James Moody: Geek in Paradise

Engadget has posted a story revealing that a number of Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 external drives have been packaged with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus. The affected models were manufactured at a sub-contractor in China. Amazingly enough, the virus phones home data it collects to guess where…a server in China!

If you’ve purchased one of these drives, you can call Seagate (for those under a rock, Seagate owns Maxtor) with the serial number of your drive and they will be able to let you know if you have one of the affected models. It really won’t help if you’ve set the virus loose on your system already, but it would be a good idea to give them a call first thing if you purchased it and have yet to hook it up.

Tags: Maxtor Seagate Virus Personal Storage 3200 China

At the WinHEC 2007 conference today, Windows Server “Longhorn” received its official name of Windows Server 2008 and got its very own website in the process. The only surprise being the “2008″ instead of “2007″. The new Server OS will release in 2007, but the official launch will be in 2008, hence the change. Make sure you check out the video of the naming process while you’re there.

Bill Gates also informed the attendees of the conference that Windows Home Server will be available to System Builders so they can build their own solutions based on the OS that is gaining a lot of traction very fast. Hardware vendors such as Lacie, Gateway and Medion also announced their foray into the WHS product arena. Software vendors Lagotek, Riptopia, Sage TV, Diskeeper, Embedded Automation and F-Secure announced solutions geared towards WHS as well. WHS is shaping up to add to Microsoft’s forward momentum in the server market, and provide a substantial boost to Microsoft’s profits for the next fiscal year, which will include Windows Server 2008 as well. Just looking at the vendors above, you can garner that WHS isn’t going to be your average ’server’ by any stretch of the imagination.

You can read more on the WHS announcements at the Windows Home Server Blog.

You can read more on the Windows Server 2008 announcements at the Windows Server Division Blog.

There were, of course, other announcements such as Windows Rally (Connectivity solution), so check out the WinHEC site for links to more announcements from day 1 of the conference.

The venerable “Athlon” moniker is finally being removed from the company’s high end line of processors, to be replaced by “Phenom”. I’ve used Athlon’s since they first came out. I remember the “goldfinger” devices used to overclock the Slot A cartridges the first Athlons were packaged in. Ahhh, the good old days.

The “Athlon” moniker will still be around gracing the packaging of the mid-range processors now. Re-branding the higher end is, I would guess, to skirt around the press the Athlon name received when Intel released it’s Core 2 Duo and began pulling away from the Athlon in performance benchmarks. “Phenom” needs to hit a homerun though to avoid falling into the same trap, imho.

Included in the changes will be a new naming convention for the AMD processors. AMD will be moving towards a shorter naming convention as well, saving costs on ink in the process. We all know how much ink costs these days.

It’s about time for me to get a new machine as my Athlon 3500+ has served me well over the last few years. $600 to be one of the first to receive a 939-pin Athlon on the island. Seeing as how you can get the same CPU for $120 or so now makes it seem overpriced, but it has served me extremely well since it first released. I have to wait to see how Phenom stacks up against the latest Intel offering before I decide who gets my cash this time around.

I found this info over at DailyTech so props to them.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise late at night to pop in my reader. Seagate has rolled out a DIY (Do-it-yourself) program to recover data from damaged hard drives.

Now, if your drive doesn’t power up, you’re still hosed and have to send it off to a professional recovery service. There are exceptions to this if you’re savvy enough to keep circuit boards from dead drives (as long as that circuit board isn’t dead as well~). This software will recover data caused by corrupted partition tables, formats or deletion of partition tables. The software itself is $129, but you can download a free software package that will test the drive to see if the data is recoverable before you purchase the software using a hexadecimal viewer to view file structure. Pretty damn nifty.

With the way Data recovery prices are nowadays, this will be a welcome addition to any technician’s repertoire (hell, anyone that works on their family’s systems). I pretty much only use Seagate Drives in the systems I build as their drives have been excellent performers, and when one does fail, the RMA process isn’t painful. Being able to perform a service such as this for a client without shipping their drive off will keep more money in their pocket, as well as mine.

Press Release

File Recovery for Windows