My love for solid-state drives is SOLID.

I was talking to a colleague today and the topic of solid state drives came up.  He had been considering using a solid-state hard drive, but had heard too many “horror” stories about performance or data loss.  I was surprised to S128hear this.  I have been using solid state drives for well over a year now and have had nothing but success.  When I originally investigated using a solid-state drive, I read many poor reviews on certain models of solid-state drives.  So when I selected my first drive, I was careful to read all of the reviews I could, and check all of the specs.  I settled on a drive from Corsair that had excellent reviews and decent specs for the price.

The first system I built with a solid-state drive was a terminal server for demo purposes.  That was the fastest terminal server I ever worked on.  The server would boot in about 30 seconds, logins took 2 seconds, and applications would launch instantaneously.  From that point forward, I was sold. 

I am currently running a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with a Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG1D solid state hard drive.  I swapped out the standard hard drive that came with the laptop.  It was as simple as Continue reading “My love for solid-state drives is SOLID.”

Windows 7 Idiot Proof?

Today I connected my laptop up to a network, but couldn’t get on the Internet, or anywhere, for that matter.  I was just about to start looking into the issue, when I noticed an exclamation point on the network connection on my screen.  I hovered over it, and it offered to diagnose my problem.  I thought “sure, let’s give that a try”.  I clicked on “Diagnose my problem.” and within a few seconds, Continue reading “Windows 7 Idiot Proof?”

Windows XP virtual on Windows 7

I’ve been running Windows 7 for a couple of months now.  Today I ran across my first application that wouldn’t install on Windows 7.  So I needed a Windows XP virtual machine.  Luckily, as part of Windows 7, Microsoft has planned to include the ability to run a virtual Windows XP OS.  So to get around my predicament, I downloaded a beta of Virtual PC and a Windows XP machine from Microsoft at this website: Continue reading “Windows XP virtual on Windows 7”