Vista x64 Displays Wrong Physical Memory Size

This is a crazy little problem in Windows Vista x64 that shows the wrong information when the System Information (msinfo32.exe) is run. This issue occurred on a computer that was upgraded from 4GB of DDR3 (4x1GB) ram to 8GB (4x2GB) of DDR3, running Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

What happened is the Installed Physical Memory displayed correctly at 8.00GB, but the Total Physical Memory only reported as 4.00GB and Available Physical Memory reported as 5.22GB. View the screenshot of this output below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Costs Using Amazon EC2 & S3

Figuring out all the costs when hosting on EC2 using S3 storage can be tricky. This is break down of what you can approximately expect to pay using a few basic scenarios, such as a lamp server and S3 backups, with Amazon services. This will also compare the costs to what you would expect to pay if you want to do the hosting yourself.

To fully understand EC2 charges, you need to know the difference between the instance types and what they cost to best meet your requirements. For the purpose of this post I will summarize – I have converted the Amazon Compute Units into basic CPU power and will then detail the costs based upon each of these instances.
Read the rest of this entry »

Can Receive But Not Send Email

There are a great many reasons a user may not be able to send email but can receive it just fine.  This will focus on some of the more common issues mostly involving Outlook and Outlook Express. Below are some common questions you can ask yourself to assist in troubleshooting:

1. Has the ISP\email provider recently changed?
2. Has the email account info been changed recently?
3. Any system changes that have taken place?

To troubleshoot #1, first check if your internet is even working then contact your email provider, perhaps they are having email issues (make sure you can answer the questions #2 and #3 to assist in support). Sometimes your email provider may not be your ISP, if this is the case it is possible your ISP requires all SMTP traffic to authenticate and relay through them and not your actual email provider. This has been the case with quite a few ISP’s to restrict SMTP traffic due to worm activity.  You should be able to get this information from your ISP technical support (Rogers and Bell usually require relaying through their SMTP) .  To check your SMTP authentication read this.
Read the rest of this entry »

Never Download a Codec Again

Windows Media Player is a real pain since it will not play DIVX and XVID out of the box, you can get video but no audio or vice versa. There are so many codecs out there, that you end up installing more than you need in order to play most downloaded content, is it really quite annoying. Enter VLC player.

Read the rest of this entry »

OpenOffice 3.0.1 Has Been Released

OpenOffice 3.0.1 has come out 2 days earlier than expected. You can get it on the P2P portion of the OpenOffice website, or you can download the torrent here here.
Read the rest of this entry »