Surgical Words

I’d heard about OpenDNS being significantly faster than stock DNS servers, mostly because of more aggressive caching. I followed their instructions for configuring the service and ran a few queries with dig to see how it performed against my stock Earthlink DNS servers, the venerable itchy and scratchy.

Results after the cut.
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Three days ago, I finally finished reinstalling Windows 2000 on our family machine. What a task. Things that went wrong:

• STOP: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error after installing Service Pack 4
• Continued error after “repair installation” from CD
• STOP: KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR error during a full reinstall from CD

I finally ended up making an illegal copy of my Windows 2000 disc (ironically, using a Mac), which sorted out whatever read errors were occurring and worked much better. I also made my father perform the installation from the fresh CD. He seems to have magic IT fingers. I am not sure which was more effective: a new CD or my father.

More problems:

• Service Pack 4 installer’s “update.exe” crashed, because it had “generated errors”

I fixed this by running the following excellent recovery command with the Windows 2000 CD in the drive:

sfc /scannow

This took about half an hour and solved the Service Pack 4 upgrade issue.

Another failure while installing Flight Simulator 2004: Century of Flight:

• Installer caused a system freeze and silent reboot, with no error message

I solved this by running ScanDisk on the destination drive. It’s scary that a bad block can bring Windows down…

My notes and task list appear after the jump.
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Firefox 3 was released about 30 minutes ago.

Here’s what Internet Health Report has to say:

Isn’t Mozilla located in the Valley?

Update (Tuesday at 7:01pm EST): Also, California legalized same-sex marriage today. Perhaps it had more to do with that.