The TP-Link TG-3468 is a cheap PCI Express (1x) gigabit network card currently retailing for £5.98 on Amazon UK, the question i was wondering when purchasing the TP-Link TG-3468 was is this network card actually any good? The TP-Link TG-3468 appeared to get generally positive reviews on Amazon, however some of them did contradict each other. To cut a long story short it works fantastic on Windows 8.1 x64, however read on if your wanting to know a little more. Installing the TP-Link TG-3468 Network Adapter Really its quite hard to say anything here other than it just works, i placed the TP-Link TG-3468 in a spare PCI express slot, power on my PC and that was that. Windows 8.1 booted and i had a network connection as soon as Windows had booted to the desktop. I didn’t have to even download any drivers. Windows 8.1 recognised the TP-Link TG-3468 as a Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller and installed a driver from the 10/05/2013.   Drivers on a CD included with the TP-Link TG-3468 support Windows XP, Vista (32bit and 64bit editions), Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit editions), however any Windows OS after XP will simply have drivers or download them from Windows Update. So needless to…

Unlocking The Asus Transformer Prime TF201 on Jellybean 4.1.1 This tutorial will show you how to unlock the bootloader on the Asus Transformer Prime TF201 Tablet, running Android 4.1.1 jellybean, along with backing up your blobs and enabling nvflash. You can just unlock the bootloader and happily go about flashing roms, however if you brick your tablet you have no way to then recover. Now that the AndroidRoot team have given us the tools required to gain access to our blobs and nvflash we would be silly not to back them up at the same time. If the worst did happen and you brick your Transformer Prime TF201 at a later date, you can then recvover it and are not left with an expensive paper weight. The information in this tutorial is based on the excellent work by the AndroidRoot team over at: https://www.androidroot.mobi/pages/guides/tegra3-guide-nvflash-jellybean/  I have simply covered the whole process from the initial unlocking, to backing up our blobs and finally gaining nvflash access. In this tutorial i use Windows 8, however you will be able to follow this perfectly on Windows 7, and earlier versions of Windows too. Unlocking the Transformer Prime TF201 on Jellybean 4.1.1 To get started we are…

Why create a ESXi Bootable Flash Drive on Windows? Lets be honest, I personally find burning a disc to install something a waste these days, chances are you might not even have an optical drive in your main computer any more if your anything like me. Creating a bootable usb flash drive to install VMware ESXi from on Windows is easy thanks to UNetbootin. UNetbootin allows you to create bootable usb drives for Linux distributions without burning a CD. I find this tool very handy now as more computers and servers are running without CD drives, plus its a lot quicker to transfer the contents of an ISO to a USB drive then it is to burn a disc! Creating a VMware ESXi Bootable Flash Drive on Windows: Firstly Download UNetBootin Connect the usb flash drive you wish to use as your VMware ESXi Bootable Flash to your computer, note this process will erase the contents of the flash drive. Load UNetBootin and select the diskimage radiobox, choose ISO, then select the ISO you want to use. Below select the type as a USB Drive, then finally choose the drive letter of your USB Memory stick, for myself this was F:\ Click Go  The…

Why do you need to add drivers to a VMware ESXi ISO? VMware ESXi 5.5 was recently released, unfortunately ESXi 5.5 removed a lot of drivers for previously supported hardware. The drivers for the hardware that were removed still work fine on ESXi 5.5, you will just need to add the drivers for your hardware to the ISO before installing. A lot of methods exist for adding ISO’s on Linux, however for Windows users a tool called ESXi Customizer appears to be the easiest way to add drivers to an VMware ESXi ISO. ESXi Customizer is a user-friendly windows application that automates the process of customizing the ESXi ISO with drivers that are not originally included with ESXi. Download: ESXi Customizer 2.7.1 Visit: ESXi-Customizer homepage Using ESXi Customizer to add drivers to a VMware ESXi ISO: When you have loaded ESXi Customizer it’s a simple case of selecting the source ISO, this been your ESXi install iso. Next you can select the drivers you wish to include in the iso, usually distributed as a VIB file. Finally you must select an NTFS formatted working directory, this will also be where your customised ISO will be saved. In the example below i am customing…

Why the Highpoint Rocket 2720SGL? The Rocket 2720 SGL is an ideal SAS / SATA controller to use with VMware ESXi, it is a cost-effective, high-performance PCI-Express 2.0 6GB/s SAS controller. The 2720SGL supports up 8x SATA3 6gbs hard drives and is compatible with large drives above 3TB in size, prefect to use if your not after RAID and wish to use something like Windows Storage Spaces for example, or simply connect a lot of hard drives to a Virtual Machine and have off site backups. I personally dont feel i need a raid setup at home, however i shall leave my reasoning for that to another blog post. When purchasing the card i was unsure if it work when passed through to a virtual machine running on VMware ESXi, however i can confirm the Rocket 2720SGL works perfectly when passed through to a VMware ESXi virtual machine. ESXi recognises the card as a Marvell 88SE9480 SAS / SATA 6Gb/s RAID controller. However despite this please keep in mind the Rocket 2720SGL is not directly usable in ESXi, it can only be utilised when passedthrough to a Virtual Machine. My ESXi setup consists of Gigabyte GA-Z77N-WIFI motherboard and an Intel CPU Core i7 3770T Quad Core…