From a post on the microsoft public 64bit newsgroup today, we have a suggestion for how to get all four buttons of your Kensington Expert Mouse to work in XP Professional x64 Edition. I don't use a Kensington, but I thought it was both useful for others who may, but also for those looking for reasonable workarounds.
- install Microsoft IntelliPoint 6.1 driver for XP 64-bit, and tell it
you have a Microsoft Trackball Optical model (may also work with other
selection)
- install free X-Mouse Button Control tool(http://www.highrez.co.uk/
downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm) which allows remapping of Expert
Mouse buttons
- The top-left Expert Mouse button is seen by X-Mouse Button Control as
the middle button, and the top-right Expert Mouse button is seem as
the left x button.
Nice suggestion, I hope it helps some others.
Microsoft has released the Windows Vista versions of PowerShell for download! For those who haven't been paying attention, PowerShell (nee Monad) is the powerful new scripting language and interactive shell that combines the best features of UNIX shells with the power of objects that can be pipelined. For more details, follow the official PowerShell blog. And for the x64 Vista download of PowerShell, go here.
Charlie.
I've long been a believer in keeping my systems as cool as possible. Not because I overclock, but just because it's better for everything and improves the stability of the system. I've discovered, over the years, that cheaping out on cases is a bad idea. But I've often stayed with the official CPU heat sink and fan. Because, frankly, in a good case they've been quite sufficient for my needs. But my main virtualization server, an Asus P5WD2 Premium with a D-930 CPU that has several SATAII hard disks and 6GB of RAM was running seriously hot. The CPU was spending a good deal of time over 60 C, and peaking at nearly 70 C. Not a good thing, and there were other signs of heat related instability. Time to get serious. So, after looking around a bit, I decided to get an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. It was not the most expensive, certainly, but has a good reputation for quiet, and had positive reviews of its efficiency and cooling. So, for $25 or so, I ordered one up from NCIX, my preferred vendor these days.
Installation was a nuisance - that awful Intel mounting system is also used by the AC Freezer 7 Pro, and it's fiddly to get it properly locked in. And the Asus motherboard doesn't give me a whole lot of finger room in this Antec Sonata II case. But after diddling around a bit, I got it. A nice touch is that the AC Freezer 7 Pro comes with thermal goop already applied, making the whole process easier and less messy. And it has you remove the fan and shroud when mounting, which also helps. But I still hate those fiddly little snap in things.
The AC Freezer 7 Pro is an upright cooler with a backwards blowing fan. It is actually quite light in weight, much more so than some of the competitors, which is probably a good thing in terms of the stress placed on the motherboard. In any case, once it was fully installed and plugged in, I closed the case back up and started Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition. What a difference! My idle CPU temperature dropped to 25 degrees C - about 3 degrees over ambient, here. And so far, in 4 days of running it, I've never managed to get the temperature up over 34 degrees C. Now that's just amazing. AND, what's almost as important - it's QUIET. Much quieter than the stock one. Highly recommended, and they make an equivalent one for AMD processors.
Charlie.
UPDATE: During the installation of Centro into three 64-bit virtual machines on this box, with CPU usages running over 80%, and mostly over 95%, for well over an hour, I managed to get the temperature up all the way to 40 degrees! Now THAT's impressive. I'm loving this cooler. I strongly suspect I'd have simply crashed out of the installation without it.
OK, this is going to be cool. I'll bet I can even use it to store programs for my TiVo! The new Windows Home Server is a headless multimedia storage, secure backup, and remote access server that sits in your closet and just does it's job. Quietly and efficiently. Jesse Lewin describes it here. Cool. Yes, I could do the whole thing on my own, but this is simple and well thought out, and I don't have any overhead except power and network. No keyboard, no mouse, no video card.
Charlie.