After having read about the goddam awful handling of a student that hacked a university system, I’d felt that a little story could help tip these people off on how to handle students without necessarily breaking them and destroying their future. Story Time Kid sits in his dorm room, bored out of his skull trying [...]

Today I helped a neighbor recover data from his laptop. It wouldn’t boot and it ran (or failed to run) Windows XP. Checking it with a low level utility showed that the MBR and partition table were shot. Now, Windows repair didn’t find the drive. Fixmbr didn’t fix the MBR. Fixboot didn’t fix the boot. [...]

As I already mentioned, MSDN didn’t work. Talked to a “concierge” who told me it was an emergency maintenance gone wrong, that made downloads impossible. Now, I can’t even log on to the service. Funny, but if you try to go to the download areas, you start bouncing between msdn.microsoft.com and login.live.com. Back and forth, [...]

Had to install a Swedish XP under Parallels to test my product. I have MSDN Pro subscription, including operating systems, so I checked out my CDs and DVDs. No Swedish. Ok, so logon to MSDN Site for downloads. Um. The download link is greyed out for all products, with no explanation. All other links work. [...]