I have to be honest, I thought that I stopped being excited by hardware, but it turns out I haven’t.

Check out the picture I took today of all the equipment being used to power the hands-on labs.

I must say I got a little tingle.

So you”ve used DiskPart many times to extend data drives, but are irritated at the limitation of not being able to extend boot partitions.  Well no more, Dell have a utility that can extend all partitions, including boot partitions.

The utility is called ExtPart and can be downloaded here, with the release notes being available here.

It is really simple, just like DiskPart.  After extending the boot volume by adding more disks in the physical world or by extending the vmdk size in the virtual world (see this article for more information) it is a case of a single line in the command prompt.  Simply run ExtPart from the command prompt and type something like:

extpart c: 1024 – where c: is the drive to be extended and 1024 is the value in mb that you wish to extend into.

Genius!

I’m sure that most people are either aware of these documents already or would have stumbled across them at some point.

I was looking for an article that gave me a breakdown of the technology of the Nehalem. I didn’t want a techno deep-dive, but what I did want can be found here.

It shows that technologically the Nehalem effectively brings back HyperThreading by allow dual execution of threads simultaneously. Everyone knows that this doesn’t equal twice the power, but it can mean a significantly more efficient chip.

Below is a graph of the speed enhancements of a 2x workload on the Nehalem chip:

All looks rather tasty over the next few months.