Random notes
Cisco Linksys SPA941 sound quality issues - kind of a robotic voice
The other day I received interesting problem description: "I can hear robotic voice in my phone during conversation". Only few VoIP phones were affected by this issue and all of them were LinkSys SPA941. The problem seems to be present in the older version of the phone http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+SPA-841+Sound+Quality and it’s still pretty the same.
When the Phone network is flooded with broadcast traffic these phones are no longer usable. The only option is to isolate the VoIP traffic or limit the broadcast traffic if possible. Both of which are good ideasJ
How to play CyberDogs (old DOS game) on Windows 7
I used to play this game with my brother when I was young. Would you believe it 607KB and its just awesome game!
So to answer the question, the short one: use DOSBox:)
Long answer:
- Download and unzip Cyber Dogs (freeware) - http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/cyberdogs/
- Download and install DOSBox http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
- Download some FrontEnd for DOSBox (if you don't want to type any single command) for instance this one http://www.progammax.webs.com/
- Browse to dogs.exe
Windows Server 8 Developer Preview, What's new in Hyper-V 3.0
There are some nice information coming from the Windows BUILD conference. While the videos and presentations are not yet published at http://channel9.msdn.com/events/BUILD/BUILD2011 some blogger are posting as much info as possible:) At the moment, the best what you can get is http://www.aidanfinn.com/ and http://www.hyper-v.nu/.
I have find some features that aren't mentioned yet:
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Second Level Paging (Hypervisor swapping)
I've got no idea how it's implemented, but one should remember the following blog posts:
"With Second Level Paging, memory assigned to a virtual machine can be backed by memory or by disk. The result is that Second Level Paging creates issues that are unique to a virtualized environment. When the system is oversubscribed, the virtualization layer can and will blindly and randomly swap out memory that the guest is holding even critical sections that the guest kernel is specifically holding in memory for performance reasons." [Jeff Woolsey, http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/05/20/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-5.aspx]
I would say, they have implemented second level paging that is OS aware - using integration services and for guests that are not hypervisor aware, they don't care. Or VMware was right http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2011/02/hypervisor-memory-management-done-right.html?:)
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Online snapshot merging
One of the new yet unmentioned features is online snapshot merging. Now you can create snapshots, delete them and merging is on-the-fly with no need to shutdown the VM. It works with VHD and VHDX.
Difference between Dell OptiPlex 980 MT and Optiplex 990 MT
Look inside the case of Dell OptiPlex 980 MT vs OptiPlex 990 MT
"New is always better" Barney Stinson.
OptiPlex 980MT
OptiPlex 990MT
New one is missing this big passive cooler. As far as I can say its not louder or I can't hear a difference.
VMM 2008 R2 SP1: Error 3140 when trying to offilne P2V WS2008R2
I just want to share some info from our recent P2V migration.
We have received 3140 error during offline P2V of Windows Server 2008 R2 (or Windows 7) using Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1.
The progress bar stuck at 40% (step 1.3.1) with error 3140 without any description in VMM. When googling I've found the following link: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/virtualmachinemgrp2vv2v/thread/83cf649a-686a-4ecc-9aa0-bf005c7f9f53 . Per instructions I sent an email to Mike Briggs. However, Mike is no longer with the VMM Team but he go through the debug logs for me and find out that the final failure is "3140/80990C44" which translates to NETLOG_MSG_SHUTDOWN.
Finally i give up and ask Microsoft PSS for support, surprisingly the bug is quite simple: The boot image that VMM is using for offline conversion cannot fit into the 100MB default (classic install) system partiton [just a side note: the system partition is used for booting the system = boot sector, bootmgr, while the Boot partition contains Windows files]. In order to fix the issue:
- Open an elevated command prompt and run : bcdboot c:\windows /s c:
- This will copy the required boot files to the C drive. Notice the hidden boot folder on the root of the C drive and also the bootmgr file.
- Set the C drive as active : You can do this from disk management or using diskpart
- Reboot the server
- Open disk management and make sure the C drive is marked as SYSTEM.
- Try the P2V process again and this time it should work fine