As I am starting to get a little more active with my blog, although granted this has taken a little while, I noticed that I am starting to get a lot of blog spam from all sorts of sites and this is starting to get rather annoying.

So after doing a bit of research I can across an extension to BlogEngine.NET developed by Justin Etheredge, using the Akismet API for C#. Justin Chase from Microsoft Expression team has an excellent blog post with step-by-step instructions on how to get this set up so need to duplicate here.

Time will tell the effectiveness of this extension, but something has to be done to stop this web annoyance.

Having a bit of down time between projects and rebuilding my work laptop made me think that my home machine needed rev'ing so I had a look to see what I could do to speed up my machine. I have a Dell Inspiron 530 that I bought last year for the tidy sum of £500. I decided to go with this machine as the reviews were pretty good and at the time Dell were doing a deal to include a 22" monitor. I toyed with the idea of getting a Mac but to get the same kind of spec was around £1.3k and so I left this for another time when finances were a bit better.

The spec of the Dell is pretty good with an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 Processor, a 600GB hard drive but it only has 3GB of RAM. So I thought that seeing Windows 7 is now available and after checking my motherboard supports 64 bit, I decided to upgrade the RAM and rebuild joining the 64 bit world. This is where the fun started.

Looking at the detailed specs from the Dell site for my machine, it appeared to suggest that the maximum amout of RAM supported was in fact 4GB?

Now this seemed a bit odd as as the motherboard supports 8GB so I did a bit of a search in bing (I am trying this out to try to break the google habit which I must admit is extremly hard!) and came across this blog post by Ed Bott on exactly this same issue. It turns out that my lovely little Dell may well support more than 4GB. There did seem to be a lot of discussions around having the right bios so before I did anything, I upgraded to version 1.0.18

I bought some of the right RAM from Crucial (a single 2GB, 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-640 ) and then installed Windows 7 64 bit. After install, I simply removed one of the existing 512MB modules and slotted in the new RAM module and Windows 7 had no problem seeing the new memory.

Now I know this all works, I am safe in the knowledge that I can replace the RAM with 2 GB modules when I need to. As a final note, and reiterating what Ed says about "Don’t believe everything you read" - even Crucial seem to suggest you can't install more than 4 GB even after putting in the additional memory shows up using their hardware scan!

I guess the lesson here is that sometimes you need to digg a bit deeper than the specification.

So my recent project has come to an end and I leave my collegues at McLaren to finish the project I started 18 months ago, developing and releasing SQL Race.

I was working there as the Technical Team lead and had the pleasure to work with quite a few talented people along the way from both EMC Consulting and McLaren. Rob Henry, Simon Munro, David Portas (SQL MVP), Peter Worthington (coding legend) and Simon Knightly all helped me to continue to learn about C#, .NET 3.5 and SQL Server in more depth than I thought possible. A seriously talented bunch of guys.

I must say that this last project has been a dream to work on and McLaren is a fantastic place to work. If you want to know a bit more about how this project has become a benchmark for the use of SQL Server 2008 and performance, more information can be found in this case study by Microsoft and on the McLaren website.