The good:  After updating my BIOS from A01 to A04, I am please to report that many of the issues I was having in regards to the system recovering from sleep mode and/or crashing with a blue screen of death have disappeared.

The bad:  I ran into a drive space issue when I tried to install both Garmin’s City Navigator 2008 and Topo Canada v4.  Topo Canada is huge, measuring over 5GB, which takes up more than 1/3 of my drive space.  Once I moved some photos from the Mini9 to my desktop machine I was able to squeeze both products on, but I am giving serious thought to getting a larger SSD.

I guess with the upcoming release of the Windows 7 RC, I will be reloading my machine anyway, so that should help clear out a lot of the bloat that I have accumulated on the Mini9 since I installed it last.  I’m also planning on putting Windows 7 RC onto my desktop machine so I can give Homegroups and Media Center a real test.

On a side note, I managed to grab some more spare parts for my Dell PowerEdge 2650 – after the upgrades the machine will have 10GB of RAM and just over 1TB of disk space.  I’ll blow away the current ESXi install and start fresh, including a new file server build with larger capacity.  Oh, how I wish ESXi supported USB pass-through so I could just pop a 1TB USB drive on the server and be done with it.