Hullo all, We’re in the process of starting up a new online tech magazine (ISO Today). The main focus will be Linux and Distribution releases/updates/reviews, however we’re also looking to offer content on Mac OS and Microsoft OS’ as well.

If anyone would be interested in becoming a contributor for the site, please let me know. To begin, contributors will not be compensated for their articles, however, we expect that to change in the not to distant future.

Please note, its pretty barebones right now and things may change slightly.

Some of you may have purchased systems that came with vista pre-installed. If you want to run an older operating system such as XP or win2k [and you do not want to have to reinstall vista] then you might be interested in this guide. Note to do this you must have a MS vista install DVD; a recovery type disk is not going to work.

Prior to beginning this task, make a complete backup of your system. In addition do make sure that win2k/xp has drivers available for your hardware. This is especially important if you have a laptop. If there are no drivers available, you are wasting your time.

To start we need to create a partition in which to install win2k/xp. Open disk management; start>run and type in “diskmgmt.msc” without quotes. Hit enter; this brings up disk management. Right click your drive and choose shrink from the menu. I would make the partition approx 10gig for win2k and 15-20gig for XP [depending on how much software you are going to install] Once you have completed the shrink process, create a partition and format with NTFS. [Using disk management] At this point your new partition has been assigned the next available drive letter. I like drive letters in order so I use disk management to reassign the drive letters for the optical drives so I can assign drive letters sequentially for the hard disk partitions. With the new partition now labeled D and optical drives following, it is now time to install our older operating system.

Boot with your win2k/xp CD [CD set as first boot device in the bios] Select the “D” partition as to where you will install. I will not go into detailed instructions as to how to install win2k or xp; there are many guides on the web for this purpose. Complete the install. At this point, vista will no longer boot; we need to repair the boot sector and vista’s boot configuration files. Boot into win2k/xp and open a command prompt; start>run>cmd and hit enter. We will now use Bootsect.exe to restore the Vista MBR and the boot code that transfers control to the Windows Boot mgr app.

Insert your vista dvd into the drive; cancel window that may autorun. Type this in
Drive:\boot\Bootset.exe /NT60 All hit enter
In this command drive is the drive where the Vista install DVD is located.

Next we will use Bcdedit.exe to manually create an entry for win2k/xp

Type Drive:\windows\system32\Bcdedit /create {ntldr} –d “Description for earlier Windows” hit enter.
Note in this command drive is where you have vista installed; most likely “C” The description can be whatever you want ie Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc.

We now will set the active partition. Note in this command drive is the letter for the active partition; again most likely “C”
Drive:\Windows\system32\Bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=X: hit enter Again this is most likely C not X.

Drive:\windows\system32\Bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr hit enter
Drive:\windows\system32\Bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} –addlast hit enter.

Now restart the system and you will have the vista boot menu giving you the choice of operating systems.

There’s a really good article over at the IBM developer site on automating OS Switching. From their site:

Switch from one operating system to another — without manual intervention — by following these step-by-step instructions for enabling a dual-boot machine. Duplicate this setup for running both Linux® and Windows® on your own machine with the scripts provided with this article.

Why would you want to do this automatically when doing it manually is straightforward enough? The simple answer is that an automated process makes it a lot easier to use multiple operating systems. If you test software on multiple operating system platforms, for example, this ability is especially useful.

Makes sense to me, but then I have three oS’s installed anyways. Of course, i need to warn you this is not for the week of heart!

A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.
“House”, for instance, is feminine, “la casa”.
“Pencil”, however, is masculine, “el lapiz”.
A student asked, “What gender is a computer”?
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether “computer” should be a masculine or feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for it’s recommendation.

The men’s group decited that “computer” should definately be of the feminine gender (”la computadora”), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
2. The language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3, Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval.
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

The women’s group, however, decided that computers should be masculine (el computador”) because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data, but still can’t think for themselves.
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

Note: The women won.

I’m fed up with comcast. We bought my in-laws house from them in January 06. We’d been living in it since 2004. We had transfered all the bills to either mine or amy’s name except for Comcast (cable). The reason we hadn’t transfered it is because it isn’t as easy as it should have been. Now, if I had my father in law’s drivers license I could have taken it and a bill to one of the comcast stores and done it that way…. otherwise, he had to call, cancel the account and then i had to sign up for a new account. You’d think they could just change the name and SSN on the account.

I started this process on Tuesday. I spoke to a nice lady who was able to actually help me. She took the old account down, brought the new account up and even called me once this was done to give me the new account number. However, when I got home, we had no service. Apparently, since there was now a balance due on the old account (for the half of a month’s service) that had to be paid before the new account could be brought up on the existing hardware, otherwise, I’d have to have someone come out to install new service (WHICH MAKES NO SENSE TO ME). So, I pay the balance, call back and apparently, it takes a business day for payments to come up in their system. So we’re with out internet and cable for another day. Or so I thought.

I was able to disconnect the digital boxes from the cable and plug the cable directly to the TV and we had cable tv. w00t. No internet, but at least we could watch our shows. I call back on Wednesday, manage to get the digital cable on and then learn that there is a problem with new internet service and that it could take up to 24 hours. Well, while talking with the support guy on the phone, it turns out he lives kind of around the corner from us (which was nice to hear in this day of outsourced support) and some how we started talking about real estate in our area and how the prices on new houses can vary so greatly from one neighborhood to the next. It was kind of a random conversation to have with a support call… however he was able to get the issue resolved and by lunch on Thursday we had internet! God Save the King!!