So how have you prepared for the upcoming change in Daylight Savings Time? There are quite a few pages on the Microsoft site which seem to cause more confusion than explain things and I know that end users are just not going to understand what they need to do and when. Microsoft do have some documentation on the changes which seems to be best for the system administrator. However I think the easiest thing is to tell everyone to ensure that all appointments have the expected date and time in the subject line.
A snippet of the changes is in the extended entry – personally I’m not happy as I lose an hour of sleep on my birthday and then have to deal with the hassles.
OneCare was released earlier this week and I received notice that the beta I was on was due to finish and that I could purchase a discounted subscription. The funny thing is that the product is just not ready for release. I have an ongoing case with Microsoft support since October 2006 and we are still no further forward – After the software was re-installed (after it corrupted itself for the second time it asked me to reboot. I did so and then received a prompt to hit “continue installation” after logging into the computer. When I click this button I get the following error message – “Onecare cannot complete the installation at this time because of a problem connecting to the service. Please check your Internet connection, wait awhile, and then try again. If the problem persists, contact support.” This continues to happen. Clicking on contact support takes me to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=40212 which returns a 404 page not found message – not very helpful either.
So far we’ve reinstalled various bits of Microsoft software and OneCare about 20 times and each time the software says that it can’t contact Microsoft’s servers to finish the installation. This is despite the fact that tcpview shows a connection and the av software does download patches. The problem is compounded by the fact that the software’s debugging facilities are practically non-existent and do not provide any help to the poor support guy. Speaking of which he has some very strange support times, answering helpdesk calls emails on Christmas day.
Tried to install the Office2007 cd and got told that I already had beta 2007 components installed (which is actually the Expression Beta) as per the error “Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies. Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.”
Several blogs later (funnily enough the first response in google was Scott’s page which I already read on a daily basis) I followed the instructions at kb928218 and removed the Expression Beta (which I had already removed from Add Remove programs and the My Uninstall program)
If you get an alert from Small Business Server stating :The following disk is low on free disk space. ……Drive letter: HarddiskVolume17″ (in my case) this is typically caused by a usb drive being unplugged without going through safe removal. The alert will get sent every day until the server is rebooted. You can also reduce the chance of this happening again by optimizing the drive for quick removal as per this post on Experts Exchange
Verizon software can be dowloaded from vzam.net for the pcmcia card – useful to know as it doesn’t seem to be easily found on the main Verizon website
Jim Allchin blogs about changes to offline files in Vista and includes the great titbit of information that now, finally, the pc will only sync the files belonging to the user that is logging off so that the access denied message does not appear delaying the log off/shut down procedure.
Also, synchronisation is intelligent in that it will only sync changes to files as opposed to the whole file itself (if supported by the application) – this should help a couple of my clients who have issues with long synchronisation times on their pc.
It will be interesting to see if a new version of csccmd comes out with Vista, which includes all the extra switches that the xp version did not unless you requested the hotfix from Microsoft support.
See The Filing Cabinet for more information on these new features.
If you try to upload a file that is greater than 500k then google docs will complain with the message “We’re sorry, but we were unable to upload this document” and then suggests you copy/paste the document from your spreadsheet or save as html. It doesn’t tell you that the reason it failed to upload is due to the fact that the file is too big. The file size is mentioned in the requirements so it would be nice if the error message mentioned that. It does give you a sensible error message if you try to email the file though (which is how I discovered this)
This is prove that laughter is contagious – bet you can’t watch this video all the way through without crying! It’s long at 10 minutes but is so funny it is worth it – you may not want to watch this in the office as everyone will be wondering what you are doing.
I’ve posed a puzzler at Friends In Tech about an issue I had when upgrading a NT4 domain to Small Business Server 2003. It will be interesting to see if anyone comes up with the correct answer but also to get some responses from other techs and hopefully it will encourage conversations on the website and forums.
As I am now not the only person working on a WordPress based site, it was time to look at providing the ability to load plugins from within WordPress – Installer – the plugin looks like it will do the job – now all I need is some more plugins to use it with!