BMW is definitely an auto manufacturer who focuses on the drivability of their cars beyond all else.  They’re short on getting “options” to work well.  What do I mean?  Read on …

You want the iPod interface or a CD changer?  You can’t have navigation or satellite radio.  You want Bluetooth?  You can’t have SOS services.

My current challenge is I want to have the Bluetooth module installed so I can use my Audiovox 5600 phone in complete hands-free mode, but the service department called me today and said that I can’t do that if I use the SOS feature.  It’s really unfortunate, because I find comfort in knowing that I have BMW Assist at the push of a button. The sad thing is I hope I never have to use the SOS feature – and I know I’ll use Bluetooth every freaking minute I’m in the car, but I don’t want to give the security of SOS.

What to do, what to do.

I configured DHCP and DNS on Windows Server 2003 to get the services off of the wireless access point and allow seamless name resolution when at the casa and when on the Internet.  Now to get the public dynamic DNS issues resolved so it stops dropping off of the ‘net altogether.

Aaron Margosis comes out of hiding with three posts in one day, one of which outlines how to tweak the Registry to allow non-Administrators to modify the power options.  Very useful for running as a non-Administrator on a laptop.

In this post I mentioned that turning off SpeedStep in the BIOS helped my Virtual Server performance problem, yet that for some machines this may run the CPU at the lowest speed possible.

This utility from Intel will tell you at what speed your CPU is running so you can judge for yourself. 

I’ve got a customer who is doing some Web services work with two-way authentication using X.509v3 certificates.  I just finished staging a virtual machine with Visual Studio 2003 and am actively installing WSE 2.0 SP2 so I can run them through some of the samples tomorrow.  There need to be more hours in the day so I can spend some of them behind closed eyes.

I prefer to run Virtual Server instead of Virtual PC on my notebook for my virtual machine needs.  Why?  Consolidated maintenance and screen real estate.  I don’t particularly care for the Virtual PC tray icon or the way it manages multiple windows.  Just a personal preference thing.

The only problem is that Virtual Server on my notebook would cause these annoying 5-10 second hangs every 30 seconds or so within its virtual instances.  That’s 10-20 seconds of WTF every minute.  It doesn’t make for good demos, nor does it make for a pleasant user experience in any way.

Turns out the problem is related to Intel’s SpeedStep which you really only see on notebook machines.  By disabling SpeedStep in the BIOS, my virtual machines are running at blazing speed!  I installed Windows Server 2003 the other night and it worked like it should, rather than taking 6+ hours!  In my hunt for a solution, it was also mentioned to me that on some notebooks disabling SpeedStep in the BIOS causes the machine to run at its lowest performing mode and the recommendation was to set Windows’ power management mode to Always On.  In my case, this didn’t do anything hence the reason I disabled SpeedStep in the BIOS.