I did have a plan though. I booted up my Windows 7 emergency System Repair Disc, and attempted to go back to a previous System Restore Point. Every time I tried though, I received a failure error of 0×80070057. (*Spoiler Alert* After I restored my computer, I realized I had turned off Systems Restore for all my drives. Sheesh, not sure why I did that. Probably to save disk space. Lesson learned.)

That left me with one option to get Windows back up and running without too much pain. In the menu of the System Repair Disk, I selected System Image Recovery, since I had scheduled weekly full backups of my system. (You do too, right?)

After successfully running the system image restoration process, a few of my files were now a week or so out of date. When I logged in, up popped my Carbonite client. It had recognized that my system had just gone through a recovery, and gave me options on restoring my files that were either out of date or missing. I selected the files to restore, and now my system is back up and running! Sweet!

The change I will be making to my backup strategy is enabling System Restore Points on my C: drive.

Summary:

• Create a Windows System Repair Disc
• Enable System Restore Points on the System drive (C:)
• Schedule weekly System Image backups
• Purchase a Carbonite subscription, and use the recommended backup settings
• Be a little skeptical of emergency patches

• Pornography
• Phishing
• Malware
• Proxy and anonymizer (for the “street smart” kiddos)

You can easily set up the service by following the walk-through instructions on configuring your router or computer’s DNS servers.

In the past, I would go through the not-too-painful-but-still-tedious process of reformatting and re-syncing all of the content.

I just discovered that I can simply restart the Zune, and when I connect it back up to my computer, everything is back to normal. I guess we still live under the principle of “when in doubt, reboot.”

Panopticlick

The following are available on TechNet and MSDN:

• Project Professional 2010 (x64) – (English) 272 (MB)
• Project Professional 2010 (x86) – (English) 235 (MB)
• Project Standard 2010 (x64) – (English) 245 (MB)
• Project Standard 2010 (x86) – (English) 223 (MB)
• Office Professional Plus 2010 (x64) – (English) 718 (MB)
• Office Professional Plus 2010 (x86) – (English) 650 (MB)
• SharePoint Server 2010 (x64) – DVD (English) 723 (MB)
• Visio 2010 (x64) – (English) 343 (MB)
• Visio 2010 (x86) – (English) 293 (MB)

Really, of all things – Twitter??

Be careful out there with your 140 characters.

Configuration Database

1. Go to the “Operations” tab
2. Click “Servers in Farm”
3. Under “Farm Information” see the following items:
   1. Configuration database server
   2. Configuration database name

Central Administration Content Database

1. Go to the “Application Management” tab
2. Click “Web application list”
3. Click “SharePoint Central Administration v3″
4. Under “SharePoint Site Management”, click “Site collection list”
5. Under the root “/” site, look in the information table for the “Database Name” value

General Usage Content Databases

1. Go to the “Application Management” tab
2. Click “Web application list”
3. For each web application listed other than “SharePoint Central Administration v3″ (see above), perform the following:
   1. Click the web application name
   2. Under “SharePoint Site Management”, click “Site collection list”
   3. For each listed site collection (by URL):
      1. Click the URL of the site collection
      2. In the information table, look for the “Database Name” value

Search Database

1. Go to the “Operations” tab
2. Under “Topology and Services”, click “Services on server”
3. Click the text “Windows SharePoint Services Help Search”
4. Under “Search Database”, look for the values:
   • Database Server
   • Database Name

I was disappointed to see VirtualPC is no longer supported for Home versions of Windows. I was also disappointed to see the free VMware Server equivalent of VirtualPC had disappeared.

However, I just discovered the free VMware Player now not only runs VMs, as it always has, but also allows you to create them! You can also create and run 64-bit guest VM’s if you have the appropriate hardware, which I do. VirtualPC can’t do that. Sweet!

Update: A co-worker (thanks Shane!) mentioned to me the free VMware Server is still available. I’m going to try out Player, hoping it is more light-weight, and see how it goes first.

“A Time for Choosing” by Ronald Reagan

“Translation: If your company is deemed “critical,” a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.”

Yikes.