Purchased E6400 (2.8 CPU, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M) early 2009, did a clean install of Windows XP 64 bit and had a rather pleasant 8-9 months: have a docking station (E series) with two monitors at home and at work and didn’t have any issues with the machine.

In October 2009 after playing with Windows 7 inside VMs and on my home PC, decided to upgrade my laptop (Win 7 64 bit). Even purchased SSD for the occasion . Installation went great and first impressions were very positive. Everything ran great and fast (and I run a lot of software at the same time) until I put the laptop into the docking station. After 5-10 minutes of any moderate activity my computer would lock up: Task Manager would show 100% utilization but not pointing to any specific process. Hard rebooting and taking it out of the docking station seemed to eliminate the issue. After a few failed attempts to resolve the issue (including having Dell replace the docking station, updating bios and all the drivers, etc), I gave up using the docking station and was successfully using my laptop without any performance issues until mid-January. In mid-January similar lock up issues started happening again. Because it started happening outside of the dock I thought that Windows 7/drivers are at fault and opened a case with Microsoft. They had me run some tests, do a few memory dumps and suggested that the issue is caused by the video card driver and that I should uninstall and just use the one that came with Windows 7. Followed their directions but that didn’t help. At that point I decided to take the plunge and do a full reinstall hoping that clean install + latest drivers will eliminate the issue.

Last weekend I updated the bios to the latest A20, did a clean install of Windows 7 64 bit and all the drivers available on Dell’s site. Came in on Monday hoping to finally be able to use my two monitors but after 10 minutes in the docking station the same problem occurred. Very frustrated and starting to go a bit nuts, I asked our IT guy to contact Dell and demand a replacement unit. He did something better than contacting Dell (which is becoming a very frustrating experience): he found a forum post that described the problem I’ve been experiencing and proposed a few solutions. His google-foo was better than mine because there is a discussion on Dell’s forum going back to 2008 with people having this problem and I didn’t find it in October.

You should read this post as it provides a LOT of detail of why this is happening and suggestions on how Dell should address it.

Quick overview: laptop overheats and that throttles down the CPU, making a 2.8 machine run at 700 or lower which causes 100% utilization and all the symptoms that I experienced. On my laptop it seems that the GPU (video card) is the one causing the issue: it constantly runs at about 55 C, but as soon I put it into the docking station temperature jumps to 70+ C and that is when all the fun starts.

It is amazing that after 16 pages of people documenting their issues related to this and Dell releasing at least 6 BIOS updates since the first report, this issues is still not resolved – according to workarounds people found, it seems like a flaw in the code that determines when the throttling should start.

What is not fully clear to me is why I didn’t experience this with Windows XP. I even opened the case to see if there is a lot of dust which might explain why I started experiencing this 9 months into using the machine, but the case was clean.

Here are ways to deal with this:

• contact dell and have them replace the heat sink and have some high quality thermal paste instead of what they use (this worked for some people, but not for others)
• put a “laptop fan” under the laptop – this worked for me (at least for one full working day)
• there are utilities (RMClock) that allow you to control/disable downclocking (see here for steps), but there are some issues with running them on 64 bit version of Window 7 due to driver signing requirement. People have workarounds posted
• SpeedFan is very useful for monitoring internal temperature of the CPUs/GPU and clock speed

I found this excerpt from tinkerdude’s post very accurately describe my situation over the last few months – I knew there was a problem, but didn’t know what was causing it.

The reason there aren’t more complaints (though many are accumulating these days) is that users who experience this problem simply have no way of knowing what the cause is and are likely to blame the wrong thing (Windows, recently installed software, cooling hardware, etc.). Untold masses may be adversely affected by this problem, but nearly all of them wouldn’t know it because there’s no way for them to tell. Also, the problem is at its worst only when in a docked configuration, which may not be common.

Sometimes I use two cameras at the same event (point-and-shoot and DSLR) and whenever there is a party or vacation with friends, I end up pulling together pictures from all the cameras and combining into a single album. The problem is that the cameras’ date/time are usually not synchronized, especially when traveling to another time zone. There are a few utilities (not easily found) that allow you to update date/time, but Live Photo Gallery is easier/more logical to use.

Pick one or more images and adjust one or more controls – in the screenshot above one of the cameras was incorrectly set to AM, while the event was in the evening. I adjusted AM to PM and it preserved everything else

Rarely used, but very helpful function.

You can read the background here and even watch a video here, but essentially it comes down to the following: As you Alt+Tab, if you pause on any of the items, Alt+Tab switcher window hides and now you are seeing Aero Peek preview of selected window. Along with a number of people I found this confusing – while Alt+Tab was a straight forward and productive experience on XP, on Windows 7 I was having major issues finding the window I wanted on the first try

The easiest way to deal with this is to disable Aero Peek:

1) Go to System Properties (right click "Computer" in an explorer window and choose properties)
2) Click "Advanced System Settings" in the left panel
3) You should be on the Advanced Tab, in the performance section, click "Settings…"
4) Uncheck "Enable Aero Peek"
5) While here consider what other items you can live without – every item you uncheck will lead to better performance. Consider choosing "adjust for best performance" if running on netbook or slower pc – that will remove all the fanciness.

This page goes into detail about options that you should consider unchecking

These providers usually have relationships with major web-based email solutions (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) and also follow the latest standards and best practices for making sure that your email is delivered. Some of the things these companies do is outlined in the DYI portion.

SMTP Relays should not be confused with "email marketing" offerings. Email marketing offerings usually specialize in List Management, opt-in/opt-out, tracking, etc. Most of SMTP Relays do not offer these features.

Here is a list of the providers that I found while researching this:

SMTP Relay Providers

www.unifiedemail.net

• We implemented this for a customer (their choice) and had no issues with it. Implementation was easy, pricing seems reasonable.
• Site is a bit sparse on information but customer reported that phone support was prompt and helpful
• You can find pricing here, but to give an example: with 5K daily limit/75K monthly limit you will pay $99.95/month

www.sailthru.com

• NYC-based, recommended by a few people on nextNY list
• Pricing: $6 per thousand of emails, $60 monthly minimum, discounts after 500K
• Seems to offer a few additional features on top of regular relay: "Triggermail — Our flagship service monitors delivery of transactional email into the user Inbox. If it gets sent we’ll tell you when it was delivered and what happened when it was opened."

www.authsmtp.com

• Another one that was recommended by a few people on nextNY list
• When looking at pricing keep in mind that listed limits are monthly, but the price is yearly. Here are monthly prices to make it easier to compare to other services:
  • $2/month for 1K emails/month
  • $14/month for 10K emails/month
  • $134/month for 100K emails/month
  • $667/month for 500K emails/month
  • goes up from there

www.socketlabs.com/od

• Pricing:
  • $79/month for 25K emails/month
  • $249/month for 100K emails/month
  • $449/month for 500K emails/month
• You do not get a dedicated ip with the first 2 plans. Not sure how big of an issue as long as SocketLabs keeps their IP range clean

www.smtp2go.com

• Looks like they target consumers as their highest plan allows for up to 300 emails a day
• They offer "corporate" product (https://smtpcorp.com/signup/), but it still doesn’t look like an STMP Relay product

www.port25.com

• Pricing is not listed on the site – you have to contact them. Hard to believe that companies still play "personalized quote" game

DYI Approach

Very good post on this topic can be found here: How to ensure your email gets delivered

This covers email marketing techniques, but applies to this discussion as well: How can I prevent my emails being marked as spam or from being blacklisted

Note: This checklist below is a modified version of a post from Oct 2007 by Tobin Schwaiger-Hastanan on Business of Software List.

First steps:

• Make sure your mail host is a valid A record
• Make sure your MX record is set to the full host name of your mail host (which is set up as a A record)
• Make sure you can do a reverse lookup of your mail hosts IP address.  (This will be important for setting up SPF/Sender ID records)
• Set up SPF/SenderID information as a TXT record. (www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch9/spf.html)

Once above is configured

• Verify DNS/MX records using http://www.dnsstuff.com/. Make sure there are no warnings or errors before contacting support for any of the email services. Yahoo has a policy of not reviewing changes for 6 months after the last request is made
• Test your emails with Spam Assassin.  Send yourself an email from your web application and copy the raw message (including headers) to a text file and run it against spam assassin’s command line test. The lower the score the better.  A score of 5 or more means that your email will most likely get filtered out by any spam filter.  I’ve also been told that anything 3 or higher is bad.
• Once you’ve tested out your emails in spam assassin, try testing it out across other services.  I initially was using Email Reach (www.emailreach.com). I think it’s a great service, but it’s still a young/small company. So if you find issues/bugs with their product, you will need to have patience with their customer service.  It’s a cheap product for what it does.  It will test delivery of your email to a large list of email providers, ISPs, and even email clients.

Tips

• If you are sending plain text emails, make sure you have the charset in the Content-Type header set to ISO-8859-1. When I changed the charset to ISO-8859-1, gmail was no longer delivering my emails to the spam folder.  However hotmail and yahoo still were.
• Yahoo! Mail allows you to view the headers of incoming emails.  You can see items they’ve added to the header.  Review them
• Visit http://postmaster.hotmail.com and review their policies and troubleshooting guides. If you adhere to their rules, try to contact them
• Implement DomainKeys on your mail server.  This is basically a crypto key that is stored in a DNS TXT record, and some work done on your mail server to get it to sign outgoing mail.

Installation:

• Was installing on the clean disk (just bought SSD specifically for reinstall)
• I was able to browse Internet 22 minutes after seeing “starting setup” screen — very impressive
• Over impression: installation is “pretty” and requires a lot less user involvement — i think you only need to select the following: time zone, home or work network, configure automatic updates
• Devices/Drivers — no warning flags in device manager. It even includes ATI Radeon X1950 GT support — looks like it is MS’s driver. ATI’s support page that Windows 7 is not supported yet, but users are welcome to install Vista drivers — I decided against it for now as my resolution is recognized and everything looks great.

First Impressions

• Feels snappy, very different from first impression of Vista
• I use Paint quite a bit for screen captures and Windows 7 Pain is significantly improved. There is also “snipping tool”, but it lacks rectangle tool to be useful
• Ships with Sync Center — looks like it is based on PowerToy Sync
• Screen saver is not enabled by default and selection is pretty much the same from Windows 95 times
• Backup allows Image Backup as well as “windows chooses which files should be backed up” and “you choose”

Next steps is to install all the soft that I normally use at home. Let’s see how that goes.

• Word 2007 — makes picture a bit blurry when adding a border. Works as I would expect it to work if you save in DOC compatibility mode
• Outlook 2007 — makes pasted picture a bit blurry even without adding border (I tried all the options under Paste Special with the same result)

On the left is DOCX with the same image pasted twice and then I added border to the top image. On the right is the DOCX saved as DOC — as soon as I saved it into DOC format, image became clear again. Bizarre…

2010/03/09 Update:

After receiving a comment from Jerseydude I wanted to make sure that zoom is not the culprit and by accident figured out what is causing this: it is NOT the zoom, it is the width of the border… what’s even more strange is that I don’t understand the logic:

• 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.75, 3, 3.25pt are the ONLY ones that maintain clear view.
• All others that i tried (from .25 to 4) produce fuzzy

• RoboForm didn’t work right — didn’t look like it was notified about current location so it didn’t show proper login option. RoboForm is essential to my productivity and even if issues were limited to it only I would downgrade as well.
• It looked like there is an issue with keystrokes and mouse clicks — in both search and location box I would type a word and sometimes only half of the word would show up. Same with Page Down/Up
• Clicking on the tab would not always switch to that tab
• Ctrl+R or F5 sometimes would not refresh the page until clicking within the page

Luckily downgrading is easy: download the latest 3.0.x version here

A friend and colleague Bora reported having issues with 3.5 on OSX as well.

http://www.simple-talk.com/exchange/exchange-articles/windows-server-virtualisation-hyper-v,-an-introduction/

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was released in the summer of 2008 and is Microsoft first real hypervisor virtualization solution. It is not an emulated environment like Virtual Server or Virtual PC, but as a hypervisor solution it “sits” between the hardware and the Operating System. With the Integration Components installed you can fully use the functionality offered by Hyper-V. You have to secure the Parent Partition as much as possible to prevent compromising the complete system.

In the next articles I will talk more about the Hyper-V best practices, deploying Virtual Machines, using the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 and the “high availability” options and why these aren’t really high available in the current release of Hyper-V.

• available 24×7, minimal hold time
• ability to setup SOP (standard operating procedure) of what needs to happen if anything goes down
• escalation procedure — try to restart service, clean this and if that doesn’t work only then call one of predefined phone numbers
• etc

There are monitoring tools that are available for EC2 specifically (see my previous post here) or just standard networking tools (Nagios, Spiceworks, etc) but most of them still require us to hire staff to react to unexpected events

I looked into GoGrid and while it has a potential, it is not suitable for us just yet.

Positives:

• 24×7 support — don’t know what it means. My expectation is outlined above
• Graphical interface — while I didn’t like the design, it was user friendly
• Free Load Balancer
• Free Public IPs
• Windows 2008 Images

Negatives:

• Cannot use my own image, cannot backup/clone an image that I setup within GoGrid — that pretty much explains why they don’t have auto scaling (next bullet point)
• No auto scaling (roadmap)
• Even if machine is “off” — they still charge you money as if it was ON. On their roadmap.
• Only 4GB machine gets its own single Xeon core (equivalent to P4 2.0 chip). Lower RAM images get fractions.
• No multi-core support
• While their Cloud Storage pricing is inline with Amazon, Data Transfer is $.50/GB Vs Amazon’s $.17/GB for first 10 and then goes down from there. Significant difference
• Amazon offers CDN and GoGrid doesn’t
• Amazon offers multiple datacenters and GoGrid doesn’t

http://www.designcommission.com/shop/iphone-stencil-kit/

courtesy of: http://konigi.com/notebook/latest