tutorial

I just applied the WDTLER fix to all my 1TB WD Green drives.  No visible change, but the intrawebs say it'll fix me up good.  Best trust the intrawebs!

Here's some info on TLER. Start there if you're wondering what I'm talking about. Here's an abridged version of the problem for the "Oh! Shiny penny!" folks out there (like me, heh).

Some notes before we get started....

THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED BY Western Digital!!

Update: Since writing this post I have since gained more experience both with VirtualBox 1.5.2 and VMware Workstation 6 (both current as of 10/07). I updated my reviews to reflect this. Also, after re-reading it the first time, I thought it would be valuable to list what I'm looking for in a hosted (i.e. desktop, or non-bare-metal/native) hypervisor. I suspect that relative to most I am a power user, with power user wants/needs. This might not be the same as what you're looking for though. As such, I tried to lay out the pros and cons in the most generic way possible.

Also, previous to this experience with researching a suitable desktop VM my primary experience has been with the server-grade version of VMware, VMware ESX 2/3. I tried to keep this as "non-technical" as I can, but if you want to know more feel free to ask.

Oh, and one more thing. Before you even THINK about trying out any of these, make sure you have at LEAST 1GB of RAM in your PC. Any less and you'll be spending your day waiting for the mouse to move while the VM's memory gets swapped out of the host OS's pagefile/swapspace. Ideally you don't want to oversubscribe your resources to your VMs at all, but it's bound to happen, and as long as you don't pass a certain threshold, you should be fine.

As you know, I am pretty big into the whole "Portable App" movement. I have my own launcher, made my own wrapper, and have customized a few applications that I have found handy to have around. But all in all, this has turned into a pain in the ass. When new versions of the products are released, I have to go through the same riggamaroll every damn time that involves a few hours of recoding and/or testing. Such a hassle.