Fixing Some Vista Woes

We have got the latest operating system Vista in our lab and latest configuration Quad Core Intel Processors. We have got large monitors and we have got game consoles. We have got them all. But Vista has been troubling me for quite some time. It randomly hangs (I found online it might be around 30 seconds) for some time. How do I find what is the issue and fix it?

I login as an Administrator, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer. Event Viewer > Application shows several errors - most related to vmware. Event Viewer > System also shows some errors. I will need to track these errors from now on.

To my surprise Event Viewer > System shows several error events (to view just error events, Menu > Action > Filter Current Log) which could be significant:

1. The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume OS. Such events were raised at 2 AM (probably after some system process executed) on 30 April 2008.
2. The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.

So I took the following steps:

1. I ran chkdsk on my disks. As I expected there are no errors detected.
2. For the iaStor0 issue, saw http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-025783.htm. I am wary of installing new things unless needed. So I will wait for Vista to hang again before I try to fix the issue.

How I Formed an Excel Sheet of Students in the Course I am Tutoring

Every semester once I would have to form a list of all students in a course. Since the frequency of this task is not high I dont prefer to make a program to automate this task. This time I did the following:
1. Go to IVLE to get the list of students in one page. Save this page.
2. Clear out the irrelevant lines.
3. With vim, query replace the ";" with "\r" newline, or whatever else to get "name, Metric No" list. The useful commands are:
%s/ /\r/gc
%s/.*userID=\(.*\)' , 800 , 600)">\(.*\).*/\1,\2\r/gc
:%s/.*t.*/\r/gc
:%s/^\n//gc
4. Import this data into excel.

Ubuntu: Get Wireless Working After Hibernate

After I installed ubuntu I faced a peculiar problem that the wireless wont connect after ubuntu wakes up from hibernation.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart didnt work for me.

Later I found that:

sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart worked. But I am afraid it might be risky to do it everytime since it restarts a very low level process (though I am not an expert on this, and have no right to say it might be risky or not).

So as stated in this forum I edited the services that are shut down on hibernation. Have to see how it works out!