I was after some software to clone a Windows XP machine onto 20 other identical machines - the main idea was to eliminate the need to install XP from scratch on each machine.

Now before I go further, I should mention that my client owned a volume license for these XP machines.

I did a bit of research (as you will find further on not enough) and came to the conclusion that Norton Ghost would be best for the job. I purchased the applicable license and proceeded to make the image - or in Ghost speak it is called a recovery point. I liked how you were able to make an additional recovery point (during the same process) to an external hard drive.

It was fairly straightforward to do, and the recovery process was no problem either. Worked well.

The only thing I didn’t like was, for what I wanted anyway, was the idea of having to install the product and then make an image (with the software installed) - if you know what I mean.

It so happened the day, after I discovered Clonezilla, an open source imaging program that worked from a Live CD (which I believe is based on a Debian backend).

I decided to give it a go, and found that it required a little more nouse to get it going - by no means rocket science though. It’s just that they were a lot of user options available, and as you were reminded multiple times along the way, if you didn’t understand what was being asked just select the defaults. So I did and it all worked well. A restore was much the same deal.

In summary, both products performed well. The average time to backup was about 15 mins for both Ghost and Clonezilla, with the restore (again with both) being under 5 minutes.

For my particular needs, Clonezilla was the choice of imaging/cloning software.

WTF? I came across this error when I had changed my ‘lab’ PC at work to join a domain - I had just built a server (2003) and wanted to make sure domain logins were working properly. The PC had been working OK up to that time.

What I found was the error was probably related some versions of the Gigabyte Easytune utility which conflicts with other software or the user ‘rights’ on your machine.

Why the cryptic wording of the message? Dunno. Sure enough, once i uninstalled Easytune, all was OK.

When I’m troubleshooting a Windows XP machine, I find myself almost always going into Device Manager to check the status of hardware devices.

But what if you want to find out information about devices that aren’t connected eg USB based devices?

Try this:

1. Go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. In the Environment Variables dialog box, locate the System Variables panel and click New.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES in the Variable Name text box and type 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK twice.
6. To view the nonpresent devices, go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage.
7. Click Device Manager, pull down the View menu, and select Show Hidden Devices.

Do you have a lot of email clogging up your inbox and have trouble organizing it all? I’ve found this great (and best part free) plugin for Outlook that does it all for you.

It’s called Xobni, and works with Outlook 2003/2007 on XP and Vista Operating Systems.

One of the many features it has is when you open an email, the Xobni sidebar will show you all related emails from the sender, how many emails you send receive the them, and even a trend graph of what time you get emails from him/her.

That is one of many. Check out the Youtube video below for a tour of this plugin:

Got a call from mate the other day. His laptop running Vista appeared to be stuck installing an update (which we later worked out to be SP1), and continuously rebooting. The laptop was displaying ‘installing 3 of 3′ which didn’t really tell him too much.

The fact that he wasn’t even getting into windows severely limited his options on what he could do. Even trying to boot into safe mode was having the same result.

After a bit of searching around on the internet, I found a solution to his problem. And it looks like he’s not the only person that has experienced the exact symptoms.

Here’s what he did:
(Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for any unexpected results of following the steps outlined below. You do so at your own risk, but if you do have the same problem as my mate, then you really don’t have much option other than to try it)

1) Boot from the Vista install disc
2) Choose your language, time etc and select the “Repair your computer” option.
3) Start a command prompt and delete/move the following file.
C:\Windows\winsxs\pending.xml. You can just move it elsewhere on the computer if need be.
4) Restart the PC, you’ll get the same ‘configuring updates’ screen but after a while it will carry onto the desktop.
5) Turn off automatic updates and create a restore point. Wait until MS fixes the update.

Hopefully after that your PC will will be working normally again.

Please post any comments on success/failure stories.