I've signed up to do another Team in Training event this year, I'll be returning to the Milwaukee Chapter cycling team for another go at Americas Most Beautiful Bike ride.  I've been hemming and hawing about it for a couple weeks now, trying to make up my mind on the committment of it, it does tend to take up a lot of your free time for 4 months. And the commitment to raising the funds can be a bit of a gut check. :)

What finally helped me make my decision was at the bike maintenance seminar the coaches put on, introductions were being made and people were talking about their reasons for doing it. There are some new members for the team, and of them 1 is a survivor (believe that makes 4 for our team), 1 lost a family member to leukemia, and another one has a brother that was diagnosed when he was 9, he's now 13.  That's why we do this, thats what this is all about - making a difference for the survivors and for those that have lost loved ones due to a blood born cancer.  It reminded me of the friends, coworkers and others I talked to last year who had been affected by one of them, and of the things they shared with me.  I recalled the stories I heard at the bike ride last year, the people who were there cheering us on, and knowing that I was helping to make a difference.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma society has made a real difference in the battle against these cancers. 2008 marks their 20th anniverary, in those 20 years 360,000 voluneteers have raised over $850 million to be used for education, research, and helping patients and their families.  In 2007 alone they contributed $66.5 million to support more than 396 researchers in 15 different countries.  And it's all through tax deductible donations from people like you - they receive no federal funding.  They've made real progress, but there is more work to be done.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.  If you wish to make an online donation, you can click on the Team in Training image in the top right corner.  On behalf of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, I thank you. 

Compacting a VirtualPC harddrive seems pretty straight forward the first time you do it.  Make sure the drive isn't in use, open up the VPC console, File | Virtual Disk Wizard | Edit Existing Drive | Select the drive | Compact it.   However after running you will probably find that its either stayed the same or increased in size!

If you read the wizard messages (who really does that though?), you'll see that they state you need to zero out the free space first.  A quick search on MSDN shows a KB article the describes how to Prepare a VPC hard drive.

To properly compact a VPC instance, you'll want to follow these steps.  For reference I'm using VirtualPC 2007.

1. Start the VPC instance and defrag the drive to start off.
2. Next click on the CD option on the menu for the VPC instance, select Capture ISO image, navigate to the VPC install directory (program files\Microsoft Virtual PC), and in the Virtual Machine Additions folder there is "Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso".  Open that and it should auto run, compacting the drive(s).
3. When its done, select the CD menu option again and Release (unmount) the ISO.
4. Shut down the Virtual PC instance.
5. In the VPC console, File | Virtual PC wizard | Select the drive you just precompacted | Compact it | Replace or Save original as you desire, and let it run.

Pretty easy once you have the steps, and it can make a big difference in the size of the virtual drive if you're using dynamic drives instead of a fixed sized one.

I wanted to copy an existing laptop to a VirtualPC instance.  It's old and had a number of issues (RAM, Win2000, CPU speed, 20gig HD, USB 1.0, to name a few), but I still need to use some of the development tools on the laptop.  Instead of going thru the hassle of trying to find all of the license keys for the software on this laptop (not sure if we even could), I thought the easiest route would be to make a VPC instance and use that on my Dell desktop that has plenty of RAM and CPU. 

We use VPC for archiving build configurations at TIP extensively and it works like a charm. When you have a build environment that you need to save in case you need to patch old source code, instead trying to make the old source work in the new enviroment (new IDE version, updated 3rd party controls, etc), just create a VPC image with that build configuration.  Then if you need to patch any code, its a breeze - start the VPC instance and your off working with a known environment.

I've never tried to clone a whole hard drive before. The research I did lead me to believe that Ghost was the way to go.  However I quickly ran into some problems going down that route - first off you can't be using the drive when you ghost it.  I wasn't able to create a boot disk as the laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and I ran into issues trying to create a bootable USB or CD with Barts Bootable CD with Networking enabled.   After several hours and much frustration, I came across a newsgroup post that lead me down the correct path, once again I was making it harder than it needed to be.  Here's the easy and cheap (ie. Free) steps I used.  I'm not going to detail the steps as the 2 converters really were quite simple to use.

1. Attach my external 500gig USB drive to the old laptop so I had a place to put the image.
2. Convert the existing drive to virtual with VMWare Converter (free version worked fine).
3. Convert the VMWare image to VPC with VMToolkit converter (free).
4. Copy the image to my desktop system, and use VPC to crete a new virtual machine using the new VHD drive.
5. Boot up the image and fix the PNP warnings for new hardware that came up.  I know some people run into problems with blue screens of death and have to use their Windows Install disks to repair the image, but I didn't have that problem.  It booted just fine, and after a couple driver changes & reboots I was off and running.

The only real hassle with the process is that the laptop only supported USB 1.0, so copying 20gig took a LOOONG time. I started the process before I went to bed and it was finished when I got up.  I did run into one problem while running VMWare Converter, it gave me a warning that the Registry wasn't large enough and I had to restart the process.  It allowed 45mb, so I bumped it to 120mb just to be sure there was enough space so I didn't have to restart a 2nd time.

The next step is to clean up the new VPC and remove the unused programs, then compress the VHD down from its 20gig size.