Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

The Vista team at Microsoft have built a website called UltimatePC beta. Unfortunately its a flash site so while it looks sexy its hard to get around it and even harder to find the links leading out of it. So we have done that for you here.

They are promoting the New HP Blackbird Gaming PC as the ultimate PC. I had a rig like this 2 years ago and my current rig is almost exactly the same. I think of it now as pretty ordinary and am waiting for the next step up in system performance, but I suppose for most people its pretty good - and dang expensive. Basic specs, Quad core extreme CPU, 2 GB RAM (not enough!), 2 8800GTX video cards, Raptor hard drive, sexy case with some excellent thermal cooling solutions and Vista ultimate. starts from around USD$5K, though with the USD fallen in a hole lately that's good for the rest of the world.

I did a really dumb thing.

Yesterday my backup failed, because of a device I/O error. I assumed (really badly) that the error was on the backup drive, and so proceeded to reformat it - losing all my backups in the process. My logic was that after I had reformated it I would try and run a fresh backup and if it failed again I would replace the disk.
It failed again, but this time I realised it was not the backup drive that was at fault, but one of the drives it was trying to backup.
I realised this because it was the drive that had all our music on it, and I was having trouble playing music, followed by even more trouble browsing the drive.
I should have been a bit smarter. This was the last of three disks that I bought all in one go from one shipment, same size and model, all 500GB Western Digital drives (I know, I know - WD are crap). The other two had failed within the last 3 months and been replaced. I just hadn't gotten around to transferring the data off this disk.

Not mine fortunately, though I have one laptop that I haven't been able to install the Service Pack on at all yet - will look at why later. (Update - I uninstalled the non supported language packs and then SP1 installed correctly.)

The point of this article is to provide a resource in one place of as many issues and resolutions for Vista Service Pack 1 installation problems as possible in one place. Note I will continue to add to this page as I get more information. It might pay to book mark this one using delicious or stumbleupon.

Microsoft Pages for Vista SP1

Just a few things I have come across today.

Microsoft have announced a new tool - invite2messenger.net. This a tool that lets users invite their friends from partner social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn) to WindowsLive Messenger.

Thanks to the Mark Harrison for the heads up.

I invited my facebook friends and already some of them have added me.

In case of Sith, break glass and use lightsaber - Starwars themed bus stop in New York - via Geeks are Sexy.

New One Note 2007 training course for beginners via Daniel Escapa's OneNote Blog.