Battlefield: Netbook

Windows 7's mission: reclaim the netbook territory.

If anyone still has doubt, check out the Technet homepage. The second featured article on Windows 7 is about using USB drive to install Windows 7 on a netbook, which by the way has been common for Linux for quite some time.

Netbooks may well be place for the beginning of the end of Windows' dominance in the client OS market. With Android on netbooks around the corner, Microsoft clearly sees the writing on the wall. There's really no time to waste for them, and it'll certainly be very interesting to see the battle.

.NET 3.5 SP1 as high priority patch by Win Update - bad & bad

I don't understand why. Computers that don't need .NET at all are getting hit with that. It just feels like a blatant effort to push the .NET platform. And holy cow, it's a D/L bigger than Delaware! Even on a 6 Mbps line, this 287 MB behemoth could take you a good 10 minutes. I wonder why there isn't a bigger outcry on this. Only found complaint from here:
http://www.askwoody.com/2009/2284/

Drives for Dell EMC AX150i

In my continued effort to tinker with AX150i, I tried a WD5000AACS in an EMC tray. No go. The array say it's not supported. The alert message only says a SATAII is needed. The drive is one of the Caviar Green series from Western Digital. 500 GB 3gb/s. I don't think it's much different from the Barracuda ES 250 GB I got from Dell/EMC. I'm not sure if it's NCQ though. Wondering how the array determines compatibility... itching to reach the conclusion of vendor lock-in conspiracy, but willing to try some others before we go there. :)

UPDATE: I tried a Barracuda ES 500 GB. No dice. Now the conspiracy is completed. They indeed want to lock you in with their expensive drives; or they really don't want you to have an easy and economic way of scaling. Either way, coupled with lack luster support I got so far from them, EMC just slipped to my trash can end of my vendor list.