Darwin Mach

Seems like one of those really annoying things out there is deploying an installation of Adobe Acrobat Pro with all (or most) of the updates at once. Of course, this pertains to the Windows version. After doing some intense research and looking through the bits and pieces if suggestions that are out there, I found a much easier way to integrate all the updates into one package.

This one is tricky, you can’t just use the traditional method of running msiexec with the /p parameter and patch over the MSI. What makes it worse is that certain updates can’t be slip streamed or they will prevent future updates from being applied. One can only imagine the headaches that can come out of trying to deploy this without having to install the numerous patches after.
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So I picked up a new Lexar Jump Drive Secure II Plus (32GB to be exact)… And ran into some serious problems with it.

First, lets have a look at its design:

Do you see that indicator on the front? Yes, that’s right… It’s a meter that shows the disk usage. The problem is that this meter must function in order for the flash drive to initialize and be readable to the operating system. Through some trial and major error, I found out it reads the first available FAT32 or NTFS partition. If one doesn’t exist, the flash drive simply keeps rebooting itself, rendering it completely unusable unless you can get it to create partition before it shuts itself down again. So if you plan on reformatting this drive, make sure you don’t delete partitions! Or, if you do, make sure you immediately create one afterwards.

Bad bad! Shame on you, Lexar…

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Hello everyone.

Today, I bring to you… How to overclock the Nokia N900! Since the first sighting of an overclocked Cortex-A8 processor has appeared, the folks at maemo.org have managed to flash the N900 with customized kernels in order to allow the CPU to be overclocked up to 1.2GHz (DSP up to 500MHz)! But due to liability concerns, only the kernel images of up to 930MHz have been posted.

Technically, the battery life would be less, but the N900 dynamically scales the CPU speed down to 250MHz when it is idle. The custom kernel allows it to go down to 125MHz.

Personally, I have flashed the 850MHz / 450MHz DSP kernel via XTerminal and the phone is definitely a lot snappier & responsive. So far, it’s been stable for me. As with any overclocking, you are on your own and accept the fact that you may cause hardware damage. In no way is anyone liable for such modifications. Period. You have been warned.

The kernels require N900 firmware PR1.1 or greater to run. However, since PR1.2 is coming soon, I highly recommend you restore the stock kernel before upgrading to the newest firmware or you may see some problems. As a side note, these customized kernel images were based off of PR1.1.1 and will almost definitely be incompatible with PR1.2. So once the new firmware has been released, WAIT for a new version of the custom kernels!

If you’re still interested, here’s a link to the guide that jakiman (thanks!) over @ maemo.org has put together: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=595582&postcount=774

Props to lehto and titan @ maemo.org for their work in creating these wonderful mods. I will update you guys if anything interesting shows up with the overclocking between now and PR1.2.

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Hello all!

Just an update / followup to my previous post about the M6400 – you should be able to use the M6500′s audio and touchpad drivers (they’re newer, for the same hardware).

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Smile

You can use an Vista or Windows 7 upgrade key to do a clean install of their respective operating systems.

How? Do a clean install of Windows. Then run the installer (from the DVD) inside the unactivated copy of Windows you just installed to “upgrade”. Your installation is now marked as an upgrade and you can activate Windows with your upgrade key. Make sure you pick the same version of Windows & architecture (x86 vs x64) you are licensed for both times.

What this means for you? You never have to pay full price for Windows, unless of course, if you can’t wait for the second install.

Additional tip: Create a bootable USB flash drive (at least 4GB) from the installation DVD and use that instead. Each install can then be done in about 10-15 minutes since it’s not using the optical media.

Cheers.

EDIT: Update with an alternative method (seems to be more reliable to me).

Install Windows as described above (the first time).

Open the registry editor and change the “MediaBootInstall” DWORD value in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE\ from 1 to 0.

Open an administrative command prompt and run the command “slmgr/rearm”.

Reboot, then enter your key from the Computer Properties and activate.

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