Tag: upgrade

By Darwin Mach on News, Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged , , , , , , , , , , with 31 Comments

Upgrade Your Linksys Router, Literally!

Cisco-Linksys decided to release new routers for their home routers: the “Valet” series and the “E” series. After doing some research, they’re actually just a re-branding of the older models. The only difference is that the “E” series now have double the amount of NVRAM available. In this article, we’ll be looking at the new E2000 and E3000 routers.

The E2000 is actually the WRT320N with a working reset button and E3000 is the new WRT610N v2. But that doesn’t that mean you have to ditch your current router if you own one of these already, especially just to get the extra 32k of NVRAM. You can actually update the CFE of the older model and transform your WRT320N or WRT610N v2 into the E2000 or E3000 respectively. The CFE is basically the BIOS of the router.

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By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips tagged , , , - Leave a comment

Clean Installation w/ Windows Upgrade Keys

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.