While on Christmas break, I purchased a few things to get started on the stock clock project. First was the Explorer 16 development board, which is the same one that I used while an a co-op (internship). I bought this particular one since I was already familiar with its features and the processors that came with it (a PIC24 and a dsPIC33). To save on costs, I bought the In Circuit Debugger from ebay (a Microchip one, not a clone) for about half the cost of a new one. After playing with it for several hours, I could not get it to work. Reading through the Microchip fourms brought something to my attention. The old ICD2 modules do not work in Vista x64 but the newer ones do. This left me with a problem, as I no longer have a 32-bit install of Windows. I’m not willing to change my Vista install on my desktop, so this left me with a few options. I could install Windows 2000 on an old computer, but I would rather not have to boot another computer every time I want to work on this project. It then hit me that maybe Virtualbox could forward the USB connected ICD2. So my current setup is running Windows 2000 with the Microchip software as a Virtualbox guest with a Gentoo host. This also has the added bonus of not making me reboot into Windows Vista on my desktop (dual boot Gentoo and Vista. Vista is used for games.). I’ve only done some minor testing, but I have gotten MPLAB to talk to the board without any additional issues. Depending on how much free time I have, I should actually make some progress on the stock clock in the coming months.