Well in the end I did get the Samsung Laptop from simply computers, but only after working out all the sales information myself.
The laptop was out of stock, despite the web page showing 12 in stock, but they were going to have some more in stock the following day (thursday). I opted for the three day delivery as it was cheaper and also purchased the student/educational/charity version of office standard at £100 (plus the option of 30 euros for a copy of access if required later which is a real bargain). Anyway, office arrived on the Thursday and the laptop arrived on Friday.
It had to wait until this afternoon before I started to install it…….and then had to stop. When you open the laptop up, there is a protective sheet over the screen with a sticker which says “Please charge the battery before use – see user manual for more information” – guess where the user manual is – yep, on the hard disk! Its annoying when you get a new toy/gadget and then have to wait *hours* to actually use it.
One good thing about the laptop is that it comes with 1yr return to base warrenty and if it is registered within 30 days, this is upgraded to a 72hr turnaround – a lot better than Toshiba’s 1.5 weeks.
It also comes with 802.11g, which my router supports so it will be interesting to see how fast this is, as all of my other equipment is only .b capable.
An alternative to my previous post, is some software, MaxiVista, that I was given an evaluation copy for review purposes. This $50 software runs on the master pc and makes the master pc (server) think it has extra monitors. Client software is then installed on slave machines and the desktop is then mirrored or extended to these extra machines…….
Synergy looks like a useful utility that allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard between different machines (and os’s) – basically a software controlled kvm. I’ve not tried it but it certainly looks interesting and worthy of a download.
I went to use WebMessenger today and was suprised to see that it asked me what status I wanted to be before I signed into the system. Handy for logging onto the system to see who is on and not letting everyone else you are online at the same time (although if everyone did this, the chat system would be very quiet. Microsoft have been pretty busy with their software updates this week with the MSN Messenger Beta released, hotmail changes, Spaces.msn.com – their blogging service whose homepage looks absolutely awful in firefox, and last but not least a critical update for windows, namely an IE patch for the latest vulnerability discovered a month ago.
Not sure how much there is to say about using offline address books (apart from the obvious fact that you need one) in Outlook but the Exchange Team have released Best Practices for Using Offline Address Books – this will be useful reading I’m sure as I’ve had problems with them recently and I guess if they’ve written a guide about it, then there must be more to it.
Had a weird client problem trying to connect to our servers this morning. She switched her machine on and was unable to lookup the address’s of our unix servers, pings came back with host unknown.
Doing a ipconfig /flushdns and a ipconfig /registerdns and it all worked again – I can tell its going to be one of those days again.
I’ve dropped the MSN feed for Absoblogginlutely as everytime my reader updates the feed it adds another X number of entries to the feed – again – even though the results are the same as the last time the query was run.
We went to see The Incredibles tonight. Kristen purchased her ticket and I got in free as I was doing a cinecheck. The film was excellent – very well drawn, funny and a good plot line too. The only down side is that there wasn’t any funny bits/blooper reel at the end of the credits, much to the disappointment of the 30 or so of us who had stayed to watch all of the credits.
I’ve been changing some more user profiles in outlook this week as we’ve moved users across to a new server. On almost every machine I’ve had to blow away the user profile in outlook and recreate a new one.
The latest error message I got was on a client machine connecting to the lan via a VPN connection and getting a message “The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance.” The weird thing is that I could telnet to the server, ping it, resolve names – just not open the mailbox on the server. After checking various things such as firewall configs,rpc ports I created a new profile – and it worked. Deleted the old one, tried to recreate it as best as I could and now the user is happy.