February 10, 2008 by dragon_788.

“Tools” required:

1 formatted floppy disk

1 USB key or CD-R
1 hour of your time (maybe more, maybe less)

1 trial version of WinImage

1 copy of the DST (Dell Service Tag) utility from a friendly guy’s site

As a project for work my boss wanted me to find a way to set/reset service tags on a few of the (thousand+) Dell PCs the business owns. The main concern was that the motherboards had been replaced and by default come with a blank service tag, and since we use the service tag internally for both warranty tracking as well as asset tracking so having a motherboard that doesn’t have a tag proves difficult to manage and introduces overhead that the big bosses don’t like. Enter Google, I hunt around for a while but can’t really find anything concrete, most places assume that everything BUT the service tag can be changed, until I stumble upon a post in Dell’s own forums alleging a way to change the tags. I read through the post here, and followed the links but didn’t have a floppy handy and really didn’t want to make my fellow interns in other business units have to hunt up a floppy either, so I searched for a way to make the tool run from USB. Read the rest of this entry »

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February 10, 2008 by dragon_788.

I’m not a fan of social networking. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and these other sites generally annoy me more than they interest me, and for more reasons than I can list in a single post. The main issues I have with them are their blatant invasions of my privacy and their loose standards for what consists of “private” data, the recent Myspace picture fiasco is just one example of just how poorly all the users of Myspace, from 10-110 are protected from those who might want to prey upon them. That’s why I found it refreshing that a new site that doesn’t claim to be a social network, but an actual literal FRIENDS network has shown up, and they have gone out of their way to inform users that adding people that you don’t know to your list just because they have a cute picture on their profile is dangerous. So I present to you, iSwirl, the friends network for your phone.

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