AVG on my XP machine at work kept complaining of an “invalid update control CTF file” the last few days, and thanks to a search that led me to this post on the AVG forums,  you just need to nuke the *.ctg files in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\update\download & AVG 8 will update once again!

I am gracious to have witnessed such an historic event take place & be a part of the process.

Raptr went into public beta last week. It’s been a pretty intense several months leading up to the launch, so it’s nice to actually have the cat out of the bag. And maybe I’ll see some daylight finally.

Some decent coverage of the launch:

• Gamers, prepare to Raptr
• Raptr Gaming Network Opens For Private Beta
• Hands-on: Raptr.com, Gamer Social Network
• GDC: Raptr and Rmbr unveil at the Startup Launchpad
• Dennis Fong’s Raptr is innovative gamer social community

I picked up a Christmas tree almost 2 weeks ago, but due to a bunch of other things going on, I didn’t have time to decorate it until a couple days ago.

I have a bunch of hard drives from old PCs that I’ve kept around since I’m a pack rat. I really should just burn what I need to keep onto DVD and recycle of all these tiny-by-today’s-standards 10-40GB hard drives. It’s amazing to think of how much more data you can cram into the same physical drive now a days — a few weeks ago I loaded 4-750 GB drives in our NAS at work. Even my dinky USB thumb drive can hold 4GB. Anybody remember 5.25″ floppies (I was a bit too young to experience the 8″ floppies)? +10,000 points if you had colored floppies, even.

Anyways, I had an old 40GB 7200RPM IBM 75GXP Deskstar , which later came to be known as the IBM 75GXP Deathstar due to their high failure rates. I somehow lucked out and didn’t have one fail on me when it was the primary drive in my PC at the time. Fast forward to the present, and I hooked up the drive to an external USB enclosure to try and find a Word doc that I couldn’t locate elsewhere. The drive spun up but wouldn’t mount in XP. I thought great, it turned into a Deathstar.

I spent hours trying a bunch of different things to get the drive to mount, but no luck. I finally googled around and came across some eBay pages where people were selling the logic board to this drive. Ok, so replacing the logic board was an option. Awesome.

I flipped the drive upside down and took a look at how hard it would be to swap out logic boards. It was then that I noticed that one of the solders connecting the the IDE pins to the logic board was bad & wasn’t making a solid connection. I hooked the drive back up to the enclosure and pressed down on the loose pin (actually the entire row of pins) with the edge of a credit card, and lo and behold the drive mounted. Even better, I was able to find what I was looking for on that drive.