So, I was bringing up another hard drive for backups on one of my Vista machines and had to decide if I was to format/partition it as a Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk. I found myself asking what the differences between MBR and GPT are. I knew GPT let me make partitions larger than 2 TB (not a problem with a single drive, but easily a problem on RAIDs), but what else did it (or didn't it do)?

I threw together this quick comparison table (for Windows): Click here to read the rest of
MBR vs. GPT comparison (Windows Vista)

I boot my operating systems from a boot drive and keep all my data on a RAID-5. Naturally, I want to keep My Documents on my RAID but a lot of programs default to using the Windows My Documents path (which defaults to C: drive). Luckily, you can change the location of Documents (as well as each individual Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) pretty easily:

Open your user's folder (in my case it's called "Michael Chu") which is found on your Desktop or the top-right corner of the Start Menu. Once you're in your user's folder, switch to Details View so you can see the Folder Paths of each of the folders inside. All the folders with special icons can be moved to new locations (or merged with existing directories).

Just right-click on the folder you want to move and select Properties.

Click on the Location tab.

Type in a new location and click OK or click on Move… to browse for a new location.

Click OK and let Windows move your files. That's it!
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Windows Vista: Moving My Documents (or My Pictures) to another location

I just built a new computer for Tina to use at home and decided to migrate her from Windows XP to a Vista Home Premium (mainly because I like to have a lot of OS's around, but also so she could get familiar with Vista as an OS). Naturally, I wanted to migrate her Firefox setup from the Windows XP laptop to the new Windows Vista system. It wasn't entirely straightforward, but it was by no means difficult. Here's how I copied her bookmarks, stored passwords, history, and other info stored in her Firefox profile from XP to Vista.

• On the Vista machine, I installed Firefox 2 (not entirely sure about Firefox 3).
• I then ran Firefox on the Vista machine logged in as my wife (so Firefox would create the profile directories) and then closed Firefox.
• I copied the contents of the folder C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<only directory of indeterminate name> from the XP machine to the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<some random characters>.default folder on the Vista machine.
• I then relaunched Firefox and everything was successfully migrated.

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Migrating a Firefox Profile from Windows XP to Vista (passwords, bookmarks, and all)

This information is elsewhere on the net, but not necessarily easy to find, so I'm "re-documenting" it here while I still remember it from my work in this area back in 2002-2005. These states are mapped for Windows XP terminology only, but a great deal of IT machines are still out there that use XP so it's probably still relevant for another year or so. The impetus to write this down was due to my wife's work laptop "being loud all the time". I took a look and discovered that it was her fan that she was complaining about. Since it had the Centrino Mobile Technology sticker, I knew the processor had to be Pentium M or later, fully supporting Intel Enhanced SpeedStep Technology, so I changed the power profile to allow the CPU to enter a low power state while the laptop was plugged in (which is almost all the time). About ten minutes later, everything was perfectly quiet (the fan having stopped running for the first time).
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Intel SpeedStep, Windows XP, and confusing Power Profiles

So a couple months ago I built a new computer around a video card I bought, but I did it with the vision that it would eventually replace my current desktop setup. That meant eventually I'd have to build a new RAID set. For data redundancy reasons, I run a RAID 5 for my primary data storage partition. (Right out of college, I lost a massive amount of data - maybe 60 GB - due to striping two disks for increased performance (RAID 0) for the purposes of video editing. After that, I have been running a RAID 5 of some form or other.) My current (until yesterday) solution is one that I have had for over six years now - the Adaptec ATA-RAID 2400A. A full size card that supports four Parallel ATA (we just called them IDE back then since there wasn't two types of IDE drives) drives and was known for reliability and cost-effectiveness (I bought it in 2000 or 2001 for $350). The reliability of the board has certainly been proven over the last six or seven years of continuous usage and three sets of drives. Unfortunately, the board also known for it's relatively low performance in RAID 5 mode. I figured since I had just built a brand new computer and I was running out of storage space (and would have to upgrade my drive set soon), it was time to upgrade from last generation's technology to a modern RAID controller.
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RAIDs and Drive Remapping in Vista

Back in May, I got tired of not being able to enjoy the variety of modern computer games available for Windows, so I went out and bought a PCI Express nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 640MB from eVGA ($380 after mail-in rebate). It wasn't the best video card out there (it was second best) but it was going to be a real jump up from my desktop, a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with a GeForce 6200 (purchased only because my GeForce3 Ti 500 died after 4 years of continuous uptime - the FAN kept dying! These moving parts - you can't trust them…). I ended up spending an additional 2x on other components to provide a system powerful enough to support the video card! (I couldn't help it.)
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What my 8800GTS made me do