Archive for February, 2008

Safely Shutting Down and Restarting explorer.exe in Windows XP

I saw a recent article on Lifehacker about cleanly shutting down and restarting explorer.exe in Windows Vista. I gave it a try in XP just for the sake of it, and not surprisingly, it did not work.

I did however find a way to do it in Windows XP that I wanted to share with others.

You can see the full process after the jump.

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A Tale of Two RAID Controllers

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of a working Promise RAID controller, it was the age of a failed Promise RAID controller…

My motherboard has two on board Sata RAID controllers – one Promise FastTrack 378 controller and one Intel ICH5 controller. They are far from enterprise-grade, but they get the job done…most of the time. I began having problems with the ICH5 controller awhile back, where the controller would suddenly “lose” one or both of the drives in my RAID 0 array. Obviously this is a problem, but I stuck with that controller until I couldn’t take it any more.

I finally decided to give up on the Intel controller, so I started shopping around for a new SATA II controller card, capable of RAID 0. I narrowed down my options and settled on a Promise FastTrack TX2300 card, figuring that since my current Promise controller had a good track record, adding another Promise card would be great.

That assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. Let’s just say the card didn’t live up to its “Promise”…

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