Belkin Wireless G (F5D7000 v5000) card Windows 7 64-bit

PROBLEM:
You have a Belkin F5D7000 wireless card in your Windows 7 rig, but Windows doesn't have drivers for it.  Belkin has outdated support info that suggests older versions of these cards (v5000) don't have drivers for Windows 7.  This solution should work for both 32 and 64-bit Win7 (though I only used it on 64-bit).

INFO:
Ignore what Belkin support sites say, and don't use any driver files found around the net.  The drivers you want are actually built right in to Windows 7.  The OS just doesn't recognize the card by default, and the drivers are hard to find if you don't know where to look.

SOLUTION (source):

• In start > search type "update" and select update device drivers.  
• Select the appropriate unknown device under network adapters and choose to update it.
• Choose "select driver from list"
• For manufacturer select "Atheros Communications Inc." exactly.
• For device select "Belkin Wireless A/G Desktop Network Card" exactly.
• You should now have access to your wireless adapter. 

Dual Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit

As promised, I installed both operating systems last night.

I put in the windows installer disk and deleted all partitions in it's partition menu.  Then I allocated half the drive to Windows and installed.  The windows OEM installer I used is extremely slow.  It takes more time to get to the first menu than it takes Ubuntu to complete it's installation.

Following the installation of Windows, I installed Ubuntu and selected the "Use Largest Continuous Free Space" option in the partitioner portion of the installer.  Everything works out of the box, and Windows is an option in the bootloader that Linux installs. 


Windows Post-install:   

• Before doing anything else, I recommend installing MS Security Essentials.  It is Microsoft's own virus protection which is constantly updated and completely free.
• An easy and handy tool for installing lots of popular pieces of software quickly without user intervention is ninite.
• Grab all the available updates

Linux Post-install:

• Grab all the available updates.
• Manually get the newest Linux 64-bit flash beta from Adobe.

The dark ages of XP x64 come to a close

Years ago, I built a new PC for myself.  I needed an OS on it, and Linux wasn't working out so well.  I went out and got a cheap copy of XP Pro x64 because I naively thought that it would benefit me somehow.  Well, years down the line I am now wiser and more cynical.  XP Pro x64 is not nearly as widely supported as 32 bit iterations of XP.  iTunes dropped support years ago, Divx has often given me trouble, and even Microsoft themselves refuses to provide a version of MS Security Essentials that will run on this OS.

Fast forward to now, and somehow the antivirussoft.com spyware infected this system after years with no trouble.  In the process of removing it, apps now seem to be unable to avoid crashing shortly after launching no matter what.  I just don't have the strength to put such a poorly supported OS back on and hope for the best.  I also have a rather nice video card that cannot fit in my only other desktop PC, and I damn well expect to be playing StarCraft 2 sometime soon
on that nice video card.  So I just bought an OEM copy of Win7 64-bit Home Premium for this dual-boot gaming/development system for around $104.  I have heard and seen software supporting 64-bit OSes much better from Vista on up, so I feel confident it won't be quite as beta this time around.

As far as Linux and x64, most people were avoiding it over the last couple of years.  I only recently installed it for good on one of my systems and found it to work flawlessly, and the last gripe I had which was the lack of Adobe 64-bit Flash for Linux is now gone.  I am declaring it ready for prime time IMHO.

I am guessing this will be the last MS OS I purchase since Linux has supplanted Windows as the OS I use most often, and my PS3 will be there for most other games.  Anyway, I will likely document the process of the wipe and install since I will be doing a wipe followed by a dual boot install and config of Win7 and Ubuntu with both being x64 editions.  See you soon.

How to migrate blog from wordpress to blogger

I recently started a blog on wordpress.com, but I didn't want to rule out monetization so I had to move the data I had already entered from there to blogspot.com. 

It was very easy to do using this webpage which gives detailed instructions about how to proceed.  You basically export your wordpress blog as xml, upload it to the conversion tool, and then download the converted xml blog data.  Then you import that data into your blogger blog and you are set.

I'm not sure if comments transfer properly as I didn't have any since the blog was so new.  Wordpress blogs have tags and categories whereas blogger blogs only have labels so both tags and categories become labels.  It isn't a big deal since you can customize a label widget to only show links for selected labels (presumably just your categories).