October, 2009

Wii sales crash

Check it out:

 http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/30/…

Wow, really? The fad is finally wearing off? People are now realizing that that there is no good software for this thing? There was no good software for this thing three years ago. I will never understand crazes like this.

Intel touts NAND-killer breakthrough

Really ground breaking stuff here:

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/28/…

Let me tell you what the best thing that ever happend to Intel was : AMD.  Time after time history has proven tha nothing stimulates progress like competition. AMD took the top crown for awhile but ever since the core 2 duo Intel has just been getting better and better. I can only hope that AMD can come up with something to counter this because if AMD dies and noone can step in and that that place then we will return to a pace of bloated prices and stagnating technology.

RIM losing market share to the iPhone

Check out the article:

 http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/28/…

Interesting news here, RIM needs to get it together here if they want to stop bleeding market share. Realistically speaking if the iPhone could come out with a enterprise server product here it might be the nail in the coffin for the blackberry.

Windows 7: Upgrade or fresh install?

As a general rule in the IT industry we generally advocate clean install vs upgrade, however  when it comes to my home PC I can be lazy at times. I decided rather than doing a clean install I would upgrade my PC from Windows Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. I ran through the upgrade process and was immediately impressed with Windows 7 and disappointed with some weird issues my computer started having immediately after the upgrade.

1) Any time I opened an application (any application) the PC would free for about 4-5 seconds

2) After any reboot my Internet connection would not work unless I went into device manager and uninstalled and reinstalled my NIC

I attempted to troubleshoot the isssue to no avail. In the end I wiped the thing and did a clean install of Windows 7 and now everything runs beautiful.

So to answer the question of upgrade vs clean install, always do clean install. Really, I should have known better.

Recovering a file from the Outlook temp folder

Ever opened an attachment in Outlook, made changes, and then did a save instead of save as? Suck’s I know. Microsoft seems to delight it making it all but impossible to find your file. Windows search will be of absolute no help here.

So here is what you do.

First find the location of you Outlook temp directory. You can get this info from the registry

You can try navigating to this location in Windows explorer but for me it lead to a dead end, I could no see the folder it specified even though I had selected show hidden files and de-selected Hide essential operating system files. However you can access this from command prompt. Open command prompt, navigate to the folder (you can use the tab key to save time by auto populating fields) and then use the copy command to copy this file somewhere else on your computer.

Bang, Bob’s your uncle. No the only thing left to do is email Microsoft and ask them why they hate you so much.

External Blu-ray drive coming to the Xbox 360

And the last horse finally cross’s the finish line ….

Steve Ballmer has confirmed that an external Blu-ray drive will be coming to the Xbox 360.

Check out the article:

 http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/22/…

All I can say about this it’s about time, way to catch the last train out of the station on this one.

A hands-on review of Xen Desktop 4

I got my first chance to play with Xen Desktop 4 and by association the new version of Xen App that it ships with.

So first off I think we can all agree that it wouldn’t be a Citrix release without a Nomenclature change. The new citrix client is out(11.2) and now called the Citrix Online Plug-In. The Access Management Console has been renamed to the Delivery Services Console for both Xen Desktop and Xen App. The web interface functionality which used to be it’s own console and then was amalgamated into the Access Management Console has now been separated back into it’s own console again. To my understanding they split their assets 50/50 and Web interface has supervised visitation rights to the kids.

Ok, so now the good. Lots of improvements on the Virtual Desktop Agent with lots more multimedia support and USB support. There seems to be more functionality built in to make the user experience more seamless and enjoyable which is good because if there is nothing in the world that will kill desktop virtualization faster then unhappy users.

When I was publishing an application in Xen App that has been installed on the Xen App server there was a handy check box to setup an Isolation Enviroment which to my remembrance not there before.

Overall I would say good improvements so far, I am sure I barely scratched the surface on changes but I only started using it today so I will post more changes as a notice them.

AP’s not registering on Cisco Wireless controller 4400 series

I experienced this issue recently where I had a Cisco Wireless 4400 series Controller and some brand new 1140 series AP’s. The problem was this, the access points would connect to the controller, they would get IP addresses, and you would see them listed under the wireless section of the web GUI but the indicator light on them would never turn a solid green and they would not broadcast the SSID’s.

The issue as it turned out was firmware on the controller. This is a known issue with version 4 and below. We upgraded to version 6 and this resolved the issue.

Passed 1y0-a14!

I wrote and passed the Xen Desktop 3.0 (1Y0-A14) yesterday with a 98%!  Overall this was a straight forward exam, no big tricks. There were a few questions where you were told the task that you needed to preform and they listed all the steps to do it and you needed to put those steps in the right order. All the other questions were very short and if you know your stuff then it shouldn’t be too hard an exam.

My advise would be to focus heavily on studying provisioning server because that played in big in the exam that I got.

Good luck!

Forms with VBScript do not work with Terminal Services in Outlook

Ok so this is a known issue I encountered that I wanted to post about. I found a MS support article with a fix for this.

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302003

So in situations where you are running Outlook on a TS(or Citrix) box, VBScript will not work and you will need to apply the fix in the article to get it working.