I’m seeing a rush of traffic again due to a 502 error in gMail.  This outage is being reported by the gMail team and it looks like they are shooting for a resolution by this evening. I haven’t been hit with it yet, knock on wood, but it would appear a lot of others are. I’ve put together some tips on surviving gMail outages and I would love to hear how you are making out in the comments.

The gMail outage of yesterday and today was appearently enough to hit the front page of Slashdot again. I didn’t see a big rush of traffic like last time, just a few trickling in. My gMail survival tips still apply. Hopefully it wasn’t as bad for you as this guy.

I turned my system on this morning to find that my DVDRW drive is not listed along with the other drives on my computer. A quick glance at the device manager showed a yellow exclamation point with the cheerful news that the driver was missing or corrupted. All of my attempts to reinstall the driver failed.

Google don’t let me down!

I finally came across these steps. After a quick registry edit and reboot, I was back in action. I recently installed Vista SP1, perhaps it had something to do with it.

1) Close all open programs

2) Click on Start, Run, and type REGEDIT and press Enter

3) Click on the plus signs (+) next to the following folders

* HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
* SYSTEM
* CurrentControlSet
* Control
* Class
* {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

4) This folder is the DVD/CD-ROM Drive Class Description in the registry. Look for any of the following names in the right hand column.

* UpperFilters
* LowerFilters
* UpperFilters.bak
* LowerFilters.bak

5) If any of the above keys shown in step 4 are listed, right-click on them and choose Delete

6) After deleting the keys, close the Registry Editor

7) Reboot your computer and confirm that the drive is listed