How to wake up early in the morning?

There was a time when I would consistently wake up between 6.30 and 7.00am in the morning and get to my day's work. I am not sure if that was a time when I was much more efficient or healthier than I am today, but, I sure did not have a guilt complex. For a very long time now, perhaps several years, I have been getting up only past 8.00am. This weighs heavily on my mind on many occassions. I carry a guilt complex the moment I wake up in the morning and carry it through at least the first couple of hours. I did try to get rid of this habit but so far have only been inconsistent on it.


Now, here is a nice article on how to wake up early daily morning. This is pretty good. It explains the basic concept of going to bed only when one is sleepy enough every night and getting up at fixed time every morning. I am going to try this on myself and see how it works. Here is the link -
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser

Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 installation problem - pdm.dll

I finally managed to resolve this nagging problem. First some background. I had Visual Studio 6.0 installed on my machine and at some time I installed Visual Studio .NET 2003 without uninstalling VS6.0. When I went back to uninstall 6.0, I got an error that said some .stf file was not found. So, I thought, installing VS6.0 again (to repair) and then uninstalling it would clean up the system of any 6.0 residues. This was not to be. I could not install 6.0 even when I uninstalled VS.NET2003 completely. I consistently got this error "pdm.dll was unable to update the registry" following which the installation would fail.

I deleted the VS6.0 folder in "Program Files", and also manually cleaned up the registry of any "visual studio" refereences. Still when I installed, got the same set of errors. To resolve the problem I had to rename pdm.dll in two locations - "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSDEBUG7" and "C:\WinNT\system32" to pdm.dll.old.

However, the above two renaming were not direct. While renaming pdm.dll in the former path, I got access denied error. So I ensured that I changed to a user who had administrative privielges and this resolved the access problem. However, to be sure, I wanted to deleted VSDEBUG7 folder altogether. To do this, I renamed the folder and then restarted the machine. After this I could delete this folder.

Renaming pdm.dll in the latter path posed another problem - explorer.exe was using it and so OS would allow neither delete nor rename operations. So I opened command prompt window, killed explorer.exe and then used the "ren" command to rename the pdm.dll file. After this I restarted Windows and installed VS6.0. This time the installation went fine.

Hope this post will be useful to people who encounter similar problems with pdm.dll.