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I have an older HP Compaq tc4200 Tablet PC.  I like it.  If you’ve never used a tablet before, where you can opt to use a pen for input, you should try one.  It’s great for applications that are primarily mouse click driven, like browsing the Intertubes or doing practice exams.

I recently reloaded mine with Windows 7, which was ridiculously easy.  Windows 7 runs no slower on it, and perhaps a bit faster.  Windows 7 natively loads all required drivers, so you won’t spend hours looking for the NIC driver or whatever for this model.  I like Windows 7.

Still as an older machine, it’s a bit slow.  The hard drive seems to thrash.  People say that replacing the internal hard drive with an inexpensive solid state drive (SSD) helps.  Will it make any real difference?  Yes.  I did it, and I’m glad I did.

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Recently a faculty member got a grant to buy a small GPU based computing cluster.  He wound up buying a ServMax PSC-2n from AMAX.  It came loaded with Debian.  It has four NVIDIA Tesla 2050 GPU cards in it.  That’s four times 448 cores per card = 1792 GPU cores in a workstation form factor.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

This was my second try at 070-643, and I passed!  Yay!  I was beginning to doubt my super-powers.

What was different?  I went slower.  Read the book again.  Took the practice tests over and over again until I was blue in the face.  Actually fiddled with some of the technology on my own.  Not much different, actually.

There’s a lot of buzz about the Zettabyte File System from Sun Oracle, which has been included for a while in both Solaris and OpenSolaris.  (Distributions based on Opensolaris like Nexenta have it.  Also some BSD distributions have it).

In general, file systems are not exactly glamorous.  HFS?  UFS? VxVM?  Who cares.  It’s a file system, right?

ZFS has some serious juicy goodness.  Personally, I think as time goes on, you’ll see more and more ZFS (or at least ZFS-like file systems) used on production servers, especially file servers.  Like NexentaStor.

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I didn’t pass.  I’ve never had such issues with any other exams before.  These Microsoft tests are tough!  Studying the official Microsoft Press books, and taking practice tests from the official Microsoft recommended practice test vendors is apparently not enough.

I read the book for this exam multiple times.  I painstakingly did all the labs.  This book does not cover test topics to the same depth and detail as you see them in the test.

I took the practice tests over and over again until I had all the questions memorized and repeatedly got perfect scores on them.  The actual test is unfortunately not a whole lot like the practice exams.

Oh well, Microsoft has their Second Shot program going right now, so retakes are free.  The program expires at the end of June 2010, so I will have to do the retakes soon.