Replies

Team Viewer is awesome. They recently added a free iPhone app and I saw yesterday that they are beta testing a Linux version. I haven’t used the VPN feature, but the text and VOIP chat are very useful. Too bad their commercial license is so expensive. I’d happily pay $50 for something like a home site license that would allow you to support 10-15 systems. Until then I’ll just keep using the free version.

I wanted to share how I installed Windows 7 to a 2002 vintage laptop (1GHz P3 w/ 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD). The laptop has a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card (the built-in USB port is broken) and it has a bootable CD-ROM drive. Short of purchasing a DVD drive for the laptop, installing from a USB stick was my only option; booting from the PCMCIA USB card isn’t supported by the BIOS. The laptop had XP on it, but the Win7 installer will not run under XP. Since BartPE and UBCD4Win are based on XP they can’t be used either. Around this time I read a blog entry on the Windows 7 AIK (Automated Installation Kit). The Windows 7 AIK is available for download to the public here and lets you build a WinPE boot CD. The laptop booted my WinPE boot disc to a command line interface (similar to safe mode with command prompt). I changed drive letters to my USB install stick and was able to install Windows 7. Rather than using the Microsoft utility I used Novicorp WinToFlash to build my USB install stick. It lets you build USB install sticks for XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008, and Win7, plus a few other options. One other possible solution I didn’t try was booting a Vista recovery disk.