I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

As I was telling you in my previous post, we’ve recently launched a new local ITPro community. What I haven’t insisted on in that post is some of the technical details behind it, so I’m going to start doing it now.

First things first: the site is hosted on a Windows 2008 R2 Server with an IIS7.5/MSSQL 2008 back-end, and on top of that lies a deployment of Telligent’s trademark product called Telligent Community, which is an amazing and robust product in itself, and it’s the community/forum/blog platform of choice for Microsoft, Dell and many others. So, if you’ve ever been on their forums or blogs, this is what they’re running.

But even with it’s blog/forum/wiki modules, it still lacks an essential feature: a calendar/event module, which is definitely a major gap in the standard deployment of the product (you can get it as an additional module, but it’s not in the main product). And for any community, organized events (be they online or offline) are most likely one of its core activities, and a way to let everyone in the community know what happens when (and where) is essential.

This is where the guys at 4 Roads and their cool TC plugins come in. In particular, they’ve been very generous in providing our new community with their social calendaring plugin for Telligent Community, Chronos. We’ve been using their Chronos for TC 5.6 for more than a month now, and I have to admit we’ve been very happy with it.

Out of all the cool features Chronos comes with I would point out the ability to map the event locations using Google Maps, the RSVP support (somewhat similar to what you have on Facebook events), event comments, RSS/iCal support, color-coded event categories (for instance, you can use different colors for offline meetings and online webcasts/webinars), recurring events and event privacy levels (e.g. Private, Friends, Group, Public).

Even with all the features, the one thing I simply love about Chronos is that the team developing it is extremely responsive and has definitely included our feedback on their product in the roadmap for its future releases. It’s one thing to use a good product that simply makes your life easier, and it’s a whole different thing when you know your feedback can actually shape future releases of that product.

P.S. We’re also looking at testing out their latest release of their social integration framework, Nexus very soon, and by the looks of it, it should be a great addition to our website.

For those of you who don’t have access to the Windows 7 RC via TechNet/MSDN and are still waiting for the May 5th public release of Windows 7 RC (build 7100), Windows 7 RC is out, but you should know that you won’t be able to upgrade your January build 7000 beta in-place (or any build prior to 7077 for that matter), but you will in fact be asked to perform a clean install.

Long story short, the Windows 7 RC (7100) will only allow upgrades from build 7077 upwards. For any older builds, running the upgrade from the DVD will simply not work.

The solution for this is pretty simple:

1. Download Windows 7 RC build 7100 .iso

2. Burn ISO on DVD (or use any ISO file mounting tool) and then copy all files & folders to your HDD

3. Now access the “sources” directory within the location where you copied the Windows 7 files & folders

4. Open the file cversion.ini in your favourite text editor (e.g. Notepad)

5. Replace the minclient value from 7077 to any lower build for e.g 7077 to 7000 (just make sure that the number is equal to or lower than the current build you’re running)

6. Save the file cversion.ini

7. Run the installer from the copied directory

And voila!

The above steps will most likely be required for an RC to RTM upgrade installation as well.

Oh, and on a funny note, this is taken from the RC download page itself:

Remember expiration dates: Please plan ahead for the Beta and RC expiration dates. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to rebuild your test machine using a valid version of Windows before the software expires. Windows will notify you that the expiration process is beginning and two weeks later your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. The Beta expires on August 1, 2009, and bi-hourly shutdowns will begin July 1, 2009. The RC will expire June 1, 2010, and the bi-hourly shutdowns will begin on March 1, 2010. In both cases, you’ll need to rebuild your test PC to replace the OS and reinstall all your programs and data.

When you have a computer with a recent model CPU, chances are it’s a dual-core (or quad-core) CPU. Both Intel & AMD have been producing dual core CPU’s for a few years now. By default, Windows Vista will only use a single core during boot-up. And you can easily change how many cores are used on boot from the System Configuration utility:

1. In Vista’s Start Search type msconfig & hit the [Enter] key on your keyboard

2. Once System Configuration has started, select the Boot tab

3. Select the No GUI option (this removes the loading screen – it will just give you a static screen instead)

4. Now click on the Advanced Options dialog, check the “Number of processors” check box, and choose 2 (or 4 if you have quad-core) for the number of processors

5. Click OK twice

Now try and check if you notice any differences. Although, in my case, I think the real “speed-up” only comes from the NO-GUI option, which in itself is designed to be less of a performance hog than it might seem.

Finally! I’ve had this annoying problem the past few days, where my Windows Vista machine would just misbehave when it came to my internet connection – and since I found the solution, I decided to share it. The thing is, all of a sudden, I would start getting “Page not found” errors in my browser, even though the connection was up and all the hosts responded to ping. I started digging for answers, and I found out that this issue was related to the TCP/IP stack Winsock settings, which may get corrupted, causing errors and problems with Internet connectivity.

Corrupt Winsock or Windows sockets configuration can be due to a lot of reasons (such as installation of a networking software, or due to virus, trojan or malware infection, or sometime even due to disinfection of spyware by security software). I did install quite a few networking tools lately, while trying out some security audit solutions – so that might have been it.

Anyhow, when Winsock corrupts, the networking errors that you may face include unable to surf the Internet with “Page cannot be displayed” error message in the browser, even though the DSL/ADSL/cable Internet connection is connected. Apparently sometimes, Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service is terminated as well.

To repair and reset the Windows Vista Winsock Catalog:

1. Click on Start button.
2. Type Cmd in the Start Search text box.
3. Press Ctrl-Shift-ENTER keyboard shortcut to run Command Prompt as Administrator. You will need to allow the elevation request. If the Ctrl-Shift-ENTER combo doesn’t help, you can click START, type “cmd” and then right click the “cmd.exe” that shows up in the search results list, then click on “Run as Administrator”.
4. Type netsh winsock reset in the Command Prompt shell, and then press the Enter key.
5. Restart the computer.

What netsh winsock reset command does is it resets the Winsock Catalog to a clean state or default configuration. It removes all Winsock LSP (Layered Service Providers) previously installed, including the potential malfunctioned LSP that causes loss of network packets transmission failure. So all previously-installed LSPs must be reinstalled. This command does not affect Winsock Name Space Provider entries.

Note: To check which LSPs installed on your Vista system, you can use netsh winsock show catalog command (in an elevated command prompt).