Infra

OK, I admit... It's been a while since I put together a PC. But this is really too weird. At startup, even before having an OS installed, there was a tremendous delay when the BIOS tried to detect the IDE devices. Just two, a hard disk drive on the primary and a CDROM on the secondary. How hard can that be to detect?

Well appearently very hard, because the waiting started to bother me from the first boot I had to make. So you start tweaking the BIOS settings. The BIOS Optimization Guide seemed a good place to start. But allas, whatever I tried it was of no use.

Hours later, after searching the web for known issues with my drives and/or mobo, I finally keyed the right phrase into google and asked 'slow boot in bios'. And there my answer was, only one click and some scrolling away. Googles first result, opened a discussion thread called 'Slow Booting' and hidden under 'Response Number 6' I found what I was looking for.

Hold on: the jumpers on the IDE devices need to be set to cable select. The setting master is not good enough anymore. Why, why, WHY!?

Something a lot of developers crave for, is to be able to run multiple websites in IIS on a WinXP Pro machine. I always thought this to be impossible... But there is (sort of) a solution. You can achieve to have multiple websites on WinXP Pro, with one drawback: only one website can run at a time. How?

Open a command window and type:

The first command creates a new virtual server in the IIS metabase. The second command copies all the necessary meta data from your default Web site to the new Web site to make it work properly.

Thanks to Steven M. Cohn.