns right back on. It was starting to drive me nuts.

Stumbled over the solution…

In preparation for a couple of days of travelling, I turned down the brightness on the display of my Treo 750 to conserve battery life while reading ebooks on the plane. It turns out that there is a known bug whereby if you turn the brightness down to past 40% it will constantly turn on. Nice way to save power!

The solution is simple – turn the brightness back up.

When I was teaching a course back in April I fell in love with the “Presenter view” in PowerPoint. For those who haven’t see it, it allows for the slides to be displayed on a projector while your laptop screen shows a smaller version along with the speaker notes and other information. Very handy!

Back then I was running Office 2007 on Windows XP, and all was good. Since then I have upgraded my laptop to run Windows Vista. When I started teaching a class yesterday I found that the presenter view was fine except for the slides appearing as a black square. Not handy!

After some fiddling around I discovered the cause today: Go into the slideshow options and turn off hardware acceleration. I guess the nVidia drivers for Vista aren’t quite as robust as they should be.

As anyone who knows me already knows, I’ve been a PalmOS user since way back in the days of the original Pilot. Twice now I have attempted to make the switch to Windows Mobile, but I just can’t do it.

The first attempt was a few years back when the XDA II mini was released. At the time I was looking for a single device that would mean I didn’t have to carry both a phone and my PDA. The earlier models were just too big for my liking. The XDA II mini was about right size.

However, it was totally unreliable. I’d always be performing a soft reset, often more than once a day. To me it just wasn’t stable enough to use as a phone.

I had the opportunity to change over to a Treo 650. I’ve read a lot of reports damning the Treo for having a buggy and unreliable operating system, but I’ve never seen it. It’s certainly a lot more reliable than the XDA.

Now I’ve tried again, by moving to a Treo 750. Instead of PalmOS, this one runs Windows Mobile 5. The main reason for the change here was to support my employer’s choice of email platform – they are a legacy Blackberry shop but are trying to move to native Exchange push mail. And it works pretty well for that.

Palm have done a pretty good job with this phone. They have taken the basically pen driven Windows Mobile, and made it almost able to be totally driven with one hand. The phone experience is much better than it was with the XDA. It’s not as "phone-ish" as the 650, but it’s not bad.

However, it’s slow, unresponsive, and unreliable.

Even with no third party applications installed it needs to be soft reset on a regular basis. There is some strange problem where it just stops giving alerts for events like an incoming phone call. Useful. They have released an update for the AT&T branded version, but not for the one I have yet.

It’s not all bad. The 3G support is pretty good. Web browsing is actually usable. But I’m sad to say that I have reverted to carrying two devices: my old Treo 650 as a phone, and the 750 as an email device.

So much for convergence. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the production version of the open phone coming from OpenMoko will actually be usable. If not, at least I can hack it.

Since moving our mail services over to Google’s hosted applications (Google Apps For Your Domain), I’ve been starting to use the calendar, as it works pretty well and has very good integration with GMail. The only issue has been having to double enter everything: once into Google, and then again into my PDA of choice, a Palm Treo 650.

A little while ago, I came across this blog entry at Engtech, describing how to use a service called ScheduleWorld to act as a central agent between Google, Outlook, and a bunch of other apps.

"Hooray!" I thought. I rushed over and signed up, and set about configuring the service to talk to my online calendar. To my dismay, there were some differences in the way Google handles their hosted domain and their normal accounts, which prevented the service from working.

The great news is that Mark Swanson, the top bloke behind ScheduleWorld, has been working flat out and now has support for hosted calendars. After a bit of mucking around I’ve got it all working: Once an hour, my local copy of Outlook is synced with ScheduleWorld, which in turn is kept in sync with Google. It’s all two-way, so a change made anywhere is replicated to the other points. Very cool!

For those who don’t know, our preferred instant messaging client is Google Talk, using our normal email addresses via Google’s hosted application service. However, not everyone has a Google (or Gmail) account.

Fear not, as we have now "federated" the stocksfamily.org chat service, which means we should be contactable by pretty much anyone with a compatible client, such as Gizmo.

Still… we look forward to the days when the madness ends and all the instant message network operators start using Jabber.