Recently I’ve seen a number of sites discuss the Panavise. Specifically, which is best for the beginner? Here is my executive summary:

If you are starting out with electronics you only need one, and it’s this one: The Panavise Jr.

PanaVise Model 201

It’s cheap (< $20), it opens pretty wide (2.8 inches), it rotates all over the place, and it has slots for holding printed circuit boards. I have yet to meet a basic electronics kit PCB that doesn’t fit into it.

If you need to work with bigger boards on a regular basis, your next purchase would be the 305 Multi-Purpose Center:

PanaVise 350 Multi-Purpose Work Center

It’s about $55 and has a gigantic (9″) opening.

My least useful Panavise? The 301 Standard / 381 Standard With Vac. It’s a good vise, but really crappy for holding circuit boards.

I use the Jr. 80% of the time, the 305 about 10% of the time, and all my others (381, 333) the remaining 10%.

Long story short, if you are doing electronics, get the Jr and then get the 305. You’ll be happy. Toss in a 301/381 is you also need a more traditional vise.

I tried getting Ubuntu on the Netbook, but it wasn’t working out. So here’s what I did to back things out:

* Use BootIt to create a bootable ISO, which you can burn onto a CD. You can either get the full software here or download the tiny ISO here.

* Boot off that CD, click “Cancel” to the “install on hard disk” prompt.

* If  you installed the GRUB bootloader you will need to reset the MBR. To do this select the Windows Partition and click “View MBR” on the left. When in there select the Windows partition again and click the STD MBR button. This will remove GRUB and set your MBR back to the way it was before. Click apply and the changes will be made. Then eject your media and use the file option at the top left to reboot. Your computer should restart normally into Windows.

(Thanks to this guy for the lead: Uninstall Ubuntu)

I tried the above in Windows 7 and it worked fine. Note that I DID NOT try to do any partition work, since I figured it would be easier to do that in Windows. Thanks to BootIt for getting my MBR back. There might have been other ways to do this, but this worked out fine.

Once in Windows:

* Open up Administrative Tools > Computer Management. Select Storage > Disk Management

* Right click on the Linux partitions and choose “Delete Partition”. I had two: one for the regular Linux, one for the Linux Swap. Windows warned me that the partition might be used by other operating systems — that’s okay, I was getting rid of Ubuntu.

* Reboot to be safe.

* I now have an Extended partition of free space. In my case, about 20 GB.

* Right click on that free space — it’s probably bright green (indicating extended partition) — and choose delete partition (yes, again). You’ll get a warning that it will become inaccessible. Don’t worry.

* Now you should see the space as Unallocated. This is what you want.

* Click on your primary Windows Partition (usually the big one) and choose Extend Volume. You are giving that free space back where you took it from originally. You don’t have to do this. You could create another drive letter with it, extend another partition you might have, or whatever. In my case, I took from the OS volume so I’m returning to the OS volume.

* Give it another reboot to be safe. You should now be back to where you started.

(I had done a Shrink Volume to get space for Linux — I LOVE the shrink capability in Windows 7).