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After having issues with a Western Digital 200 GB hard drive and Windows XP I thought it would be beneficial to put my notes into some sort of guide for other people that might have a problem with Windows and drives that are bigger than 137 GB (128 GB binary). Windows XP Service Pack 1 eliminates the 137 GB (128 GB binary) barrier (Windows XP SP1 includes 48-bit LBA support for ATAPI disk drives). The Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP is something everyone should read if they are having the problem of a large hard drive not being completely recognized. This Knowledge Base Article could help you solve your problem quickly but if it doesn’t then continue reading. Do bare in mind that you MUST have Windows XP SP1 to use a hard disk that has a capacity that is greater than 137 GB. ...

Firefox has taken out a two-page ad in the New York Times! According to Firefox this is the, “largest open source fundraising campaign in history” and, “these folks were willing to put their name out there and be the first to publicly support Firefox and our community at a scale never before attempted in open source history.” Somewhere in that massive list of names is mine. I will be picking up a New York Times some time today to see how good this Firefox ad looks on two full pages. ...

SlashDot is running a story saying that the twice a day DNS updates of .com and .net domains will cease to exist; VeriSign Naming and Directory Services will be switching to a near real-time system on September 8, 2004. From the announcement: After the rapid DNS update is implemented, the elapsed time from registrars’ add or change operations to the visibility of those adds or changes in all 13 .com/.net authoritative name servers is expected to average less than five minutes. ...

This is a comprehensive review of the T-Mobile Sidekick II. I wanted to push this review out a lot quicker but I figured that a thorough testing and experience with the Sidekick II was necessary. After spending a year with the original color Sidekick I think I’ll be able to write up a very good review. On Tuesday, my Sidekick II came and like a gleeful school boy I dropped my SIM card in it and plugged in it to charge. I analyzed, prodded, poked, and so on then took it to SeaWorld the next day. ...

Microsoft announced on Sunday that it would share Microsoft Office 2003 source code as part of the Microsoft Government Security Program. The program is designed to make governments feel more comfortable about Microsoft’s security practices. The source code for Office 2003 is going to be shared with the governments of more than 30 countries. I’m sure the United States will have numerous teams from different agencies analyzing this source code. It will be interesting to see what the NSA has to say about it. Something I’m curious about is if a government finds a blatant security flaw of some sort are they to fix the flaw themselves or is Microsoft the only person allowed to manipulate the code? I’m Microsoft isn’t going to want to have over 30 different versions of Office 2003 out there but it sure would be nice to strip out the Excel game and all of the other non-sense incorporated into Office in an effort to speed things up and make it more secure. ...