Daz’s bits and bobs

Getting the KMS count up over the initial threshold is a pain when you only have one server or one workstation to start with. Typically you need at least 5 servers or 25 client machine requesting activation before it will work.

This guy here as created a nice .exe that will trick KMS into thinking it has received all the required requests…

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/39665-KMS-Client-Emulator-for-Increasing-KMS-Server-Client-Count

KMS Client

Run this elevated command to find out;

powercfg /requests

There are some good windows web proxies about. The only problem with them is they sometimes dont natively act as a transparent proxy. i.e. typically you’ll need to set your client machines to a specific IP and port.

I’ve used squid historically when setting up transparent proxies (mainly since it actually has a transparent mode) and this has worked well. Recently i thought i’d have a go at some of the windows solutions to see how they pan out.

netsh is going to be the tool to assist in this case. Here is a typical use for netsh;

netsh

>add v4tov4 listenport=80 connectaddress=127.0.0.1  connectport=8080

This should grab all traffic that hits your machine bound for port 80 and redirect to port 8080.

You’ll also need to make sure that routing is enabled, so your machine can act as a gateway between the requests and the real outbound gateway (typically your dsl modem)

Want to move your current disk image onto a SSD drive?

Quick, easy and free. Also aligns disk sectors :)

1. Tidy up your current HDD – delete / move any unneeded items to an archive disk
2. Shrink the C volume to under the size of the SSD (you do not need to shrink as small as possible, just shrink just under SSD size)
3. Run Windows Backup (win7 backup is very good, i.e. image backup) onto external USB Drive
4. Remove your current HDD and install SSD
5. Restore via Windows Backup — Boot install DVD, and choose Repair your computer, then select recover from windows backup image (use the image you backed up onto your USB drive).
6. Reboot, then expand the C volume to consume the full space of the SSD

Done.

Quick way to check that TRIM has also been enabled;

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If the result is ’0′ TRIM is enabled.

I’ve run through this exercise again – my old findings here

4 x 500 WD Black drives — in one big RAID 0 (128K blocks)

and again only using 500GB of capacity (roughly 1/4 of each of the drives)