Upgrading to Windows 8

There must be a lot of computer purchasers that have bought Windows 7 computers for going "Back to School".

Many retailers, including Best Buy, have offers that if you purchase a Windows 7 computer now they will give you are copy of Windows 7 Pro when it is released.

If this is not the case you will have to either purchase a copy and install it yourself, later on this year. You may even want to download a copy of Window 8 Pro RTM from a file sharing site and activate it with the
Windows 8 Loader.

On the other hand there is probably little to be gained by installing Windows 8 on your Windows 7 hardware. It is likely not to be "touch screen" enabled and the reports of performance improvements are speculative at best.

Why I think Outlook is seriously flawed

Don't get me wrong, I think that Outlook is probably the best that there is in integration of an Office suite on a Personal Computer. The ability to tie all elements of document creation with your messaging and scheduling is almost perfect.

However, I have observed many what I would term "legacy" problems over the time that I have had experience with using the MS Office suite. I won't go on to detail the versions that I have had dealings with as I think that my observations go beyond the differences between them. In addition, I think that the flaws transcend these versions and as such maybe be beyond redemption.

The fact that the user base is spread across multiple versions and platforms makes a fix" neigh on impossible. My initial suspicions were based on the notion that I either didn't know what I was doing, quite possible, or it was just that the version that I was using was fundamentally different than the versions and data files that are used in the enterprise. What I was seeing was inconsistencies in .pst files when I was migrating users from old computers to replacement ones.

What I was seeing was multiple folders, inboxes - outboxes etc - with data that seemed to have broken links between them. I was kind of expecting to see more than one set of personal folders, one from the old install and a new one. However, what I was seeing was that the linkages that seemed to have worked before were now broken in the migrated data. Contacts that were in the original contact folder were either not there or could not be found when emails were initiated to recipients that had been mailed frequently in the past. Often these contacts had to be added back to the personal folder that contained the in-box that was wanting to be used.

As I was saying, I thought that this behavior was due to something that I was not "getting" or doing wrong. I have now seen almost the exact same thing happening to an organization that I thankfully have no commitment to their IT well-being.  In this case a failure in the organizations email seemed to have resulted in the corruption of their users Exchange servers accounts. Whether this is just I coincidence with the firing of their complete IT department I just don't know!

A final note about Windows 8 (RT) and Office:

I am of the opinion that there are likely to be a lot of "pissed" Microsoft customers that are waiting for the Surface and other "Windows" based tablets. As far as I can see Outlook, the email, calendar and contacts, are not going to be available for RT based machines.

If the tablet format is to be viable in the workplace an Outlook solution (or something like it) is essential.

Windows RT is a nonsense

The WikiP page explains that RT means "Runtime" but not to be confused with Windows Runtime.

The reason for this post was my disgust with the nonsense in the article "Qualcomm bets on Windows RT tablets and hybrids"  by John Morris & Sean Portnoy,  ZDNet  30 June 2012

I really don't think that the "kit" buying public will "get it" - A Windows device is going to be perceived as one that runs Windows applications, when it is discovered that RT is just a touch-centric tablet/phone o/s a lot of people are going to be disappointed.

---

Links:

• A ZDNet article - the original article that spawned this post seems to have been pulled?

PEBrowsePro

A Hexadecimal file browser for debugging.

With a tool such as PEBrowsePro you can inspect the contents of an executable (or binary file).

For example you can determine whether menu items and options are included in a BIOS image so that you could unlock them. There are likely to be switches that possibly can be set to allow these features to display in a computers Set Up screens. Of course, if the menu options were not there in the first place they cannot be unlocked. Similarly, if there are features that the hardware of your computer that do not appear in the Set Up Screens you may be able to enable them by editing such an image and then updating (flashing) your BIOS.


Links:

• Updating your System BIOS
• Tools to unlock Insyde H2O BIOS
• WinHex
• Multiedit
• Nikkidebugger  
• The SmidgeonSoft Website 
• SmidgeonSoft on this blog

Other tools from SmidgeonSoft:

• pebrowse64
• pebrowsedbg64
• pebrowse

Multi-Edit

The program editor that I use.

Multi Edit can be use for all types of file formats including hexadecimal. It can be used to inspect and modify BIOS images.

Links:

• Updating your System BIOS
• PEBrowsePro
• NikPEViewer
• Winhex 

Although the version that I use is ME2008, the 2008 being the year, it is still more editor than I need. There was talk of a Linux version but that seems to have been forgotten. In any case if I were to change my operating system I think that I would also change my editor. Using gedit in Linux or a new unspecified editor under OSX (I am sure that there must be plenty)

Winhex

A Hexadecimal Editor

• Tools to unlock Insyde H2O BIOS
• Multi-Edit
• NikPEViewer
• PEBrowsePro

NikPEViewer

Tool to inspect your BIOS image

Other posts on this blog related to program editors:

• Multiedit
• Winhex
• PEBrowsePro

NikiDebugger

A tool to debug and modify binary files

Other program editors featured on this blog:

• MultiEdit
• NikPEViewer
• PEBrowsePro 
• Winhex

Acer Customer Service - Chapter 2

I shipped my Acer back to the Acer depot in Mississauga, Ontario.

I did not receive the email that they promised and as such I was not totally sure what the packaging requirements were and whether they would pick up the cost of shipping. As it is I am not holding my breath on the shipping costs.

As I had purchased the Acer in part as a spare battery and power supply I did not include that in my shipment. In any case it made the package lighter and therefore cheaper. Acer would have batteries and power supplies as do I. All I want is a new HDD and they can re-image it for me.

I still maintain that a hard drive should not have failed as soon as it did. I am not sure if I can blame Acer for this as the drive is a Western Digital, the same model as I have used on other devices. It is not as if the computer had particularly abused, it had been used in exactly the same manner as the other Acers that I have in my possession. I am further presuming that the drive could have been from a "bad batch".

The third chapter of this saga will be how long Acer take to return the computer to me and what they actually do to it. As I was saying before there was no data on the computer so I don't care if they re-format it. They would have to do that anyway as it requires a new drive. I might as well have a computer that is in warranty until April 2013.

As a side note I did check the warranty on the drive itself with WD. The serial number was recognized but it was obviously recognized as one that had been installed in an OEM installation and I am not sure if it would have been registered as being installed in Canada - it is anyone's guess where that registration was. If and when the drive is replaced (in Canada this time) it will be interesting to see if it is in warranty in Canada. Unlike the AO522 the drive and memory are particularly easy to access on the AO722.

I could have hand delivered the computer to the Acer Service depot in Mississauga but as I don't trust Acer to honour the repair and want to make sure that I have a record of its delivery back to them I decided to pay for tracked shipping. In any case the $26 was probably less that what I would have had to pay for the PSP from FutureShop. FS are all too keen to sell you these plans but it is almost impossible to find out how much the plans cost. Searching the Internet and looking on their website doesn't reveal a definitive answer. I think that it depends on the product and could be a percentage of the price paid. This will probably vary from item to item as more are likely to fail than others. Still, on a computer in the $350 range I would think that the PSP would have been at least $50 for the extra year.

Problem with Analytics and Keywords

There seems to be a problem with reporting on keywords in Google Analytics:

Update:

I think that this was a transitional issue as it cleared itself up. My theory is that Google were working on the Blogger or Analytics code at the time I was trying to access a specific report on Keywords.

Update August 2012:

It would now appear that Google have fundamentally changed the way that Analytics report keywords. My Analytics reports are more often than not populated with the keyword column with "Not Provided" or "Not Set".

This was due to a change that Google made where they claimed this was to make "Search more secure", I am not so sure that this was the reason.

Links:

• A follow-up post on the changes made by Google with respect to Keyword reporting

Rebuilding a notebook with AMD Radeon 6290 graphics

As I have stated on another post, I have archived the drivers for the AMD HD 6290 graphics processor unit (GPU) that forms part of an AMD Brazos APU.


My experience in the past is that when a fresh copy of Windows is installed on a computer with a configuration such as this, there is a problem with obtaining the correct drivers. The consequence of this is that the newly configured computer will be restricted to a Standard VGA video adapter. This means that the maximum resolution of the computer is only 800 by 600 pixels (regardless of the capabilities of the display).

In addition this combination of APU, in this case an AMD C-60 with Radeon HD 6290 and Atheros AR5B125 Wireless Adapter, there were other problems in getting the wireless adapter to connect to the Internet. This is particularly important when a fresh install is performed as it is my experience that most systems will connect to the Internet even though the most up-to-date driver is being used. This initial connectivity is extremely important as it is the primary method that current drivers are found.

Links:

• Returning the Acer Notebook for warranty repair (my experiences with Acer Customer Service)

Running Microsoft Office on a Tablet

I have run Microsoft Office applications, Word, Excel and Powerpoint on both an Asus Prime and a Playbook using Splashtop Remote Desktop.

While the Prime, with its keyboard makes the editing of Office documents the same as if you were using it on the host computer (there was very little lag due to the network), the Playbook was more suited for use as a remote control and a monitor.

The use with the Playbook would be very useful if you were using your laptop to present a Powerpoint presentation and you could then see what was on the screen behind you as you look towards your audience with your Playbook on your lectern as you control the presentation.

DNS Zone Management

As ZoneEdit seems to be down and I was interested in how to assign my domain name so that it could be pointed at a Google Blogger blog, I have been taking another look at the DNS Management offerings of my domain registrar.

It now looks like I don`t need to use a service such as ZoneEdit anyway.  Reading the Google help for using your own domain name for your blog I was confused that ZoneEdit did not have a specific setting for CNAME referrals.

It now looks like I can set my A records to whatever IP address that I like and I can use my registrars nameservers. This is new and was not available when I started to use ZoneEdit.

My nameservers are still set to ZoneEdit`s default servers - at the present time this is OK as I am not currently maintaining tempusfugit.ca as an  independently hosted website.

It also looks like I could set my website (Domain) to point at a Google Blogger blog. I am not doing so at the present time. I now have the option of either resurrecting my own server or using Google.

1st impressions of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

Having re-configured my server and media machines I allowed the webserver backup machine to update to version 11.10

At first glance the new Unity GUI was a bit of a shock.

Take the tour (of the current version of Ubuntu)

Having run Ubuntu and other distributions of Linux for a number of years now, I have fair amount of experience to make a comparison between Ubuntu, Windows and OSX. So far the rhetoric I have seen so far, and I haven't been looking for long, it seems to be the "same old same old". The discussion on whether Linux or OSX are better than Windows is pointless in my opinion.

The main advantage of not using Windows as I see it is that they are both still minority o/s and as such, smaller targets.

My interest in the re-configuration of the Linux box was to setup Samba Shares for use in a media server. This is part of a "proof of concept" for the Raspberry Pi Media server.

Data Backup (not recovery)

• Systems Pages
•  Robocopy Beeping

I am a great believer in making regular data backups and I don't hold much stock in the concept of data recovery.

I am also not a great fan of the backup solutions that are offered by Microsoft or third parties. Using a "robust copy" such as Windows robocopy or Linux rsync you can make incremental backups that can protect terabytes of data in a manner that doesn't take hours.
Once you have learned the syntax of the commands it is easy to use and you don't have to worry about loosing data to a drive going "bad".

In my experience you can predict when a drive is likely to fail and in situations where you do something like drop your laptop you will soon learn to make the backups that I describe. In addition, I am also of he opinion that you should not have your backup on a drive that you boot a computer. You can have copies of that data but when the boot drive goes bad so does that precious data.

I currently have up to about 4T Bytes of data and I cannot store this on a single drive in any case. My "backup and use" drives currently comprises of 2 * 2T drives plus 2 * 1.5T drives. The "pairs" are "working" and "backup" copies. The drives are mirrored using Windows robocopy.

As long as I remember to run the backups the incremental copy can take a matter of minutes.

As can be seen the copy of 734M of media took just over 28 min

The /MIR switch creates a "mirror" and if no changes are made to the 2 drives:

This is the same robocopy command as the copy above with no additional media

The mirror command only took 3 seconds - compare this will copying a 2T drive in its entirety which could take 12 to 24 hours!

In addition, should the connection between the drives and the computer or network be interrupted the process will restart where it left off.

Alternative DNS services

I had been using ZoneEdit for a while without major problems. It was sometimes slow but proved to be reasonably reliable considering that it was a free service.

I was a little dubious about paying for additional nameservers, this was based on the negative reviews that I had read and the fact that the speed of web access was acceptable to me.

I looked at a few other DNS offerings and I was prepared to pay for a service. The service that I thought would be the service that I would go with was DynDNS (if I were to go with a paid service). Other services I looked at included:

• DynDNS
• DNSExit.com
• pairNIC
• OpenDNS
• My own Domain Registrar

Subsequently to the research that I performed earlier, I now find that I can manage my DNS needs with the service the I have been using for the last 8 years.

• DNS Services
• DNS Zone Management

Backup Technology

Asigra today announced that its partner, Backup Technology Limited (BTL), will present on the advantages of cloud-based Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR) at the 2012 Storage Networking World (SNW) conference in Dallas.

Backup Technology has established itself as the world leading Online Backup and Disaster Recovery provider.  With individual customer data sizes ranging from 50GB to over 100TB, they currently protect well over 8 Petabytes including billions of files.  With clients across industries, be it public or private sector, including charities such as the British Red Cross to Premier League Football clubs such as Liverpool FC and global brands like Master Lock, Backup Technology has an impressive portfolio of customers.

Asigra is the leading Canadian cloud computing vendor focused on backup, recovery and restoration with more than 550,000 customer sites deployed globally. Asigra Cloud Backup™ transforms the way businesses manage and protect their data by delivering seamless end-to-end data protection that efficiently scales and easily adapts to any IT environment. Asigra Cloud Backup is built for progressive Managed Service Providers who focus on driving growth and increasing their total addressable market to better service their customers, IT constrained organizations, and industries with compliance mandates that are looking to improve their backup with a secure, proven and flexible cloud backup and recovery model. With more than 26 years of experience as backup/recovery pioneers, Asigra manages one of the largest business-class backup service provider ecosystems in the world who power their cloud backup services using Asigra technology. Asigra is recognized among top-tier industry analysts, including the Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC, Forrester Research and the 451 Group. Recently, the company was recognized by Business Solutions Magazine as a Best Channel Vendor for 2012 and Storage Magazine named Asigra Cloud Backup its 2011 Product of the Year. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally.

Seven Book Air

• Configuring a Hackintosh   - main page

A reverse Hackintosh - Installing Windows 7 on a Mac Book Air as the main o/s

A quote from Scott Raymond:

"...... it was a fairly simple procedure to install the Windows OS from a USB stick with the use of rEFIt, an EFI boot menu toolkit."

He then goes on to say that he tried the CNet procedure but ended up using:

"..... the USB-based system rescue drive that Apple provides and wiped out the drive partitions, ......"

... here I get a conflicting message as he then goes on to describe booting from a DVD and then installing the  Boot Camp Additions. I can't really see the benefit here of having Windows as the only operating system and when I tried this I just followed the Boot Camp instructions.

While the Boot Camp instructions and installation procedure were not perfect I managed to do so using an external USB DVD drive. I did not want to crack the seal on the Apple recovery USB stick as it was my intention to return the MBA after I have  performed my proof of concept on it. That you can install Windows 7 in Boot Camp and fully activate it using Daz. Even with Boot Camp you end up with a Mac Book Air that will boot either into Windows or OSX (depending on your last boot - there the are options to boot into the other o/s - but I forget what the exact procedure is)

Like many of the commentators on the article I found that I spent most of my time in OSX even though I had the option of using Windows 7 and MS Office on the Mac. In closing I cannot see the value of using a MBA when I can purchase 4 similar Windows 7 machines for the same price. I know that they are not a sexy and they may break sooner but the time value of money being what it is, I can take my $750 after a year of use of my Acer 522 and put it towards another MBA or whatever is available in the sub-notebook/Ultrabook range at that time.

• Windows 7 On The MacBook Air: Don't Go There  -  Scott Raymond ZDNet July 28, 2011.
• Install Win 7 on MacBook Air from a USB drive - Dong Ngo CNet

The Apple Airport Express

A minimal configuration for the Apple Airport Express

The Airport Express has proven to be of use in hotels around the world where Internet access is provided to rooms and WiFi service is restrictive (multiple accounts needed for notebook, iPad and Touch)

In addition A/P.E. has been found useful at client sites where wired access to LAN is provided - allowing the use of wireless devices on a non-wireless infrastructure.

The aim here is to configure the AirPort so that it was a close to "out of the box" as possible.

Wireless security was not necessary (but possible) for this instance. The AirPort (basestation) name was (had to be) changed to "New Airport" and was given the Capital Radio password.

Attempts were made to configure the device wirelessly but I had to resort to connecting the AP to my notebook via the Ethernet cable.

            Firmware was updated to version 7.5.2......

Links:

• Apple slips out new AirPort Express with simultaneous dual-band WiFi By Jon Fingas Engadget Jun 11th 2012 - Here John Fingas obviously doesn't know what a "dual band" router is or what it offers over a single band one!

Samba Shares

Setting up a Samba share on Ubuntu

This topic is discussed in greater detail on my website, tempusfugit.ca

Links:

• Linux pages on The Technology Muse
• Programming and Systems
• Implementing Samba Shares on a Raspberry Pi computer