Chris Wolfe's blog

0x00000051 after Windows 2003 SP1 upgrade

We recently had a client who applied Windows 2003 Server Service Pack 1 on their Dell Poweredge 420SC server. On reboot, they were greeted with the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) with the error message.

STOP 0x00000051 (REGISTRY_ERROR)

The server would then reboot and then do it all again. Safe mode and Last Known good configuration made no difference.

After searching the net, it turns out that this is a known problem on older Dell Poweredges that have had a factory install of Windows on.

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Removing the 16Gb limit in Exchange 2003

Our company supports a number of Exchange servers for our clients and up until recently one of the bug bears we had was the hard encoded 16Gb database limit.

This meant that as soon as the combined total of the users email hit 16Gb, Exchange would shut itself down. There is a way to temporary increase this limit to 17Gb to allow you to delete emails and run the defrag utility to free up dead space but as soon as the server has been rebooted it's not long until it hits 16Gb and the problem returned.

Since these days 16Gb is not a massive amount of data, users send and work with large attachments in some of the industries we deal with and it started to become an issue. However, Microsoft in a rare moment of actually listening to its customers decided to increase this limit to something with a little more headroom.

Hence, from Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 you can set the limit to up to 75Gb. Microsoft decided that having a simple tab in Exchange System Manager to set this limit would be too easy, you have to set it via a registry hack.

Once you install Service Pack 2, the limit is set at 18Gb and you have to choose a new limit depending on storage space you have.

The Keys that need to be changed are for the Private mailboxes:-

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Ulead DVD Factory 5 experience.

Here is a brief note about my recent experience with the trial version of ULead's DVD Factory.
The client who owns a large horse stud farm and wanted to edit and burn her digital videos onto DVD to send to breeders who were interested in her horses.

After spending the morning upgrading her PC with 2Gb RAM, Firewire, 20" widescreen LCD and a 300Gb Hard drive and then proceeded to install the ULead package.

The goal was to have something wizard and step driven that will allow my client, a non-technical person to easily create simple DVDs.

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Mini-Review of Orange SPV M5000

Gadget fever

Gadget upgrade fever is a condition that afflicts most IT people and it did seem an age since my last phone upgrade. In fact, I had been using my Nokia 6630 for almost a year when I started to suffer the familiar tech-envy.

As is the case when deciding the next phone upgrade, which way do you go? Do you stay with the tried and trusted or do you go for something a little different. Since I am a Nokia fanboy, it was the N80 that I coveted.

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Recent Microsoft Update causes Office and Explorer file actions to freeze

A recent MS automatic security update (during the second week of April 06) looks like it might cause problems on machines with HP printer and scanner software installed.

The symptoms are Office apps freezing when you try to save or open files using explorer.

If you take a look in Task Manager and see a process called VERCLSID.EXE then you might be affected. If you have tried multiple times to open or save a file then you will have multiple instances of this process.

To resolve the issue, take a look at the KB article at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918165

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