Blogs

In my latest article for Windows Vista Magazine I spoke about performance tuning a system and more importantly how to diagnose performance issues. One of the tools I recommend using to do this is the Windows Performance Tools kit. This can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx . It includes a getting started document. The tools are described as: The Windows Performance Tools (WPT) Kit contains performance analysis tools that are new to the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. The WPT Kit is useful to a broad audience, including system builders, hardware manufacturers, driver developers, and general application developers. These tools are designed for measuring and analyzing system and application performance on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and later. The tools currently include an xperf trace capture tool, an xperfview visualization tool (also known as Performance Analyzer), and an xbootmgr boot trace capture tool. The tools are designed for the analysis...

I wanted to load Navizon onto my phone to give me GPS type capability even when I don't have a GPS using wireless access point and Mobile Phone Cell triangulation (and it pays me $$'s when I feed it information), however there was an issue with the locked down nature of my E650. Upon searching the web, this page was the one that had the real answer - note you need to sign up to the site to be able to download the magic program: xda-developers - View Single Post - Application unlock for HTC Monet (Virgin Lobster 700tv) Application unlock for HTC Monet (Virgin Lobster 700tv) Been trying everything on the Internet and managed to make some headway with Monet (Virgin Lobster 700tv) unlock (this might work for Meteor/C700 as well). 1. Firstly you need to get rid of the 'registry security policy' lock. Download cert install sp.zip: [see attachment] a. copy "SP_AllowCertificateInstall.cab" to the root of Monet memory or card b. Use file explorer on monet to navigate to file. Click to run. Should...

I saw over on Nicholas's blog post - Nicholas King : EBS/SBS Upgrades & Migrations that he has started to answer some of the questions around system upgrades and migrations. Below are some snippets of key information he has shared. Read his blog post for more. However, key thoughts for me are: 1) no in box SBS 2003 -> SBS 2008 upgrades. This is a box to box migration process. If you have SA or FPP copies of SBS 2003 then you can potentially do a P2V and then migrate from the virtual image. If not, I would consider running a VM of Windows Server to enable you to move the domain at least 2) Moving from one box to another (eg hardware upgrades in the future) are now supported. This can potentially be used to go from a RC0 build to RTM, but it is not tested or supported, however that does not mean it will not work!! 3) There is a GREAT document linked below that describes a migration in glorious detail EBS/SBS Upgrades & Migrations Recently I had several people ask me whether it is possible or supported...

Kevin asked a couple of weeks ago if I could share this – so I’m sharing :-) The Windows Small Business Server 2008 WW Community Survey is live This is the third year we have published an SBS WW Community Survey to the SBS Community. Because of the previous surveys, we have made some adjustments in our community engagement. To name a few; we really worked on putting more focus on the Official SBS Blog. Our Sustaining Engineering team runs mini betas with our MVPs before KB's and Bug Fixes are released via Windows Update. We try to get more involvement in our techbetas from our User Groups. The list does go on. To the survey, the SBS Product Team would like to hear from the Windows SBS Community again. This survey is completely anonymous. In fact, some of you may have to sign out from Live in order to take the survey. So, if you get a PAGE NOT FOUND error message, please log out of Live and click on the link to the survey again. We want to know how valuable your experience is with the community resources and...

I will be at iForum again this year representing Microsoft (with others). We will be presenting the joint VDI and Terminal Server solutions from Microsoft and Citrix, which includes Access Essentials for customers of less than 75 users. if you would like to attend, snap up the early bird discount. Here is the “blurb” Reducing costs, improving efficiencies and increasing performance is a challenge for any business…but Microsoft and Citrix can help. Citrix and Microsoft have decades of experience working together to provide customers a range of solutions which deliver choice, flexibility and cost savings. Our joint solutions to dynamically deliver desktop service and applications to uses wherever they are is based on tight integration of Citrix solutions with Window Server 2008, Hyper-V server virtualisation and terminal services / presentation virtualisation, and with the System Center management tools especially Virtual Machine Manager. Microsoft is proud to be a platinum sponsor at this year’s...

[updated so can be downloaded without a sign in] Hi, My 8 year old daughter has created a word search. It is a PDF file that you can print out and draw on, nothing more complex than that. If you would like to download it and play, please donate too . Thanks David Technorati Tags: Comic Relief , Charity , if you only read one post today

If you visited the Channel Expo show this year then you probably saw one or two Microsoft presentations on desktop and server solutions. James Akrigg and Matt McSpirit provided the desktop entertainment while I covered off what servers we have out there and what is coming in the near future. We promised the slides and here they are: Desktop (Windows Vista and Office 2007)- Office 2007 PowerPoint Desktop (Windows Vista and Office 2007)- PDF Server (SBS, Windows Server 2003 R2, Longhorn and Home Server) - Office 2007 PowerPoint Server (SBS, Windows Server 2003 R2, Longhorn and Home Server) - PDF James has an amazing blog (Out of Office) at http://blogs.technet.com/outofoffice Matt touches many aspects of desktop technology including that for small business at http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit Have a look at the blogs and enjoy the presentations. ttfn David Technorati tags: Channel Expo , Vista , Office 2007 , SBS 2003 , Nakes Servers , Home Server , Longhorn

In the IT market the term "change is the only constant" has been around for years (well, certainly since I left ICL where change was not constant, but that was due to the contract that dictated that everything did not change, so fell behind). Note, this post is purely the ramblings from my mind, not a statement from Microsoft in an Official or Unofficial capacity We've seen big iron, then smaller systems, the rise of SMP, the reduction in IT hardware and software costs for solutions, the rise of Microsoft servers, client server, 3-tier, clustered computing, multi-core and now internet enabled computing. There is much more, of course, to come, but how we deliver IT to customers has changed too. Of course, this is all generalised and some people have always been at one end or the other, but general acceptance is always shifting - remember the ASP business model of the late 90's - dead, yet here it is again with Software as / plus service. The pricing of some services even appears to be £0, yet...

I have already discussed on this blog what is and is not support for Office on Vista (any version from 2000 on) here . However there is always the question of licensing what is actually allowed and what would be piracy. I am going to try to make it very simple here. · If you have the Home and Student (was the Student and Teacher) Edition then this can be installed on 3 computers in the same household · If you have a previous “Full Packaged Product” – the pretty box you bought at a retailers – version of the product then this can be removed from one computer and installed on a new computer. It can only be installed on one computer at any time · If your software is provided as part of a volume license agreement then you can install on a new computer or other computers, but if you change the number of computers that it is installed on you may have to pay more for the extra usage. · If you have neither of these then you have an OEM copy – this is provided and supported by the people who supplied your computer and...

I was recently asked by a colleague about the ease of setting up Mac’s in the SBS 2003 world. We are all aware of the pitfalls of using a .local domain name (I hope) and that some of the wizards do not work (or perhaps none of them do), but I have never actually been through the detail. One question that stumped me was around certificates on the Mac. So, I posted the question internally and someone Mark Stanfill piped up asking if the customer / partner had looked at the Whitepaper on how to setup a Mac. For my sins, I was not even remotely aware of the whitepaper, so I downloaded it and had a look. Talk about an awesome document, so if you need to set up a Mac on a SBS network, get this document. The link is http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=46578 and this should take you to the download. Microsoft is not the only source for information like this, it is also worth looking at the below for some ISA and Mac info: http://simultaneouspancakes.com/Lessons/archives/2005/11/internet_access_1.shtml Ttfn David Just...

So these are really quick snippets.  I hit an error where my Gateway monitoring software could not connect to the database.  All the errors were along the lines of “Provider cannot be found” and when I looked in the Connection String it stated “Provider=SQLNCLI” which is the SQL Native Client connector software. The fix that worked for me was very simple, to change the “Provider=SQLNCLI …..” to “Provider=SQLNCLI10 …..”.   The second issue was nothing that came about from the SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 conversion, but became an issue when I could not see the properties for the database.  The error I would see was that “Property Owner is not available for database”.  The fix can be found here - http://blog.dampee.be/post/2008/06/22/MSSQL-2005-error-message-quot3bProperty-Owner-is-not-available-for-Database-databaseNamequot3b.aspx .   ttfn David Technorati Tags: Microsoft , SQL Server , SQL Server 2008 , Tips

I knew this was coming, but I've not seen it shouted too much. My machine feels more responsive and some operations as mentioned before are faster. If you read the Windows Vista team blog Windows Vista SP1 RC now available for public download you would think it is only available to MSDN and Technet customers. It does have some good pointers though. We're making available today the RC release of Windows Vista SP1, found here on MSDN and here on TechNet , with an FAQ here . I invite you to download, install and use the SP1 RC and let us know about your experience by providing your feedback here . Before you install SP1 RC, please bear in mind the following points of advice, detailed in this short article : If you have a prior version of SP1 Beta installed, you must uninstall it prior to installing RC. This is pre-release code and will change before the final release. This pre-release software is provided for testing purposes only. Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission...

Hello folks, I have just been looking at my nice log based tool for analyzing site usage and I have to say that the site has grown a trooper. We have more than doubled traffic in terms of web hits and are up at least 50% on unique IP addresses, which is the closest I can get to unique users from my simple logs. To see the stats, go to http://uksbsguy.com/usage_report/jun06 for the June ones and http://uksbsguy.com/usage_report/ytd I have had a couple of people ask me about getting the software I use – I am very happy to provide it, but it still needs some tidying up. My software produces the numbers, but I still have to tweak the spreadsheet (delete a column or two) to import them into MapPoint to get the mapped data. The summary of the site usage is now: Summary Stats Total Hits 174438 Total Unique IPs 5195 Total Web Page Hits 140650 Total Feed downloads 33788 Top consolidated referrers Page URL Hits Google 1962 Bloglines 1010 Newsgator 641 community+server 639 msmvps.com 289 ukvistaguy.com 216 blo.gs 145 search...