Ever wanted to clone a windows machine, and run it as a VM? Well, Disk2vhd is the answer.

“Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs).”

In order simplify my home office, I made a snapshot of one of my Windows machines, and now run it on my Mac using VirtualBox. Saves physical space, and keeps me from having to use that Dell I hate.

I struggled to create a report in the snmp-graph.properties file to show Logical Disk Percent Idle, but after some tinkering I got it to work. Here’s how the report looks in the file…

report.sinf.peridletm.name=Logical Disk Percent Idle (SNMP-Inf)
report.sinf.peridletm.columns=sinfLDskPctIdleTm
report.sinf.peridletm.type=sinfLDskInstance
report.sinf.peridletm.propertiesValues=sinfLDskInstance
report.sinf.peridletm.command=–title=”Logical Disk {sinfLDskInstance} Percent Idle (SNMP-Informant)” \
DEF:utilization={rrd1}:sinfLDskPctIdleTm:AVERAGE \
DEF:minUtilization={rrd1}:sinfLDskPctIdleTm:MIN \
DEF:maxUtilization={rrd1}:sinfLDskPctIdleTm:MAX \
LINE2:utilization#ff0000:”% idle.” \
GPRINT:utilization:AVERAGE:”Avg \\: %10.2lf %s” \
GPRINT:utilization:MIN:”Min \\: %10.2lf %s” \
GPRINT:utilization:MAX:”Max \\: %10.2lf %s\\n”

Make sure to put the name of the report in the top of the file. (In this case the name of the report is “peridletm”.

PCAuthority.com.au did a piece on the worst Apple products ever, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with the Apple devices that made their list, I found much of their reasoning unsound.

For example :

In regard to the “Color Classic”…

“It could be argued that this system forced Apple to rethink building screens into systems. Sure it looks very good but it increases the overall cost of the system and limits users to a particular view. Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs.”

Have they not heard of the G3 iMac, or the G4 iMac, or the eMac? Or how about the new iMacs? They all have built-in screens. What “way of the dinosaurs” are they talking about?

Or how about in regard to the QuickTake, Apple’s old-school digital camera?

“In hindsight, we can say that computer companies make for lousy digital camera vendors. The high-end brands we see in the market today are almost all companies that made old-fashioned film cameras…”

What about Sony? They make some of the best digital cameras. And, Kodak – one of the oldest camera companies in the world, makes terrible digital cameras. I think they’re over-simplifying here.

The article has got some great pictures, and takes you back to the crappier era of computing though, so I suggest you check it out.