James O'Neill has an awesome post on why you should learn PowerShell now or get left behind. I have been advocating at work for a while now and his is a great post on the importance of getting on the band wagon now.

When v2 was released last week I tossed this email notification and quick links together for my co-workers.

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PowerShell v2 is the native scripting and management shell for Windows 7 and Windows 2008r2. Last week, Microsoft released versions for Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003sp2 and Server 2008sp2. They have released it under the title of Windows Management Framework which is made up of;
• Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0
• Windows PowerShell 2.0
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 4.0

Microsoft added PowerShell as part of their Common Engineering Criteria for all server based products as of 2009 so it’s something to be aware of going forward for all their products.

The announcement on the PowerShell team blog is here;
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2009/10/27/windows-management-f...

The software, and links to documentation, can be found here;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968929

Some articles on the differences can be found on the Hey Scripting Guys website;
http://blogs.technet.com/heyscriptingguy/archive/2009/10/26/hey-scriptin...
http://blogs.technet.com/heyscriptingguy/archive/2009/10/27/hey-scriptin...
http://blogs.technet.com/heyscriptingguy/archive/2009/10/28/hey-scriptin...

A very good, and free, ebook can be found online and as a pdf here;
http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/

While PowerShell v2 comes with a nice editor, there are a lot of things I still use Notepad++ for and there is a great syntax highlighting lexer that can be found here;
http://poshcode.org/notepad++lexer/

Have fun playing with this great tool.

So, last week we had a storm. My UPS's were beeping so I got up and shut down my systems. The next evening when I got home I came to discover my system wouldn't boot up. Trial and error seem to indicate a power supply issue. Off to Fry's and one Antec 650 Watt power supply later my system was powering up.

My son then asked what was wrong with his system.... The system that was working before we left for Fry's. Nice boot screen with the white on black letters, "Hard disk failure, insert boot disk to continue". Oh joy. Found a hard disk on the shelf, started to load the OS. System died. Sigh. Dug another old system out (his was a P500) and loaded it up. Yay! It works. All he needs to do is surf the kids sites and his game.

Back to mine. Power up but no video, error codes are mysterious. Eventual conclusion, when the power supply went so did my motherboard and CPU. Back to Fry's.

Picked up an Intel motherboard and CPU, CPU fan. Got it all assembled. OS loaded. YAY! Back online. Fire up World of Warcraft, spontaneous reboot. What?!

Eventual testing leads to the ever popular memtest. Memtest runs great for a while but eventually the system just locks up. I am hoping that it is a memory problem as replacing the motherboard again is going to be a serious pain . Off to Fry's with the memory and receipt.

[update - New memory seems to have fixed the random reboot issues with the new system parts]

I own and use Windows based PC's. I use Windows for work and to play games. While enjoying the various ads from Apple I could not help but notice many inaccuracies in the various commercials. A friend sent me this article by Charlie Brooker on his take of the British commercial campaign which I found dead on.

One memorable quote;

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension.

There's more but you should go read the article for it, unless you're a Mac owner. :)