I had just recently purchased a Buffalo external hard drive with 250GB capacity, to hold the photos I’ve been taking with my new Nikon D60 camera. But since the space was there I figured I’d use it for storing my other non-office files as well. That is, until I tried copying a file that was 5GB in size.

I was stumped when Windows told me the disk I was copying into did not have enough space for the 5GB file, which was strange because there was over 200GB left in the drive. A quick search through the Buffalo forums revealed that the drive—connected via the USB port—was formatted in FAT and therefore had the 4GB file size limit. The thing to do was to format the drive into NTSC. Doing this would limit file access to the drive by only Windows XP/Vista systems, but that was what I had anyway. But how could I do that when Windows only lets you format USB drives in FAT?

GetUSB.info taught me how. The illustrated step-by-step on how to format any USB drive as NTFS can be found on THIS PAGE. So if you ever have the same problem as I did, head on down there now.

BUT—and this is a very big but—what if you already have files in the USB drive and you don’t want to erase all that is there by re-formatting? You can convert FAT to NTFS directly by following this guide on Microsoft TechNET. However it requires entering commands into a DOS/command prompt window, so if you’re not comfortable with that, you’re better off finding a computer with enough space to hold what you have on your external USB drive, copy everything off, and do the format as suggested by GetUSB.info.

Happy formatting!

At first glance it looks just like the real ebay site. But a quick look at the URL in the address bar will tell you that this is NOT ebay.

The link says http://www.grandzawiyah.com/state.wa/signin.htm?213rjceirjqexr98rdlkmsanchfrinvc58ucrdjkxnerimjgtmxkjnzmhrugt45ncoirehviuhtrckm45x and you end up here if you happen to have received the spoofed ebay email.

My client got theirs from email address eBay Member: quickshipelectronics [mailto:lindbergjh@hotmail.com] and as usual I checked the URLs embedded in the email. While on the surface the URLs say http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130258573190 the actual destination is http://www.shamick.com/SWF?item=130258573190 which leads you to the URL of the site in the screenshot above.

However, www.shamick.com and www.grandzawiyah.com appear to be legitimate domains and websites — but people with malicious intent may have hijacked a subfolder on their hosting service where the redirect from shamick.com/swf has been placed to lead to the fake ebay landing page above.

So a CAVEAT to all. Check the actual links before you click on them, especially if you know you shouldn’t be getting emails from services you have not signed for. Mouse over the link and then check if the URL that appears in your status bar matches the link and is the actual URL of the service.

A friend introduced me to the CoolIris (formerly known as Piclens) plugin for Firefox and like a giddy nit I downloaded it and plugged it into my spanking new Firefox 3.0.1 installation on this spanking new laptop.

Turned out it was one of the culprits that, with Norton 360 installed, caused programs to turn into zombies in Task Manager after I had closed them. Imagine having five instances of Firefox lined up in the Task Manager Processes list each consuming a minimum of 50,000K and you’ll feel the chill. Add to that other instances of programs that you have already closed, still sitting in Task Manager as running programs, eating up resources that they should have spit out a few seconds after they were closed. Feel your spine tingling now? Mine did, even with 2GB of RAM on this Intel Centrino vPro.

Googling around gave me two solutions. Disable the CoolIris plugin and unregister buShell.dll which is part of Norton 360’s backup component.

For a few minutes I couldn’t uninstall CoolIris through the Addons window in Firefox. Every click on Disable or Uninstall and Restart Firefox I made ended up with the plugin still there and enabled. I had to go into my Firefox Profile folder and delete the darned folders just to get rid of it.

But after the buShell.dll unregistration and the removal of CoolIris, I must report all is well on this installation. According to my research the same effect is caused by the Skype plugin for Firefox as well so if anyone out there is experiencing the problems stated above, look into both CoolIris and the Skype plugin on your Firefox browser.