Windows Archive

Well it’s only 6 months until my birthday and 9 months until Christmas so I’m knocking together my birthday/xmas list. Top of the list is going to be a MacBook Pro. There’s a couple of reasons for this:

• Portability
• Security
• Style

As far as portability goes, I’m not fussed about weight, dimensions or battery life when it comes to choosing a laptop since I don’t do that much travelling, I’m usually not too far from a power point and I’d rather have a full sized keyboard than a laptop that would fit in my pocket.

What I am more concerned about is being able to do some work wherever I am. For me this means being able to write a PHP script, test it on a development server running L.A.M.P and then finally uploaded to one of our production servers. This is easy enough to get up and running on a Windoze laptop as there are XP versions of the W.A.M.P components (and for Vista too) but the problem is that a lot of what I develop interacts with the Linux operating system in some way.

For this reason I usually need to be on a network with a Linux box. If I had a MacBook Pro, I could just turn it on wherever I was, have all my files permenantly stored locally running on L.A.M.P. so I can develop, test and then use whatever internet connection is near by to upload them and then run a quick live test. Simple.

The other good thing is that there are Mac versions of all the major bits of software I use (FireFox, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, … iTunes) and for the few bits that don’t have Mac versions, there’s something that’s easily as good if not better. Perfick.

As far as the second point goes, the only reason I can think of to upgrade to Vista and finally get away from XP is security. Apparently Vista will be a lot better than XP, but it’s still going to be the focus of every nasty thats created. Why not switch to something that is not only based upon a secure operating system to start with, but has been improved upon as well.

Finally, style. This is a bit of a no-brainer. Considering they are a computer company in essence, there’s got to be very few companies in the world that can claim to be as stylish. People don’t buy iPods because they prefer the AAC format after all. And yes, Vista might be full of new eye candy, but even after ditching the playmobile themes Microsoft will always be playing catch-up with Apple.

Time to start saving!

Just in case you were planning on getting a copy of Vista Home and you upgrade your own PC every now and again, beware and read the EULA…

Microsoft have now decided to make a few changes in EULA (which no-one reads) and hope no-one will notice (which we won’t until it’s too late) which means that if you buy a brand spanking new PC with an EOM version of Vista on it, you can only transfer the licience for that copy of Windows to another PC only once.

This might not seem like a problem at first glance but there are a couple of points to remember:

• Hardware upgrades will cause a New Machine event
• Windows Activation is now mandatory

The firat point is most important for those who upgrade a lot as a year down the line, swapping out the hard disk and adding more RAM could be enough to cause a New Machine point. A year later you might want to replace the MOBO and CPU and this might trigger another event but due to the terms of the EULA, means your copy of Windows is now invalid. And knowing Microsoft, Vista might lock you out at this point…

The second point will only affect those who are trying to use Vista legally but have been caught by the point above. It’s not a major issue but for those who are caught and decide to stick it out, it’ll be harder to keep your machine running. Even if windows doesn’t lock you out, since you are now in breach of the EULA, chances are that the daily Windows Activation thingy they’ve introduced will prevent you from getting all the security fixes that will (inevitibly) be coming out.

Watch yourselves gamers!

For months before Vista was released, all anyone was talking about was how much it had been delayed and how Microsoft should be doing more to meet the release date with all the components of the OS it promised. Well, they eventually got it shipped with most of the components and now, a few months after the release date, nobody seems to be rushing to get the upgrade. Why is that if everyone was so anxious for it to be finished?

Personally I think it’s because there’s nothing too much wrong with XP. Being an IT professional, I can manage to keep the various virus and malware nasties out of my networks and that means that we end up with a stable operating system on every machine. Yes, there may be a whole raft of new features that could increase productivity, security and other various buzzwords that keep upper management happy, but if I was given the budget for an upgrade to Vista for every box on the network, I think I would rather put it into tools and equipment to reduce spam and viruses on the network, beef up wireless connectivity and security, increase backup and system imaging… etc, etc.

So, no upgrades then? Nah, I’ll give it a few months to see what happens with it in terms of security and if everything seems to be going well, I’ll shove a copy on my home desktop to see what’s what. As far as the office goes, I think I’ll give it a miss and just wait until the actual boxes need replacing and if they’re pre-loaded with Vista, great. If not, we’ll stick with XP. Or maybe Fedora Core?

I hate all printers! Forever!

We’ve got three printers in the office:

• A massive Xerox Phaser 7300
• A fairly big Lexmark something or other
• A tiny little Samsung whatsit

Last week we had a problem with the Xerox and it’s packed up until it can be serviced.

Then while we were waiting for a couple of new printers we ordered, the Lexmark ran out of toner leaving us with the crappy little one to print our thousands of pages of course materials on. Not good.

Luckily the new ones arrived and I got to spend all of yesterday either setting up or repairing printers. Woo!

Anyway, rant over, back to the point… I got in this morning and there was about 14 automatically detected shared printers. It’s slightly annoying because the shared printers I want, I installed and I don’t want another copy along with five others.

Quick look around Windoze Explorer and you can turn it off by:

• Going to “Start > Control Panel > Folder Options”
• Click on “View”
• Un-tick “Automatically search for network folders and printers”
• Click OK a dozen or whatever times

Just wish we had Active Directory so I don’t have to do it on every PC I use.

I´ve gone and blatantely copied Ed  and downloaded the beta of IE7 to have a look at how the next version was progressing and whats been put in it so far. Seems pretty good so far but I´ve only had a look at a few sites. As with Ed, here´s a screenshot

 
Also since I´m a cynical bastard and love being right I´m glad I was only using it for one and a half minutes before I made it crash. And all I did was shove it on full screen and back while loading a Google search for one of sites! Ah well, they´ll get it sorted out by the time it comes out of beta. No wait, by service pack 1. Maybe service pack 2…
 
On the plus side all of our sites that I checked render the way I wanted so I´m happy. I´ll eventually get around to testing all the bits that use Javascript or other client side oddities but for the time being any early adopters will have to put up with errors until I get given a testing team.
 
Oh well, one distraction out of the way… Back to it!

With XP SP2, automatic updates have become a lot easier since they are generally automated and any really critical updates get installed without any user intervention. As far as I´m concerned this is all a good thing. There are however all the other updates to consider.
 
I found out about Office SP2 by reading about it in a magazine. Considering it contained important security updates this is kind of a bad way of doing things. There´s also the fact that it´s not just my two desktops and my laptops to update but every PC in the office. I´m not even going to try and get them to manage updates themselves since I can´t even get them to use "My Documents" for backup reasons.

 
To make all this easier to manage I´m considering getting a WUS Server to sort out all the updates for me. I just need to check out all the specifics for it since I don´t want to go onto Active Directory yet and most of us work remotely a lot of the time. If I can get it to work on a spare server and just push out updates to a certain workgroup or range of IP addresses then that would be perfect. Time to investigate. If I go ahead I´ll post the results in case any other small businesses are looking at doing something similar.