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Solved: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

·2609 words·13 mins
My son and I went through rather painful ordeal with this Event 11 that Windows quietly generates. It took us few weeks to fully work out why Windows suddenly started hanging, misbehaving or even crashing with blue screen. Now that I feel it is fully resolved, I thought I’d share my conclusion (and the process) – hopefully it will help few others out there who are struggling with this. Ridiculously, many people are likely affected by this issue, but unless they open Event Viewer and search for this event id 11, they will not realize that hanging is not “normal” behavior, even for Windows! OS seems to silently recover from this problem 10 to 60 seconds later, which is really strange in my book – considering that user isn’t even alerted to this serious atapi error.

Windows 7 and Vista Side by Side Adventures

·327 words·2 mins
It was really straight forward to setup side-by-side Windows 7 and Vista on the same computer, simply put them on separate hard-drives (either physical or separate partitions). Installation was no troubles, and I was happily booting between them back and forth as needed, until I hit a snag last night, MAJOR SNAG!!!

Windows 7 64 Bit – Installation & My First Week

·514 words·3 mins
As you may have heard from me in the past, I was very impressed with Beta and RC version of Win 7, so I was among the many people preordering a copy when special $50 offer was available for a limited time. In fact, local MicroCenter store offered $40 preorder option at the time, so I jumped onboard. I also decided to use this opportunity to migrate to 64 Bit and fully utilize my 4Gb memory (which I think I will upgrade to 6 GB or more in the future).

Windows 7 – only $40 at MicroCenter or $45 at Costco

·212 words·1 min
The title is all you need to know. The special price only at your local MicroCenter store and only for 3 days. Of you don’t have one, check local Costco. Or, I will have a link to Amazon, which promised to deliver on Oct 22, on here later today. Posting from my iPhone, so signing off now.

Your Data Is Safe…… Not!!!

·481 words·3 mins
Poor attempt at a Not joke? I had a rough day, but I want to promptly document it for everyone’s benefit. Our story begins during late night hours, somewhere deep in the tough Ulduar area in World of Warcraft Instance.

The Next Series: Part 1 – Simulated Past

I have decided to have a few posts focused on discussing what’s next in the world of computing. The idea is to look at progression thus far, and see what makes sense to be researched and improved next. This simple formula can be surprisingly effective, due to collective “creationism” that defines computing industry. In other words – we create our future (just like in real life) by focusing research efforts (aka: wishes) on particular things. Thus, we can foresee now what will the future bring, simply by assuming that our research pans out.

Web Services? Cloud Computing? Both? Neither?

An important announcement from Microsoft, something called Mesh, is happening tonight at Midnight eastern time. I am into guessing game, again, mostly because it is fun, but also because in a funny coincidence, I left a rather long rant at Yahoo’s own Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. What started as a short comment, turned into longer and I think worthy read about future of operating environments for us all. Jeremy doesn’t post too much, which is exactly how I prefer it and thus he is on my ‘read-first’ list. Check out my comment right here.

Plaxo – so far so good + Vista in your XP

·386 words·2 mins
I signed up for Plaxo account today, following a little reminder of their existence. I have been watching their progress for a while, and looks like they are on the right path and have stamina needed to survive rough startup waters. The core functionality that they were always about is maintaining a type of ‘self-updating’ Address book on the web. It’s great, because even if your friends change phone numbers (new job, new home, new phone provider, etc.) The idea that if I update my phone number, it will automatically update address book of all my friends. This is something I have been waiting for a while. But I never wanted to work hard to migrate my address book into ‘yet another web site’, but their latest auto-sync with Yahoo! and Google features have finally convinced me.