Blog

I had been trying to set up Internet Information Services (IIS) under Windows 7 to use PHP and MySQL to save myself the trouble of having both IIS and XAMPP installed. After a short time I managed to get it running rather easily using the Web Platform Installer. This was great apart from a couple of small annoyances when developing PHP applications. After a few weeks of use, I decided it was about time to switch back to XAMPP as it removed all of the annoyances I had encountered - here, I ran into a couple of problems!

---

Here's a simple and easy way of making a backup image of your disk. It uses dd (used for low-level copying) to copy either an entire disk or just one partition, into either a gzipped file or onto another disk.

---

One of the most annoying features of Windows is its ability to restart your machine automatically once you've installed Windows updates. This issue becomes even more annoying if for instance you leave things running overnight to continue next morning, or leave your machine running while you go grab some lunch. Thankfullly it really quick and easy to fix.

---

Something that's cost me a lot of time recently is trying to install the .net 3.5 Framework to multiple computers in a domain using Group Policy. You would think, being a Microsoft product that the installer would be provided as an MSI as well as an EXE to ease deployment through domains, this however is not the case. The following steps should get .net 3.5 deployed to your domain computers. Please note that .net 3.5 cannot be installed without the previous versions (2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1) being installed. It will also not tell you there is a problem and there will not be any errors in the Event Viewer.

---

If like me you get annoyed every time an application crashes on Windows and it then tries to send an error report, you may wish to follow this short guide to disable error reporting!

---