If you ever fail to create a bare metal backup using wbadmin for Windows 2008 R2 due to the fact that the Windows system files resides on the FAT32 partition that is factory created by Dell, and you do not want to convert it to NTFS, follow these steps:

• Open cmd.exe

• Run:

  bcdboot c:\windows /s C:
  

  where C: is the target drive where the system files should reside for booting

• Mark the C: partition as active using Disk Management
• Reboot

• If you run HyperV it will fail. Open cmd.exe. Then run:

  bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto
  

• Reboot.

I generally do not comment on product releases, but this is a special case. pfSense is a software firewall. It is like IPCop, Endian, M0n0wall etc., just…. better. I've been testing their BETA versions for the 2.0 branch for the better part of the past 2 years on no less than 10 different sites, and have been mightily impressed with the power and user friendliness.

Go get it from here.

I have a Windows 7 Professional x64 machine, fully patched. Screen card is nVidia GeForce GTX 295. This card gets really hot, so initially when playing StarCraft II Wings Of Liberty I assumed it was crashing (sometimes 2-3 times in an hour) due to heat, as the sound still played, the screen went black and the machine was still pingable. Though I could not remotely connect to the machine or Ctrl+Alt+Del it, it needed a hard reset. This seemed consistent with the display adapter turning itself off to protect itself from heat, then being unable to reinitialise itself when it cooled down and causing the freeze.

I added a huge external fan temporarily, but it made no difference. In the end I found the problem - I had to revert to the Microsoft nVidia drivers, as any nVidia driver I installed from nVidia themselves caused the machine to crash.