Having heard so many good things about SSDs (solid state disks), a few months I decided to try one out on my laptop – a Dell M4400 at the time.
So I got a Patriot Warp v. 3 256GB SSD, backed up the old disk (a standard 7200rpm 250GB disk) and restored it to the new SSD.
This appeared to work very nicely at first (quiet, quick boot etc.), but soon the laptop started taking long breaks where it practically froze, apparently doing some kind of disk activity (as per the HD light).
This might have had something to do with the Intel controller SATA settings and some weird restore partition that the Dell laptop was born with, but I never figured it out and eventually put the original hard disk back in to get some work done. And the SSD ended up in the drawer :-(

Then last week at the local mall I came across this cute little Sony Vaio Z21 laptop – which I just had to have.
It is light (1,5 kgs), great screen (13.1” 1600x900), Core2 Duo 2.53GHz, and 4GB RAM, and looks great too.
The hard disk however was a bit slow - 5400prm standard. So this was a perfect opportunity to try the SSD again.

After a few failed attempts (blue screen of death) at installing Windows 7 RC on the Vaio / SSD, the Windows installer suddenly claimed that the computer had no hard disk at all.
I tried with Windows 7 RC, Vista, several older Windows versions, and various disk partitioning utilities, but none of them recognized the disk anymore.

After a lot of googling, I finally found “Super FDisk” from http://www.ptdd.com/. A free utility delivered as a downloadable ISO image for burning a bootable CD.
Visually it reminded me of the good old Windows 3.1 days, but it worked wonders!
After deleting some weird looking disk partitions using this tool, the SSD appeared to be reborn.
The Windows 7 RC installer now recognized the SSD, and installed flawlessly on the first attempt. I have been running this 3-4 days now as so far it has been great (writing this in Windows Live Writer on the Vaio).

So thanks very much to the Super FDisk people for making (and giving away) this brilliant tool!

Dell M4400	Patriot Warp v. 3 256gb
Vaio Z21	Vaio Z21

Went to a fantastic outdoor concert with Bruce Springsteen in Herning (Denmark) last night.
He rocked the place for 3 hours straight and looked like he could continue for twice that long – I almost felt sorry for the E-Street Band who got no breaks at all.

It had been a cloudy and rainy day right up to 20:15 when Bruce and the band went on stage and the sun broke through the clouds for a perfect evening with great music and atmosphere.

Thanks Boss!

We've always wanted to host our Internet servers from our own office. Besides from providing more control, security, and privacy, this is also just much easier and more convenient as we are constantly tweaking and developing our web-sites.
However, until now it hasn't been possible to get a decent business Internet connection in our location (Frederikshavn, Denmark). The best the phone companies could offer was ~5Mb/512Kb consumer grade ADSL.
So we've always been forced to host our web-sites in remote data centers - most recently in Kansas, USA.

So when a new player, BredbaandNord, offering fiber Internet connections turned up on the local scene this spring, we jumped at it.
A few weeks ago we got our 50Mb/50Mb business grade fiber connection installed, and just got done moving everything from Kansas to a brand new Dell PowerEdge T300 (Xeon Quad-core / 16GB RAM) running Windows Server 2008 64bit sitting right here in our attic.

Here are a few photos (click for larger versions):

Fiber coming into our building:

In our attic, this guy converts the fiber to Ethernet:


About 3 km (2 miles) from here, the other end of our fiber goes in this "hut" - the local hub:


Inside the hut, a technician is hooking up our fiber:


Hmmmm.... which one was it now?


Back in our attic, the new PowerEdge server is happily serving this blog and all our other web-sites:


And of course the server and fiber converter has one of these (battery) in case power should ever fail: