Streamyx is down yet again!

Welcome to boleh-land where nothing works right. Malaysia is vying for high income develop nation status and yet the simplest of things like a decent broadband internet connection still cannot achieve. Yes, I'm kvetching again at the lacklustre Streamyx service.

I was having off then on connection whole day long. At first I thought it was my PC, but then I realised it was TM/Streamyx fault. The connection sputtered on like a lame duck. I have to force click several times on a link to get a web page to refresh. Trying to do some work was a slow process.

And finally this evening while trying to update a web page, TM/Streamyx finally died out. And no amount of forcing the line would get me a connection.

Hurmph! Where's the competition to force Streamyx to improve their service? If this is the way TM is going about their broadband connection, you have better think twice about signing up on their UNIFI service. It ain't cheap and Malaysia broadband service is one of the expensive one around this region due to lack of competition. Monopoly is no good. It just shows it can't improve its services when the competition is sleeping with their promotion.

So where is that garish potong wayar ad to spur Streamyx to improve its broadand service connection?

Windows Messenger Error Code 81000306

Again I got Windows Live Messenger Error Code 81000306 in my Windows Vista. Which means I could not connect to the Windows Live Messenger server. There was this fix that I did some many months ago, and it still works.

 

- Click start
- Type: cmd (but don’t hit Enter)
- Right-click cmd.exe when it appears under Applications
- Click Run As Administrator
- Type the following: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
- Press enter

 

It should work without rebooting. I must have turned on the TCP during one of the Windows update or something. But this didn’t help me on my office new Ricoh Aficio 2027 Multifunction copier printer scanner. Though I could send print jobs to it, but the scan jobs would not send to my PC. Still trying to figure that one out.

Format FAT32 big partition using Linux

I was attempting to format big partition size >100GB for a FAT32 file system for the WD My Passport portable hard disk. Turn out to be very tedious because the FAT32 format utility provided by Western Digital could not work in Windows Vista. So I tried to find alternative way, but to no avail, until...

There is limit to the FAT32 partition on your hard disk. It cannot exceed more than 32GB. To format larger than 32GB I will need to use the manufacturer software. Turn out it cannot run in Windows Vista. So I searched around for alternatives.

I found one software called SwissKnife, but turn out that this too was outdated and could not run in Windows Vista. It could only run in Windows 2000.

There were many post in forums about using command prompt to format large size partition. Many said it was very slow, you can't do a quick format, and there seem to be limit to the format size. NOt sure about the actual limit, but I believe it could not exceed 100GB. Since I need it bigger than 100GB I decided not to try this way.

In the end, I have to fire up my old PC running in Windows XP to install the WD FAT32 formatter program. It requires at least the dotNetFx 2.0 version so again I have to take time to install a .Net software. Than installed the WD FAT32 formatter. Finally got them all installed.

But... it wouldn't allow me to partition it!

So in the end, I used Ubuntu Linux Gnome partition manager. Before using it, I have to delete the partition using Windows Disk Manager. For some unknown reason I couldn't delete the partition in Gnome partition manager. Using the Ubunto Linux Gnome partition manager, I could partition the WD My Passport portable hard disk and format a FAT32 partition bigger than 100GB size.

Thank goodness for Linux!

Welcome to My Blog

This is my first personal blog. Hopefully more will be published as days go by. Right now I am at a loss as to what to type in. But writer's block does not apply to blogging, right?

I was setting up my Cameron Highlands website, but it takes time to come up with content. Well hopefully I can complete my project and something will come out from my endeavor.

I think the present modern day is rather exciting with all the new gadgets and technical wizadry. I have seen the pace of advancement is rather amazing! I myself owned a few of these gadgets, PDA, handphones, digital cameras, and it does certainly makes life rather interesting! Incredibly I still have my old HP 320LX handheld PC and it still functions. But its speed is so slow, using this ancient device is more like nostalgia.

Until I have something more interesting to write, au revoir!