I also noticed a few people who mentioned that they had it working, but they didn’t really offer much advice on how I might do the same. Knowing that someone had it working was enough to goad me into trying it for myself, though. And voila, I got it to work. Here then are the steps I took in Windows 7 Ultimate (64-Bit). I have no reason to think this won’t work in other versions of 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista:

1. Install the Nike+ Utility. Download it from here: nikeplus.com/downloads
2. Once installed, locate the utility in the Start menu:



3. Right-click  the  Nike+ Utility and choose ‘Properties’ and choose the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Select the choice to ‘Run the Program in compatibility mode for:’ and choose ‘Windows XP SP2.’



4. Next, and this is important, insert the SportBand into an available USB port.
5. The Nike+ Utility should appear now on your screen, but if it doesn’t, look down in the toolbar and find the little Nike icon. Right-click ‘Hide Nike+ Utility’ and then Right-click again and choose ‘Show Nike+ Utility’. For some reason, this sometimes helps it appear on my computer.



6. That’s really it.

Now, I can’t really fix the steaming pile of Flash that is the Nike Plus site. Luckily, I don’t need to. I’ve set my account at MapMyRun.com to sync runs over from my nike account, so I shouldn’t really have to visit the site.

In our house, we have had an annual, serialized conversation that goes something like this:

Spouse #1: Why do we still keep phonebooks in our living space? Do we ever use them?

Spouse #2: Sure I use phonebooks! We need to have them available in case.

#1: In case of what, the suspension of the internet?

#2: There are some things that are easier to look up in a phonebook.

#1: Like what? Anyway, they take up too much space.

This conversation can go on forever.

But I was pretty sure that neither of us ever used phonebooks (oops, did I just betray the identities of spouses #1 and #2?), so I decided to try a small experiment.

I placed a single piece of tape across the edge of the two phonebooks opposite the spines, put them back on the shelf and promptly forgot about it.

It’s now a year later and some new phonebooks just showed up on our porch. As I went to grab the old ones from the shelf, I remembered my experiment and wondered what the results were.

It was as I’d expected, the tape had not been disturbed, indicating that no one had looked in the phonebooks or even tried to remove one from the shelf. Now, they’re all in the recycling bin. If only I could cancel the future delivery of them…

Now I wish we’d saved our money. When she got her Macbook Pro back from Apple yesterday, it came with a new hard drive and a fresh os install. Before I went to the trouble of installing parallels and Vista again, I thought I would give ies4osx a try first.

Ies4osx is a gpl-licensed software package that installs with Darwine and provides Mac users an honest-to-goodness Internet Explorer that lives on the dock and launches like any other application. And it works nicely with ActiveX. Really. It should be noted that for now ies4osx only runs IE6. Apparently it used to run IE7 as well, but there were some problems with that.

It’s so easy and quick, though, that I certainly won’t be putting Parallels or Vista back on the Mac. I guess I can use the time I would have spent on that coming up with a better backup strategy…

Linux users should check out ies4linux, whose name is fairly self-explanatory when you think about it.

I have spent years (literally) grumbling about the hidden ‘PQSERVICE’ partition that ships on every new Acer computer. My school has been a fairly loyal customer of Acer’s over the years and with good reason. Their combination of value and build quality have made their laptops and desktops reasonably good investments for our Windows-dependent school.

But back to PQSERVICE. When one tries to delete it, it proves to be tenacious. It is an EISA partition and Windows will try to prevent you from removing it. Even after you’ve done so, your MBR and boot.ini file are screwed up and other boot-related errors crop up. I had searched and searched for a procedure to follow that would work, but never found one. Now, I think I’ve figured it out and want to share. This post is an attempt to document one way for removing the PQSERVICE partition. I make no promise that it will work for you. In fact, it could certainly make your computer unusable, so please proceed with backups and caution. Iwould appreciate any feedback that you have on this post. If you have something to add, please do.

Why Delete It?

First of all, if you don’t need to, don’t delete PQSERVICE. Reclaiming the 4GB it takes up is not reason enough. If you depend on Acer’s recovery tools, it is also necessary. But there are some valid reasons to remove the hidden partition. I use Fog Server to image computers in my school. It can do an unresizable full-disk image or a resizable single-partition image from the first partition.  Having a resizable partition gives me flexibility to use drives that are smaller than the original as replacements. The stack of 20 and 40GB drives in my closet just became more useful! Also, there may be some performance to be gained by moving your OS partition to the first slot, as that resides on the outer edge of the physical disk, which is reputed to be faster.

Instructions after the jump…

Note, I have only done this with C: and D: drives that are formatted NTFS. Older Acers will have one or both formatted FAT32. While this may work fine, I haven’t tested it on them. You might want to use convert.exe to convert them first (after backing up the computer, of course).

Procedure

1. Create a Full Backup of your Computer

   I can’t stress this enough. You are about to (a) delete a partition, (b) mess with the MBR, and (c) edit the registry. If you do not do a full backup of the computer you run the risk of losing everything.

   I use Fog Server for imaging and deploying computers (a subject of a future post), so I was able to quickly take a full image of computer and move on to the next step.

2. Edit c:\boot.ini

   This is easy, but you want to be sure not to mess up. Boot.ini is a configuration file for NTLDR, which allows a user to specify which OS gets booted at startup.

   It is a hidden, write-protected system file, so the first thing is to select ”Show hidden files and folders” and deselect “Hide protected operating system files” in folder view options and that “Read-only” option is unchecked under file properties. You can open it in Notebook or any text editor.

   The standard one looks like this:

   [boot loader]
   timeout=30
   default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
   [operating systems]
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

   for now, we’ll copy the last line, hit return, and paste it in, altering only the partition number. This will allow you to boot into either partition 1 or 2. Since we are about to delete the current first partition, our bootable partition will become the first partition and its much easier to prepare for that than fix it later. Your boot.ini should look like this:

   [boot loader]
   timeout=30
   default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
   [operating systems]
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

   Save the file and close it.

3. Edit the Windows Registry

   Run regedit (Start menu > ‘Run…’ > regedit)

   Enter HKLM\System\MountedDevices and delete all entries. This will force your computer to re-create it’s list of Mounted disks when it next boots.

   Enter HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager and select the ‘BootExecute’ record. Delete the line that says “auto check autochk *”

4. Boot into GParted (or other partition editor)

   I used GParted‘s live boot cd to delete the offending partition, but you could use anything similar.

   Be sure to delete the first partition, labelled ‘PQService’ and then resize the second partition to fill the space left behind.

5. Fix MBR in Windows Recovery Console

   I used a Window’s install disk to boot into the recovery console. It should be noted that although you need a Window’s install disk to do this, it doesn’t seem to need to be one that came with the computer or, even, the same brand computer.

   It does appear that there other ways to repair an MBR. MBRFix gets consistently good reviews, though I haven’t tested it. Here’s another approach that looks promising.

   Here are instructions for using fixmbr from the Recovery Console [Microsoft'sTechNet]:

   1. Insert the Windows XP Professional Setup CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive.
   2. Restart the computer. If prompted to press a key to start the computer from the CD-ROM, press the appropriate key.
   3. When the text-based part of Setup begins, follow the prompts. Press the R key to repair a Windows XP Professional installation.
   4. If you are repairing a system that has more than one operating system installed, from the Recovery Console choose the Windows XP Professional installation that you need to repair.
   5. When prompted, type the Administrator password.
   6. To replace the MBR, at the Recovery Console command prompt, type:

      fixmbr

   7. Press the Y key to proceed, or press the N key to cancel.

6. Reboot

   When you reboot into Windows, NTLDR will ask you which Windows installation to boot from. Because of the boot.ini that we saved in Step #2, you will want to choose the second (non-default) option.

7. Edit c:\boot.ini (again)

   Now we can edit boot.ini again. We’ll set the first partition as the default and remove the second partition as an option. The file will look like this:

   [boot loader]
   timeout=30
   default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
   [operating systems]
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

   When you’re done editing, be sure to reset it as read-only in file properties.

8. Edit the Windows Registry (again)

   Re-open regedit and return the “auto check authochk *” line to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\BootExecute

9. Reboot

   chkdsk will probably run before Windows boots. It has never had to fix any errors for me and only runs the first time the computer reboots.

10. Finish Up

    At this point you could repartition your disk with GParted. Remove the D: drive, split it into two, etc.

References & Resources

• Fog Server
• boot.ini
• Editing the registry with regedit
• HKLM\System\MountedDevices
• HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\BootExecute
• GParted Live CD how-to
• fixmbr

I’ve decided to stop feeling badly that I haven’t managed to lead a web 2.0 revolution at my school. If I’ve simply provided a functional, available, and friendly infrastructure for our users, I should feel pretty good about that.

That might sound like a cop-out. Isn’t it like saying that as long as I’ve built a good foundation, it doesn’t matter what kind of house I build? I guess at its root, though, this is an issue of what should be expected from EdTech in K-12 schools. If you try to do the fancy stuff without sound fundamentals, you quickly get nowhere.

I have come to believe that most people who work in schools have no clear idea of what they should be getting for their IT dollars. The corollary, of course, is that they don’t have any idea how much they should be willing to pay for it.

Imaging and Managing Workstations with FOG: A Free Alternative to Ghost

Which area does you presentation most closely match?: Technical
Please describe your presentation:

Tool: FOG

Description (from project web site): “Fog is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP and Vista that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. Fog doesn’t use any boot disks, or CDs; everything is done via TFTP and PXE. Also with fog many drivers are built into the kernel, so you don’t really need to worry about drivers (unless there isn’t a linux kernel module for it). Fog also supports putting an image that came from a computer with a 80GB partition onto a machine with a 40GB hard drive as long as the data is less than 40GB.”

Importance: Simplifying the management of computer images is crucial to improving IT in schools, especially in Windows environments. EdTech departments typically have little time to deploy new computers and frequently fail to re-image computers, even as they get older and older. Being able to automate and batch deployment of new images to specific groups of computers–and allow it to happen at off-peak hours when networks are quiet–is something that has been available only to those willing to pay high licensing fees. FOG is an actively maintained project that solves that. It also works. One can download a VM image of FOG and have it up and running quickly. It has served our school well for the last 6 months and is only getting better.

Presentation: Will include these elements

* A discussion of my experiences using FOG to image and manage desktops and laptops at the Paul Cuffee School, a public charter school in Providence, RI.
* A tutorial, accompanied by screenshots and live demonstration, of every step of using FOG:
o Installing
o Saving and deploying master images
o Grouping hosts to batch deployment and improve image management
o Using snapins to to run executables remotely on multiple hosts
o Automatically joining Windows computers to a domain after imaging
o Using FOG to image linux pcs
* Time for discussion among participants about FOG and other tools for managing computers and deploying images. A chance to share resources about other open source tools that can improve and streamline school IT.

[via the CoolTools blog]

Said by me at lunch today.

1. hundreds of spam comments weeded out
2. upgrade to WordPress 2.6
3. a new url, benshead.bhharris.com (I wonder how many people know what the ‘h’ stands for…)
4. a temporary theme, PressRow, until I can come up with something better
5. old posts and comments imported; categories and tags have disappeared, though, for some reason

The hardest decision was to buy bhharris.com and move benshead over to it. I’ve been using learningblogs.org for quite a while, but it never really lived up to its potential. It makes more sense to me to use a domain that is specific to me. Also, the site had become a bit of a spam derelict (see items #1 and #2 above), so perhaps a change will throw them off. The obvious choices (benharris.anything, benjaminharris.anything, etc) were all taken years ago, so I had to be more creative.

Anyway, here we go again.

Also see:

• this picture
• and this one