Microsoft have released a technical preview of IE9 along with a demo site to show off the new features. We’re still persuading users to upgrade some of their machines to ie8 although I did get the approval from the last site that had major issues forcing them to stay on ie7.
Interesting that the preview requires Windows7 – I wonder if Windows7 will be needed for the final release version?
If you have the misfortune to have BackupExec at your client sites, you may have noticed your backups failed last night with “e000e020 – The job was scheduled to run, but the availability window closed before the job could start. There may not have been any destination devices available during the window, or the job may have been submitted to run when the window was closed”
Apparently this is due to Daylight Savings Time – the solution is to rerun the job or wait and see if it runs tonight – Thanks for a really helpful solution Symantec.
A while back I changed my twitter password – not realising how many other applications I would need to change…The first thing I had to do was go and change my tweetdeck installations which wasn’t too bad. However, this did mean changing it on three different machines.
This morning I posted a new blog post on IRL and realised that the post hadn’t made it to @helsbyhome on twitter. Checking in I realised I had to change my twitter plugins within wordpress too. These plugins haven’t been working for a couple of months now – oops!
For those of you are are interested, I’m using twitme and twitter updater with Tinyurl – any suggestions on alternatives or what do you use?
I’m running the Office2010 beta at home (mainly for Outlook and OneNote2010) and would highly recommend it when it is finally released. If you are running Exchange2010 then there are even more reasons why you should be running Outlook2010. (Note that a lot of the extra features such as mailtips and access to the archive mailbox are already available with the outlook web access app). If you purchase and activate Office 2007 between now and Sept 30 2010, you will be able to upgrade to 2010 via a free download. You will need a LiveID, the receipt and to register your purchase. More details available at the Office2010 Technology guarantee website.
At long last, there is now a 1 click option to retrieve pop3 mail into gmail without having to go into the accounts tab and then refreshing every account. To turn it on, go to the labs and near the bottom is the Refresh Pop Accounts. See the official announcement for more details.
I had an interesting google alert come through the other day that found some of my content posted at a website – www.windows7keygen.com. (safe to visit.) Ensuring I had noscript switched on, I checked the site out to find that it was just scraping blogs and posting them as content on the website. I sent the host an email to request that they stopped including my site and added a todo to check back in a weeks time.
I was surprised to find a week later (5 days ago) that the site redirects to a bing search for windows7keygen. I checked whois for windows7keygen.com and found that the domain is now owned by Microsoft – along with another 29,000 domains and it looks like 22,000 of them are hosted on the same server. The domain registrar of Niobe Telekom is also unusual – I suspect that is due to the original owners registration.
I find it rather amusing that Microsoft now have control over the domain but I’m not sure how they managed to get control of it – I’m assuming a windows7 trademark threat? I would have thought that they’d have redirected it to Get Windows7 though.
It’s a busy week at the office this week as I’m at a 3 day event on Exchange2010 training as part of Microsoft’s Ignite sessions. You do need to be a Microsoft Partner to register for the Exchange 2010 training (if there are any further events going on – I’m not sure) but if you are going to be using or supporting Exchange2010 then I highly recommend it. So far it seems to be very similar to the Exchange admin training courses you would normally attend, but at a fraction of the cost. It’s a level 300 course so pretty technical – by about 4pm on the first day my mind was starting to get a bit confused – there was a lot of theory today and you certainly need to have some familiarity with previous versions of exchange.
The neat thing was that we’ve just recently moved to Exchange2010 in-house, so I was able to check some of the features that I didn’t already know about on our live client (outlook or outlook web app) as we progressed through the training.
We’re using Windows2008 machines running Hyper-V with 8gb of memory which means some creative juggling of memory and sometimes the machines are slow, but it really is the only way to do the training. Some points we have 4 machines running – this would have been almost impossible before virtualization was around to reduce the hardware requirements for enterprise lab environments. This course is also the first one I’ve been to that has some users in the local office and some using gotomeeting to attend the training over the internet. So far I think the arrangement has worked well for the internet users although I feel sorry for the person in Washington who has to start work at 6am due to the time zones. I was surprised that they were not using LiveMeeting to host the training (as this is a Microsoft event) but apparently the screenupdates were not been fast enough for the remote users.
I’ll be posting a few links on my twitter account – helsbyhome, and my absoblogginlutely delicious account as the course progresses. Mostly these are links for extra tools, utilities or downloads to assist in the management and implementation of Exchange2010.
I’m using the Outlook2010 beta at home and loving it. The interface is nice and clean and there are several nice features that are new to the program. One of the things that I discovered this morning was that copying an appointment from one calendar to another automatically selects the same date and time on the destination calendar as the original calendar. This obviously makes sense as if you were going to copy an appointment from a colleagues calendar, or a shared internet calendar to your own calendar, it is likely that you want the same times. All you have to do is drag the appointment over to anywhere on the new calendar and the appointment is automatically copied across. In outlook2007 the copy functionality is still there, but you have to get the right date and time as you copy the appointment – more flexibility but more time and care is needed when placing the appointment.
See the screenshot below for some details. (You’ll probably need to click on it to see the full details.
Had an interesting troubleshooting session this afternoon on a Windows7 pc that was no longer having the screensaver kick in. After checking the screensaver settings were being deployed via group policy, disabling wake on lan and also preventing the network card from waking up the computer/allowing the computer to be shut down, the problem still persisted. Unplugging the wireless mouse (that was a new addition by the user and not the original supplied mouse) didn’t help either. In the end installing the latest intellipoint software and rebooting the machine fixed the problem. Just installing the software didn’t help.
It was nice that Windows7 had automatically found drivers, but it obviously needed the full software installed to work completely.
Subsequently we found a message popping up on the client pc that said the wireless signal strength was low – so it was probably the mouse trying to check in that was making the computer think activity was occurring on the pc.
I had a client’s LiveCommunicator 2005 stop working and part of the troubleshooting was to remove the software and reinstall. Unfortunately, when I went to reinstall the software, the installation was interrupted and did not complete. No errors were logged in the event log but by looking at the install log file and searching for “return value 3” (standard practise when debugging msi installs) I found the following “ActivateTimeBomb. Return value 3”. A google search only pulled back 3 results, all for Live Communicator which was a good sign, but I did find a posting on the appdeploy forums that offered a solution. I had already applied this patch to the server but had not needed to apply it to the client before, but doing so fixed the problem. The patch file can be found from the kb article 974571 or a direct download.
I was suprised to see how little information was available on google and how useless the install process was. The timebomb information was hidden away in the install log and knowing that “Return Value 3” was the key to a successful troubleshooting session.
