After it happened several times that e.g. I had to solve a problem on my PC and later, when it occured again, I did not remember how I did it the last, I decided to write something like my personal Wikis. All information of course without any warranty ;).

Installation of a Dual Boot System with Linux and Windows Vista

The task was to install a dual boot system with Linux and Windows Vista. The situation was that my new PC came with Windows Vista pre-installed and I wanted to install Scientific Linux 4.4 in addition. I got it working with the help of this and this link. However, in the following I will describe it more precisely step-by-step what I did, then it is explained on these webpages: After a restart of the computer you will have the option to chose to boot either Windows Vista or Linux.

Ethernet Card with Intel 82562V Chipset under Linux

Although the Intel 82562V does not seem to be an usual chipset for ethernet cards, the card was unfortunately not recognized automatically during installation and no compatible driver was available. Searching the Intel webpage for a driver for the 82562V chipset let me end on this site, leaving me in the belief that I just would have to download this file, to copy it to Linux, to compile it and after adding the line "alias eth0 e100" to /etc/modprobe.conf everything would work fine. Unfortunately this was of course not the case. I just got the error message "device eth0 not found". However, after searching for some hours in various forums, I found that for the chipset 82562V not the driver "e100" is needed but the "e1000" driver which can be found here. After unpacking, compiling/installing (just with typing "make install") and adding the line "alias eth0 e1000" to /etc/modprobe.conf I was able to get a internet connection without any problem! The disadvantage is that one has to re-compile the module everytime the kernel is updated, otherwise the ethernet card will not work.

Recovering of an external Hard Disk

I do not know how it happened, but after plugging my external hard disk in my laptop Windows XP just told me that this disk seems not to be formatted. Plugging it again into my PC gave the same result. Not very happy, but accepting the unavoidable, as I thought, I was going to format the disk and planing to be more carful the next time. However, both XP and Vista only offered me to format the hard disk (250 Gb) as NTFS, which might be a nice file system but unfortunately it is not good if you also want to use the disk from Linux. Searching a bit in the web let me find the tool "h2format" with which one can format even large disks in the FAT format. However, starting the program I got the message that it is only possible to format empty disks from which I concluded that there is still hope. And really, searching a bit more I found a really great program called testdisk which works on several OS (e.g. Windows, Linux, Mac OS). Starting the program from the command line with the option "testdisk -help" gave all relevant information for the use. I just typed afterwards "testdisk e:", where "e:" was the drive letter of the external hard disk and followed the instructions. After checking the disk, what took around 30 min, I had the option to ask for the repairing of the "fstab" of the disk. Afterwards the disk was again recognized by Windows and Linux and it was possible to access the data.

Color corruption in the Photo Gallery of Windows Vista

After I bought a DELL E520 computer which was delivered with pre-installed Vista, I had to discover that my photos showed a yellowness when I opened them in the Photo Gallery of Vista. As long as I only looked at the thumbnails of the photos it was fine. In fact not only the photos showed a yellowness but the whole window of the Photo Gallery had a slight yellow tone and my first guess was that this was shining through my photos causing this strange effect. Other programs did show this effect. Since I was one of the first unlucky guys, who got Vista, I did not find anything at the beginning about this and just hoped that this "bug" would disappear after a one of the regular Windows patches. Of course this never happened. However, after a few months I got Photoshop Elements and also there the colors of my photos looked strange. Not so yellow as in the Photo Gallery but for example the blue sky was more white than blue. After starting a new internet research on this I found the requiered hint ( here). It seems that for some monitors like the DELL Ultrasharp, which I have, but also for some Samsung monitors the installed ICC profile is not working properly.
To fix the problem I did the following:
1) I went to the "Control Panel" and then on "Personalizacion" (I have a Spanish Vista). In the following menu I clicked on "Configuracion de pantalla" (Monitor configuration) and on the opening window on "Advanced Options". The fourth tab of this contains the "Color management" where one can administrate color issues. On the next window I first switched the device to "Monitor", checked the box "Use my own configuration" and removed the default profile from the list. In contrast to the suggestion in the above mentioned link, I added the profile "Adobe RGB" for the monitor. As a consequence the colors were correctly represented in the Photo Gallery and also in Photoshop Elements without any reboot.
PS: I found also a small but brilliant program when I was researching for this color problem. In priniciple I read that it is quite difficult to get something like a calibration for a LCD monitor, but here a freeware program was suggested. It is called Monitor Calibration Wizard and after I tested it, I must say it is really good. There might be better programs on the market, but I am just happy that the blue sky in my photos now look like I had it in mind.

Network Interruption under Vista

Another problem I observed when working under Vista was that I lost my internet connection quite often. Under Windows XP with another computer or even under Scientific Linux on the same PC I never had this problem. Really annoying was that very often a simple restart of the network was not enough but I had to repeat this procedure several times before everything worked again for a while. Stranger was even that sometimes only the connection for the browsers (Firefox and IE7) did not work, but Windows updates or the download of virus definitions seemed to be possible. Once I even could not access anymore a webpage on the localhost (on my PC).
However, I discovered accidentally that it runs at least much, much more stable when I switched off Skype. On the forum of Skype this behavior was already reported, although some deny that this was caused by Skype. Well, fact is that Skype is still not approved for Windows Vista although it seems to run. If anybody observed the same behavior I would be happy about some feedback.