KWSupport : Other links and articles

IT Pro Tiki Tour - Tampa/Lakeland

kwsupport — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:07:00 GMT

Blain Barton, Microsoft's Southeast IT Pro Evangelist, will be bringing his Spring Tiki Tour to the Tampa area on June 4th, 2009 (6p-9p) at the Polk Community College in Lakeland. Topics include: Moving to the Modern OS Roadmap, Windows Security, and Windows 7. I will be doing the Windows 7 presentation. (Yes, food is included!)

Space is limited. As of Tuesday 5/26, we already have 165 registered. Click here to register and for more information.

Hope to see you there!

Introduction to Windows Server 2008 Foundation

kwsupport — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:25:00 GMT

I previously blogged on April 1st about the new entry level Windows Server that Microsoft just released -- Windows Server 2008 Foundation (WSF). Microsoft has now published a new paper called Introduction to Windows Server 2008 Foundation.

WSF is NOT intended to be a "baby" version of SBS. Rather, it is a Windows 2008 Server limited to 15 users. It's designed to be sold into an existing very small business that is currently running a peer-to-peer (workgroup) network. There's no Exchange on it.

Enjoy!

New Entry Level Windows 2008 Server

kwsupport — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:18:00 GMT

Microsoft announced today (April 1, 2009) a new entry level version of Windows 2008 Server - called Foundations. And this ain't no April Fool's joke. It will support a maximum of 15 users. Read more in their press release.

Frank McCallister - In Memoriam

kwsupport — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:03:00 GMT

Frank McCallister passed away this week. Frank was an SBS MVP. He loved to say he was the oldest MVP. But more importantly he was a real friend. His stories would hold your attention, but the real story was Frank. He called himself "the Old Fart". But that name does not describe all that he did and would do for people. Frank, we will miss you.

In tribute to Frank, I've reworked the lyrics of the song "The Gambler", made famous by Kenny Rogers (YouTube video).

The Old Fart (aka The Gambler)
Dedicated to Frank McCallister

On a warm summer's evenin' on a train bound for ‘Bama,
I met up with the old fart; we were both too tired to sleep.
So we took turns a starin' out the window at the darkness
'Til boredom overtook us, and he began to speak.

He said, "Son, I've made a life out of readin' people's emails,
And knowin' what their logs showed, by the way they signed their names.
And if you don't mind my sayin', I can see you’re out of disk space.
For a taste of your whiskey I'll give you some advice."

So I handed him my bottle and he drank down my last swallow.
Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.
Said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.

You got to know when to defrag, know when to format,
Know when to reinstall, ‘cause I’m the old fart.
You never say you’re thirsty when you're sittin' at the console.
There'll be time enough for drinkin' when the (MVP) party starts

Ev'ry old fart knows that the secret to survivin'
Is knowin' emails to throw away and knowing what to keep.
'Cause ev'ry email's a winner and ev'ry email's a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

And when he'd finished speakin', he turned back towards the window,
Crushed out his cigarette and faded off to sleep.
And somewhere in the darkness the old fart, he broke even.
But in his final words I found an ace that I could keep.

-kw

Hot Fixes for Outlook 2007 Now Available

kwsupport — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:49:00 GMT

For those using Outlook2007, two new hotfixes are now available that address specific speed and performance issues as well as a variety of other issues. Hotfixes, by nature, come with some warnings on their use. Hot fix 961752 and Hot fix 967688

Note #1: If you have never requested a hot fix from Microsoft, or it has been years since you have, you will be pleased to find that the process is quite fast and efficient. No longer do you need to even call Microsoft to request a hot fix!

Simply click on the links above to open up a new window with information on the hot fix. In the upper left of the window will be a clickable link" 'View and request hotfix downloads'. Click on the link, enter your email address twice plus a security code and within five minutes you will receive an email containing a link to download the hotfix and a required password. The password is only good for a certain number of days (7 days maximum), so it is best that you download the hotfix as soon as you receive the email from Microsoft.

Windows Mobile and DST

kwsupport — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:41:00 GMT

I can't believe it's 2009 and we still have issues with DST and calendar items! Several of us just discovered (here on Feb-10-2009) that an event we are entering for August 2009 in Outlook 2007 is showing up an hour earlier on our WM6.1 phones. I've downloaded the latest WM/DST patch and installed it on my WM6.1 phone, but appointments are still showing up an hour earlier. I tried rebooting the phone, but no change. AFAIK, Outlook and my Exchange/SBS 2003 box are up to snuff with patches.

Very frustrating ...

Experience with the Seagate disk drive fiasco

kwsupport — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:54:00 GMT

As most of you know, last week there were widespread reports of Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200.11 drives failing. Initially only the 1TB disk drives were thought to be the issie. But later it was determined that the problem also existed in some of their other 7200.11 drives.

I know, as I got hit with an SBS 2008 server that had four 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives!

Seagate has since come out with a free firmware upgrade and utility. The download is in an ISO format as you must create a bootable CD to run it. However, please note that this firmware utility will not run on systems utilizing SATA Raid controllers. Instead you will need to remove the drives from your server and connect them one at a time to a desktop station that is running a standard SATA drive controller.

To determine if your drive is amongst those with the bad firmware, and download the appropriate firmware, click here.

Good luck!

Vista Sidebar survey

kwsupport — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:45:00 GMT

Just a quick survey directed to those folks running Windows Vista: Do you enable and use a sidebar? If so, do you use the Vista sidebar? Or do you use one from another vendor (Google, Yahoo, etc.)? What sidebar apps/gadgets do you find most useful or helpful?

Here are some early responses from some of my SBS friends:

"Using Vista Sidebar with Google tool add-in ... mostly so that the format of the Applicaiton is forced back to a usable 3:4 ratio"

"Vista. I use a full month calendar, and the weather gadget. Starting a week or two before traveling, I add another weather gadget or my destination. This will be much more useful in Windows 7 with "aero peek:. It's annoying that the Vista "show desktop" hides the sidebar as well as the app windows, but I usually just hit win+spacebar to bring the sidebar to the top"

"Vista sidebar, plus a couple of RSS gadgets and the weather gadget are floating about the desktops. XM gadget too."

"I use clock when travelling. I configure it for the time zone of my destination. I was using something called Magic Folder. Loved it but they ran into some bugs and pulled it. "

"Vista sidebar. Local timezone clock, CPU meter, weather, Office tips & tricks. Additional clocks for GMT, India and Sydney are at 60% opacity, and at the bottom of the sidebar."

Kaspersky Lockup Solved

kwsupport — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:51:00 GMT

So, this is a bit off the SBS highway. I started using Kaspersky's 2009 Internet Security Suite for many of my non-server (family and friends) clients. I like it a lot. But a couple of times recently, I had an issue where Kaspersky would lock up while I was trying to use it or install it. In each case, once it locked up, I could do nothing but stop it from task manager.

remember many years ago when I did a lot of software debugging to always reduce a problem down to its Lowest Cost Denominator (LCD).

Well, I finally had time to do that today, and determined that the LCD in this case was LogMeIn! In each case where I had Kaspersky locking up on me, I was connected to the computer remotely through LogMeIn. The solution was to add LogMeIn.exe to Kaspersky's Trusted Site and click on the option to not have it control application activity. I believe I saw posts where a similar lockup occurs with the VNC-type remote access software.

Hope this helps!
-kw

Making Vista UAC Workable

kwsupport — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:24:00 GMT

I know I am not the only one who has considered completely disabling the User Account Control (UAC) in Windows Vista, or actually gone ahead and disabled that sucker! Recently I had a situation where UAC was preventing me from completing a project, and I had to disable UAC long enough to install and run a new app. Since then I have discovered tow possible workarounds to this issue.

Both solutions take the approach of letting you flag often-used applications and the level of security required to run them. It then stores that information so that the next time you execute the application, it already knows your response, and you can proceed without getting that annoying UAC prompt.

The first solution comes from the dailyApps blog, and is based on use of the Application Compatibility ToolKit from Microsoft. Click here to read the details. The second solution comes from NortonLabs, is is simply entitled UAC Tool. Their approach is to put a wrapper around Vista UAC, building a whitelist database of your frequently-used apps, while still relying on the UAC security system.

I'd be interested in finding out what others think of either or both solution.

Facebook add-in to Outlook

kwsupport — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:16:00 GMT

I opened up a Facebook account earlier this year. You can imagine the shock on my daughter's face when she discovered that Dad had a Facebook account!

So, I've used it and like many of the social networking features. However, it's not second nature to me to logon to Facebook to update my status or see new posts. So, I just discovered a free Facebook add-in to Outlook called FBLook.

This product is certainly in it's infancy, but it already makes it easier for me to do two things (see screenshot here):

I can update my Facebook status directly from the Outlook toolbar. That's great, because I don't have to open another window and login to accomplish this task.
It gives me a drop down list within Outlook to easily read the lastest posts from my friends. I can then click on one of those posts from wthin Outlook and it will open up Facebook so I can post a reply.

Give it a try. It works with both Outlook 2003/2007.

MailFoundry and the small user

kwsupport — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:59:00 GMT

You can call me slow, you can call me old.
You can call me what you will, you can call me over the hill.

But it's still nice to discover something new ... and free! This post is for those of you with small users (10 or less employees).

I know that MailFoundry has been around for quite awhile, but I never had a reason to look for a anti-spam solution until this past week. I have a customer (non-SBS) who uses the local Outlook junk mail filter for his office, and it works reasonably well. However, he also has his emails coming to his phone - and his phone gets all the junk and spam mail.

So, in checking out solutions, I discovered that MailFoundry currently offers free spam/virus filtering for up to 10 mail boxes! I signed the customer up, updated my MX records to point to Mail Foundry, and have been running a test with one mail client (the president of the company, of course). In the first few hours of running it, out of 151 incoming messages, it blocked 141, and not one was a false positive. it blocked 141 of a possible 151 messages.

Will my computer support SBS 2008?

kwsupport — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:56:00 GMT

SBS 2008, as you know, will only run on a 64 bit platform. But there's more processor terminology out there than I can keep up with. We have Xeon, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Quad this, Quad that. Makes you wonder what happened to Core Single? And then you wonder if your system will support virtualization (Hyper-V in Microsoft's world).

If you have had to ask yourself whether a machine you are working on is capable of supporting SBS 2008, YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

Steve Gibson, from Gibson Research, has a great little tool caled SecurAble - it will tell you whether you computer is (a) 64 bit, (b) if hardware DEP is enabled, and (c) if it will support virtualization. It's easy to run, and easy to interpret. And if you want even more information on your processor and system, check out CPU-Z. This is another free little utility. Nothing to install ... simply unzip it and run the included .exe file.

HTH!

-kw

ThirdTier Press Release

kwsupport — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:53:00 GMT

Two great friends and fellow MVP's - Amy Babinchak and Eriq Neale - have combined forces to start ThirdTier, a new business venture providing support to the IT professionals in the SMB marketplace. Here is their press release:

Eriq Neale and I have launched a new company today. It’s called Third Tier. The company formalizes the remote support services that we have both been offering from some time. We will be adding subject matter experts to cover a wide variety of software in use today at the SMB.

Support Services for IT Professionals

Press Release

Contact: Amy Babinchak

Phone: (248) 890-1794

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 3, 2008

IT Support Services for Professionals

Royal Oak, MI, October 3, 2008: Amy Babinchak and Eriq Neale, MS MVP’s, Authors and Speakers, have teamed up in a new business venture to provide remote support services to IT professionals. By formalizing and centralizing the remote support services of highly skilled professionals across a wide range of products ThirdTier.net will be the place where IT professionals turn to when they need assistance to resolve that tough problem for their client. Third Tier will also offer SMB focused vendors the solution to the difficult problem of supporting a wide variety of skill sets in the SMB market space, thus making it easier for them to offer their products to small business customers.

· Central location for IT Professionals to contract experts on a wide variety of technologies to remotely assist in problem resolution.

· Experts providing vendors the solution to product support in the SMB market space.

Windows Search 4 (WS4)

kwsupport — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:22:00 GMT

I never thought I would find myself recommending the Windows Desktop Search utility to anyone. But, perhaps with version 4, they finally are getting it right! The prior version (Windows Desktop Search 3) is now named Windows Search 4. And this is from someone who used the Lookout product for years- that is until Microsoft bought the product, and tried to turn it into MSN Search. I then switched to Lookeen when I moved over to Vista and Office 2007 last year.

I've been running WS4 on my Vista SP1 box for all of 24 hours, but already I can say the improvement over the prior Microsoft versions is noticeable - meaning faster. To give it a fair shake, I completely uninstalled Lookeen from the system. I cannot say yet whether it's as good as Lookeen (or Lookout). So, stay tuned for further updates.

-kw

Trend Micro renames/enhances CSM

kwsupport — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:48:00 GMT

For those of you using Trend Micro's Clent Server Messaging (CSM) suite for your SBS servers, you should know that Trend Micro on June 2, 2008 recently rebranded the CSM product to "Worry-Free Business Security Advanced (WFBS)" and released version 5.0.

If you are using CSM 3.5/3.6 and are under maintenance, you can upgrade to WFBS Advanced at no charge.. Upgrading to WFBS will preserve all your current CSM configuration parameters. Click here for instructions from Trend Micro on how to upgrade to WFBS. To download the WFBS Advance installation file (768MB), click here.

I'll post back after I've installed it on my test server.

-kw

XP SP3 and HP

kwsupport — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:53:00 GMT

Well HP finally admits there's an issue (surprise, surprise) with XP SP3 and some of their AMD systems. They are recommending to their users to NOT install SP3 until they have a prerequisite fix available for download later this week. Read more here.

-kw

XP SP3 and MCE (Revisited)

kwsupport — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:20:00 GMT

Well, SP3 is now officially out, and many people have encountered the problem I did after installing SP3 where the system going into a continual reboot cycle. Jesper Johansson has written a very detail, in-depth post on the causes and fixes for this situation (click here).

I will be giving his workaround a try later this week on my wife's XP MCE computer (HP with an AMD processor!) to see if SP3 successfully installs.More latewr.

-kw

USB Drives and Slow Server

kwsupport — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:19:00 GMT

I know that there are plenty of posts that deal with issues related to external USB drives on servers, such as problems when rebooting the server, or the server acting strange when a USB drive is not removed properly. But until today, I had not encountered any of these scenarios.

Situation was that the server was slow to log on, and clicking on 'My Computer' took several minutes before it would display the full list of server drives. My first attempt to resolve the issue was to uninstall the A/V, but that did nothing. I then tried rebooting the server, but to no avail.

Finally, I noticed that there should have been two external USB hard drives attached that the customer uses for rotating real time backups. These were assigned as drives L: and M:, but M: did not show any drive attached. So, I clicked on the handy-dandy green check icon to safely remove the missing USB driver, and voila!, everything started working.

Hope this helps someone down the road!

-kw

Dell and resetting BIOS

kwsupport — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:02:00 GMT

People who know me, know that I don't like hardware! I was working on a client's computer (older Dell 8200) yesterday that wouldn't boot up. I went ahead and put in a different hard drive. But every time I would boot it up, it would display the "Primary Hard Drive 1 Not Found". I would go into BIOS, and it would show the drive. And if I pressed F1 from the error, the computer would go ahead and boot up.

I messed around with the BIOS settings enought, that ultimately it was not booting at all, but coming up with a "Strike f1 to retry boot, f2 to enter system utility". After some stumbling around, I found the following recommendation for resetting the BIOS and getting past such problematic warnings and errors:

When the F1 or F2 screen come up, make sure that:
1) CAPS LOCK LIGHT IS ON
2) NUMBERS LOCK LIGHT IS ON
3) SCROLL LOCK LIGHT IS ON
ALL 3 LIGHTS ON KEYBOARD MUST BE ON...

Then you press:
1) (ALT TAB) E
2) (ALT TAB) F
3) (ALT TAB) B

The computer will restart on its own and reconfigure the IDE settings.