Blog for U's Bargain Network

Do you use twitter everyday? Do you add friends to your Twitter account everyday? Are you tired? Have you ever thought about automate the process?

Yep. There are tons of tools available to consolidate your Twitter account. TwitterGIFT is one of them. It can help you to add more followers daily without your time and searching. It searches the Twitter database and pull a pool of targeted followers and then following them first. Follow the link to download a copy and try it. You will definitely love it.

Enjoy your exploration. TwitterGIFT is ideal tool for small business to gain web traffic through Twitter.

ASUS provides your a DVD recovery disk for your EEE BOX machine, which does not have CD/DVD drive. When something of your OS goes wrong, you have to plug in a CD/DVD drive to run the recovery DVD to get Windows recovered. It happened that I do not have a portable CD/DVD drive available. How can I install the Windows OS without pluging in a Cd/DVD drive? The answer is it is not easy but you can do it. A step by step instruction is given here.

1 Software needed

- Ultra ISO Creator Version 9 Trial  from  http://www.ezbsystems.com/ultraiso/download.htm
- A USB flash drive with at least 2 GB free space
- a XP computer with DVD drive and USB 2.0  port
- Asus EEE Recovery DVD
- Optional  (to avoid working with original DVD) : a program to create the bootable ISO of your Recovery DVD. I used  LCIsoCreator.exe  from http://www.lucersoft.com/freeware.php
- PeToUSB

2 Create an ISO file from the ASUS original Recovery DVD

a ) Unzip  the  file LcIsoCreator.zip in a folder of your choice
b) Insert Asus EEE Recovery DVD into the drive
c) Launch LcIsoCreator.exe, select the DVD unit and click on  Create ISO. Type the file for your iso image , for example : EEE.iso

3a Create your bootable Asus EEE USB flash drive (using Ultra ISO)

a) Install Ultra ISO with default settings
b) Launch UltraISO, click on Continue to Try ..
c) If you decided to work using an iso image instead of the physical DVD mount the iso image on a virtual DVD (Tools / Mount to drive  (F6)). You can  also mount it using another tool such Daemon tool if you prefer it.
d) From menu select  File / Open CD/DVD e select the DVD drive of the Asus EEE Recovery DVD (physical or virtual depending on your previous choices)
e) Insert your USB pen into an USB port
f) From menu select Bootable  / Write Disk Image. on Disk Drive select the USB pen drive, on Image File you should have already the DVD drive, on Write Method select USB-HDD.
g) Click on Xpress Boot and wait the image creation. It will take about 30 minutes

3b Create your bootable Asus EEE USB flash drive (using PeToUSB)

a) Unzip PeToUSB to a folder
b) Connect a USB Flash Drive with at least 2GB of storage to your PC and start PeToUSB
c) The USB flash drive should show up under Destination Drive. Check USB Removable, Enable Disk Format and Enable File Copy
d) Finally browse to the Source Path of the EEE.iso created in the second step
e) Click “Start” button and answer the following two questions “Continue?” with “Yes”. All existing volumes and data will be lost!
Depending on the write speed of your USB Flash drive it may take a while to copy all EEE.iso files.
f) If everything goes well, the message “Operation Completed Successfully!” should appear. Click “OK” and close PeToUSB.

4 Modify WINPE.ISO to Choose Symantec Ghost as start application

a) Use Ultra ISO open WINPE.ISO on the USB falsh drive
b) Navigate to I386\SYSTEM32\ and find WINPESHL.INI
c) Extract this file to your hard drive
d) Open the file WINPESHL.INI and change …

[launchApp]
AppPath=x:\EPCRecover.exe

… to …

[launchApp]
AppPath=x:\GHOST32.EXE

… and save the changes

e) Copy this file back to I386\SYSTEM32\ in UltraISO
f) Save your modification to the USB flash drive
In addition, please also copy all content in the ASUS drive CD to the USB flash drive. You need it once the Widnows is installed.

5 Recovery process

a) Connect the USB Flash Drive to your Eee PC and turn on the Eee
b) Press “Delete” at the boot screen and you will be able to open BIOS setup page
c) Go to Boot tab and set the Hard Drive to USB flash and set it to first priority drive
d) After booting from USB Flash Drive, WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment) should start and finally Symantec Ghost
e) Click “OK” and then “Local > Disk > From Image”. From the pulldown menu on the top choose your USB Flash Drive. It should be drive X:, because Windows assigned this drive letter during boot up. From here you can choose the image file ASUS.GHO.
f) Now you have to select the destination drive. Of course this should be the Eee BOX hard drive
g) The next window will show you the destination drive details. Here you can change the partition layout or just click “OK” to keep the default settings.
h) The ghost image ASUS.GHO was password protected. You have to use the password “mbrcd” to proceed. There will be one last question “Proceed with disk restore?”. If you click “Yes”, the process will be started

6 Install and setting your Windows

It was a big pain to install Windows and set up all things. It took hours to complete. After Windows installation is done, you can navigate the ASUS drive folder on your USB flash drive and start the setup program. It will automatically install all drivers for you.

Now it is time to enjoy your brand new EEE BOX.

Back to the same time last year, ASUS’s EEE BOX, the world smallest desktop PC, got into the market. I bought one and used it as a regular pc at home. Its performance as a home pc, especially for web surfing and light document editing, is very good. It is quiet and use much less power as regular pc. I leave it on all the time.

Because its size and excellent performance, I bought another one from NewEgg. Based my experience in computer software and hardware, I bought a open box with Linux OS. It costed me about $200 bucks. I got it in a few days. The original OS was ugly. I toally do not like it. That is probably why people return this fantastic PC.

What I do next was to go Ubuntu’s official website and download the lasted Ubuntu Desktop version and install it to the EEE BOX machine. It works flawlessly and performs excellent. I am really glad to have this Open Box EEE BOX machine.  More often, NewEgg will sell Open Box products in very low price. If you know what you buy and can work out excellent solution, go for it.

Enjoying your deal hunting by visiting U’s Bargain Network frequently.

Dear friends, the brand new interface of the U’s Bargain Network has been rolled out recently. There are more merchants and deals available too. Hope you enjoy deal hunting and wish you save money everyday. Provide your suggestions and ideas about the new interface. We are here to help you find the best deals or bargains on the planet.

We are working on developing new site interface for several weeks. It is almost done. We are expecting to release it in next couple of weeks. If you want to have a peek of the new interface. Click here. Remember it is not complete yet. So you will encounter broken links or some other bugs. If you like, please report bugs back to us. Post your opinions here to share with us. We will appreciate your time and generous.

Install the Share/Save WordPress plugin today. It works flawlessly with the sysytem. Please use the button to share our posts with your friends or submit them to social network service sites, such as Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, MySpace etc. Thanks.

Since the new WordPress version is relaesed today. The blog still is pretty young. I decided to upgrade to the lastest version reight way. The upgrade was smooth and easier. Here lists the simple steps:

• Just downloaded the new version to server and unzip the package to a folder.
• Then just copy the wp-config.php file from the earlier installation to the new folder.
• Then move the older files under installation folder to somewhere and move the files in the new version to the installation folder.
• In your browser enter the following address “blog domain name/wp-admin” and click upgrade database
• Then you can use your blog in the new version without any problem.

One thing you have to pay attention is you could get blank page if you use customized theme or other third party theme other than the default. If that is the case, you just simply reinstall the theme you used before. It should works fine.

I read an article talking about how to get meaningful permalink structure for blogs. Based on that article, I redefined the blog’s permalink. At first, the permalink did not work and always bring me to the 404 page. Search blog posts about how to fix WordPress permalink 404 not found error. End up the following commands on Ubuntu server should be executed to make the permalink work.

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Linksys WRT54GL router is an excellent router, robust and stable with strong signal. I like this router very much. It performs even better if you can manage to flash it with a third party firmware, DD-WRT. Here is some experience about flashing this router with DD-WRT.

First visit DD-WRT at http://www.dd-wrt.com/ to learn more about the router and the firmware. Click “supported hardware” and enter “wrt54gl” and clik the router link in the search result. It will lead you to a firmware page with multiple versions avaialble, see below.

Since WRT54GL has 4MB flash memory, you can select Min Generic and upgrade it directly through the router’s user interface. The best way to do it correctly, you need exactly follow the steps described in the following page: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G/GL/GS/GX.

After the router was flashed with DD-WRT, it runs smoothly for a long time without any reboot. It totally change our view and ways to use router. Before I own this WRT54GL router, I have used USR 5461 router for more than two years. I had to reboot it from time to time to keep internet running, especially, after I upgraded the router’s firmware to the latest. It got worse. I decided to tried other routers, particularly, gigabit N router. I bought two of these kind of routers and tested them. No of them works well. The worst one is ZyXel wireless N router. I totally ruined my network, disconneted me in several minutes interval. I was so disappointed and went to online and searched for robust router, finnally got Linksys WRT54GL router. I am really happy to purchase this router. By upgrading it with DD-WRT firmware, the router became the best router ever.

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