That should sort it for you!

Installed Fedora (FC8) and puzzled to how to get it to see more than 3GB Ram? I was!

admin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:30:00 +0000

Well, just finished building a MySQL server for one of my customers, reasonable spec, Dell PowerEdge Server, 6GB Ram, 2 Intel Xeons, Fast Disks, should do the job great! Well, it would if it could see more than 3GB Ram!

After much googleing… and getting nowhere - here’s what i found:

Install the PAE version of the Kernel:

“yum install kernel-PAE”

Cool. Now get Fedora to actually use that kernel on the next rebbot:

“vi /etc/grub.conf”

Look for the line “default=1″ Then change that to the corresponding kernel image you wanna load. Im my case it was title Fedora (2.6.24.3-34.fc8PAE), it was the first in the list, so I changed the default to:

“default=0″

:wq!

Then a quick “shutdown -r now”

when its back up you can do a quick “cat /etc/meminfo” to see how much ram the os can now see and use.

On this server i was using Fedora Core 8 (FC8) and think this aplies to most newer linux distro’s. If you find that there isn’t a “kernel-pae” package to install try “kernel-smp”, woked on one of my older Fedora Core 4 servers i just chucked some more ram into. Good luck!

How to Downgrade Windows XP Professional to Windows XP Home!

admin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:54:58 +0000

Well, all us geeks have been there and done that FCKGW XP Pro Key thing, and then had to change our mobile number when the XP service pack came out.

After many years of seeking a solution, Ive finally found one that works!!!

OK, so youve got a mates/customers computer, its got an XP home COA stuck on it side, cool, you can dig out your XP home OEM CD and get on with doing a repair install - the fixer of all XP wierdness… well thats the theory.

So you boot of your CD, hit enter, the chose “Repair” to to an inplace upgrade, keeping all their settings ‘n stuff. WHAT! waddya mean it doesnt setect the install? WTF? oh bugger, its got XP Pro on it… and you can’t “downgrade” XP Pro to XP Home. What now? another Dodgy Key? Some other Bios Crack to fudge it? Why ITs got a LEgit Sticker on the Side. Well you could back up their 1.7 terrabyte of porn wares and mp3’s and do a clean install… feck that! you need XP Mode Switch from filewalker.de!

This cool utility allows you so fool XP into thinking its whatever version you like! So boot back up into XP PRo, Run modeswitch, select XP home, and reboot. Then Shutdown Windows, boot again from your XP Home Oem CD and this time when you goto do a repair install you can see the installation in the list - away you go! XP repaird, using the legit key on the side of the PC!

Welcome to my random thoughs and discoveries, spilled here for your plundering!

admin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:07:18 +0000

Well, my first post, and one of the most useful time saving hacks that I have **EVER** found. As you will get to know, I run a small computer repair shop in Chorley Lancashire in the UK. Many many times per week we get customers bringing in their PC’s to be “fixed” the main problem always being the there just rammed with spyware, malware, virus’s and other windows killing faults. Cool, just drag out Spybot, AVG, a good dose of MSConfig and away we go! Well most of the time. Then there are the ones that wont boot any more, same old fixes apply, infact you could get a monkey to fix half of the PC’s, Follow these simple steps, Chkdsk, Boot from AVG Rescue CD and do a full scan, Repair Install of Windows, once in Windows run Spybot, Clean AVG Install, Remove anything that didnt ship from Microsoft from starting up using Msconfig, then your’e done - 99% of faults cured! Well - its not qute as simple as that as you will see as you browse round this site - the first problem i’m going to ramble/waffle about is what to do when the customers friends, mothers, uncles, cousins mate had a go at repairing it a while back and installed XP Pro with the world famous FCKGW cd Key!