Ever wonder why there’s no option anywhere in the Windows Vista Control Panel to disable hibernation?  Me too.  If you want to disable hibernation support permanently so that Windows isn’t storing hiberfile.sys the size of your physical memory on your system drive, go to a command prompt and run the following command:

powercfg –h off

This will turn off hibernation support and free up a few GB’s of space on your system drive.  The actual amount of space savings should be equal to the amount of physical memory in your system.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m always on the hunt for awesome admin tools.  Today I read a post on 4sysops.com about FlexTK Express.  This tool allows you to perform many different file management operations like disk analysis, batch copying, searching based on multiple criteria, duplicate searching, and a whole lot more.  I don’t spend a lot of my time managing files but I do occasionally go on a file organization/cleanup rampage and this tool will definitely come in handy.  I tested it out briefly and my initial impressions of it are fantastic.  The interface is lightning fast, and the searching and the disk usage analyzer were quick.  If you perform a lot of manual file operations I suggest you try out FlexTK Express.

I’ve installed service pack 6 on the BES and everything seems to be running like a champ.  The upgrade went smoothly without problems, and was pretty speedy to install. The HTML mail on the Blackberry is surprisingly fantastic. Downloading images is quick and renders quite well on the Blackberry. It’s nice to have rich text and images instead of plain old stinky text and overly long web addresses that fill the entire screen.

A giant fly is getting ready to infiltrate the building across the street.

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last few days, it’s that setting your SATA controller to standard IDE mode in the BIOS is the best way to go, unless there’s some specific reason that you need to run it in AHCI mode.  Setting it to AHCI mode just because you can is crazy.  It’s much more hassle than it’s worth.  Case in point:  I had set up a machine, everything was working fine.  After converting the two SATA disks to Dynamic disks in Windows Server 2003 x64, and setting the volume up as a mirror, the system now hangs at the BIOS.  I figured it was a problem with one of the drives, so I replaced the suspect drive, converted it to Dynamic, created the mirror, and again it hangs at the BIOS.  Well screw it.  I’ve switched it to IDE mode and I’m loading Windows from scratch so I don’t have to deal with the headache that is AHCI.

Following in the foot steps of this fellow’s Rogers post regarding their mobile phone sector, I’m about to go off on a little rant of my own about their cable TV.  Before I start, I have to note that I live in a town house condo where it’s not permitted to have satellites on the roof, otherwise I would have switched a long time ago.  I recently purchased an HDTV which I’ve been quite happy with so far.  The store I bought it from offered some special from Rogers that if I paid $20 when I bought the TV, I could have a Rogers HD terminal for 9 months free.  $20 for 9 months of HD terminal rental is pretty good, of course, if the HD terminal that I received last night didn’t suck.  I don’t have an HD plan so basically all I get is some HD channels that, at least right now, are just streaming in SD feeds anyway.  I’m going to have to look into pricing to get some actual HD channels, and maybe that will help sway my opinion.  The only channel I could find last night that actually came in HD was CNNHD, which half the time is also an SD feed with bars on the side that say “CNNHD”.  Another beef I have is with the program guide.  Why does it still look the same as it did 8 years ago?  It’s still the same ugly colours (which by the way there are only 2 of them), and even on the HD terminal, the guide and menus are still low resolution, so they’re just a giant blurry mess on the HDTV.  And, I don’t know if this is standard with digital terminals or not, but it’s only 1080i.  I have another question, why don’t the Rogers terminals at least highlight the channels that I don’t subscribe to in a different colour?  I’m flipping through the guide, see something I want to watch, select it, and then it tells me that I haven’t subscribed to that channel.  Unless they step it up a bit, I probably won’t be keeping the HD terminal after 9 months as it just doesn’t seem worth the ridiculous $13 a month extra, which doesn’t even include the HD programming.

Yes I know that “de-uglified” is not a real word.  If looking at that horrible green default Vista logon screen makes you want to puke, Stardock has the remedy.  LogonStudio Vista allows you to set any jpg, png, or bmp image as the background for the logon screen on your Vista computer.  It’s a free download, so give it a try.  Note that the screenshot on their page is from LogonStudio XP, which is why it has the fancy looking login box.  The Vista version only allows you to change the background image.