So this is interesting. Currently, Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage components are optional for those who want current security updates and such but Microsoft wants to change that. One Microsoft support tech was quoted as saying

“in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

Sounds pretty harsh. Now, some of you might say, “Well I’ve got a legal copy. What do I have to worry about?” Which is true, you don’t have much to worry about. I already have the WGA components installed here on my laptop and all seems to be running well. BUT, there are some who ARE having issues on their legal copies.

Two of the major issues I see from a sampling of people who installed WGA were.

• I have an XP Media center with a promise RAID 0 4-disc array. When I installed the WPA it broke the drivers for the array by causing failed delayed writes (half of the array just “disapears”.) If I do a system restore to before the installation of the WPA everything goes back to working just fine.
• [S]ince installing WPA … I’ve had blue screens and a total inability to boot. I had to run the XP repair function to get the computer to boot. I had a damaged boot sector on the hard drive. I am running two drives on a RAID 1 config.

These are not small problems. Unless they’re resolved, there is going to be huge complaints and quite possibly the greatest thing for *nix. As for those who don’t have legal copies… I’m sure there will be a workaround soon enough. lol

Lens hoods can be expensive to replace some times and if you need one really quick, can be hard to track down. That’s where lenshoods.co.uk comes to the rescue. This site contains tons of layouts for practically every SLR lens out there which you just print, cut out of cardboard and then rolled into a shape!

Neat idea and great for a quick fix!

The Daily WTF is a great little site with a collection of stories from our fellow geeks. Horror stories about clients, disfunctional software, code, programmers, all kinds of good stuff! Worth checking out for a good laugh.

The one thing I have always wanted in Windows is the ability to re-order my task bar when I have a bunch of programs open. That’s exactly what TaskbarShuffle allows you to do! This little program just sits in the tray and allows you to drag your taskbar items around and order them however you like!

One cravat is that in order to use TaskbarShuffle, you have to turn off “Group Similar Taskbar Buttons” which kind of sucks since I like that option as well, but I guess you can’t have it all!