Geeks and the City

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It’s no secret that sometimes male geeks don’t quite get into the same culture that non-geek women enjoy, such as HBO’s upcoming Sex and the City movie. To help investigate this strange and alien world, Geek Squad agents Ish Matos and Donald Barthelemy boarded one of many Sex and the City guided tours that take fans through the same locations featured in the series.

Fortunately, no agents were harmed during the making of this video.

Mysterious iPhone Line Forms at Apple Store

Engagdet.com is reporting that a line has formed at the 5th Avenue Apple Store for no official reason and has photos of the queue posted to prove it.

While rumors about a 3G iPhone have become rampant across the Internet, it’s likely that this is, as one of the comments posted on Engagdet suggests, a stunt put on by Improve Everywhere.

Hey Wait … Isn’t That Meister in the New York Times?

The New York Times had a Small Business section today with an article entitled You Can Call for I.T. Help Without Hiring a Whole Crew that talks about computer support options for those smaller organizations that can’t hire a full or even part time technical support person.

From the article:

Amy Wright, a collision repair consultant who works from her home in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, had Geek Squad set up her computer and digital camera and the wireless Internet connection in her home office, as well as the Sony video recorder her husband uses. When it came time to upgrade her computers, printers and monitors, she spent about $2,800 at Best Buy.

“You can call them for help, but you don’t have to have them on a full-time basis,” Ms. Wright said of Geek Squad.

It’s definitely a little weird seeing your photo in a major newspaper, but I’m glad I got the chance.

Greetings Three Cards at a Time

I came across Tripletz.com today, which offers a neat way to send a different kind of message to your friends and family than the usual greetings card.

For $4.99, you can have three customized cards sent on three consecutive days to anyone. The cards can use either your own customized message to be spread out over those three days, or you can use any of the designs submitted by other users of the service.

AMD HP Pavilion PCs and Windows XP Service Pack 3

I came across an issue today with an HP Pavilion desktop PC with an AMD processor that displayed a BSOD error message after it was updated to Windows XP Service Pack 3.

I found the resolution here, which involved booting into Safe Mode and changing a registry setting that was causing the system to load incompatible Intel drivers due to a mistake on HP’s part.

There are two ways to fix the issue, both of which will require the system be booted into Safe Mode.

Non-Regedit Fix:

  1. Start system in Safe Mode.
  2. Click on the Start button.
  3. Click on Run.
  4. Type “sc config intelppm start= disabled“. (note the space after the = sign)
  5. Click OK.
  6. Reboot.

Regedit Fix:

  1. Start system in Safe Mode.
  2. Click on the Start button.
  3. Click on Run.
  4. Type “regedit”.
  5. Click OK.
  6. In Regedit, locate and click on the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm“.
  7. Click on “Start” entry in the right pane and click Modify.
  8. Change the value from “1” to “4”.
  9. Click OK.
  10. Exit Regedit.
  11. Reboot the system.

After the reboot, everything worked fine. For some reason, the Intel service was set to start, causing issues on the AMD-based system.