You can help the war on Spam – specifically Image Spam.  That’s the spam that shows up in your inbox as graphics instead of text. 

The spammers got wise that all us mail admins were analyzing the text of the messages to help flag the spam.  So they ‘hid’ their pitch inside a picture so we would have a harder time analyzing it.

Grab a drink, warm up your mouse clicking finger, and make your way over to http://spamornot.org/.   Help the cause – rate a hundred images on your next break.

ReadyBoost for Vista is proported to be a way to boost the performance of your Vista system using inexpensive flash cards or other external storage.

I tested it on my HP nc8430 Business Notebook and a 2GB SANDisk SD chip.  My laptop only has 1G of RAM so before adding more RAM, I decided to give ReadyBoost a try.

On the pre-release versions of Vista this enabled easily for me, and seemed to provide a nice performance boost.

It did not get enable very easily with the Final Release, but I did get it on.  I’m still working on benchmarking my system with it on and off.

To get it to work I ended up

1. Formatting the chip as NTFS
2. Removing/reinserting the chip
3. Manually running the speed tests
4. Then enabling ReadyBoost

Without going through all of these steps, in this order, Vista would not just go ahead and use my chip for ReadyBoost. 

Go here to learn all about this feature: http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

To manually run the speed test, run each of the following commands from a Command Prompt run as Administrator:

1. winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive G (“G” being the actual drive letter of your stick)
2. winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive G (“G” being the actual drive letter of your stick)

Will post more on my performance results…

Nice article on fighting spam….

Five Things You Should Know About Fighting Spam

I was recently speaking with a few clients who were both complaining about slow performance under Microsoft Virtual Server.

After reviewing their setups, I realized they missed a few common optimizations.

As with any virtual server enviornment, make sure your host is tweaked and optimized before you blame virtualization.

There are easy best-practices which we have been following for years which are easily the most overlooked items.  You’ll have the fastest Virtual Server if you follow these recommendations.

• Update All Firmware The #1 overlooked item.  And it has the most impact.

  Every device in your Virtual Server that has a firmware needs to be verified that its running that latest (stable) version provided by your vendor.

  If you have a whitebox or other non-big-3 server (HP, IBM, Dell) than this can take some work.

  But get this done.  It helps so much.

• Disable all NIC Offloading Every NIC on your system should be manually verified to disable ALL offload options.  Different adapters call these options by different names, but if the setting has the word “offload” in it, turn it off

  Years ago we found this out by seeing frequently corrupted virtual disk images.  Luckily Microsoft Virtual Server has stablized a lot since then and now its just a performance drainer.

  More info and gory details at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888750

• Use SCSI virtual disks instead of IDE Without a lot of tech mumbo, IDE virtual disks should never be used.  They are slow in the physical world and guess what?  They are slow in the virtual world too   Stick with SCSI.

  If you’ve added your disks as IDE already, the following steps should get you converted:

  • add the virtual SCSI adapter to your VM and restart it
  • reinstall the VM Extensions and make sure the Virtual SCSI adapter is there
  • reboot the VM again to be safe
  • remove the existing IDE Virtual disk and readd it as a SCSI disk
• Run the latest versionThis goes without saying, but no list would be complete without it.  Run the latest version of Virtual Server.  We’re running the latest beta at all our clients with no ill-effect.  If you’re not that brave, than run the latest release.  Virtualization is “new” technology that is moving quickly.  It really helps to stay up to date.

I’ve been looking for a way to convert images made for VMWare over to Microsoft Virtual Server or Virtual PC.  I finally found something: http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry8.aspx.  Sweet!

One caveat – this doesn’t work with Linux VMWare images.  Darn.

Please Microsoft, release the Linux compatible version of Virtual Server!!  I’m running the beta but until its released, none of the linux folks will take Virtual Server seriously