Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Hardware'

Windows® 7 : Redécouvrez Windows Aero®

patrice — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Bonjour tout le monde,

"Je vais acheter Windows 7... Est-ce que mon matériel va être capable d'afficher mon environnement avec Windows AERO® (voir les fenêtres en transparence) ?"

Pour faire fonctionner l'interface Windows avec Aero®, les éléments matériels de votre ordinateur doivent posséder quelques pré-requis :
- Processeur 32 bits (x86) ou 64 bits (x64) cadencé à 1 gigahertz (GHz)
- 1 Go de mémoire vive (Comptez 2 Go minimum, bien 3 Go),
- 1 Carte graphique avec un pilote supportant WDDM 1.0, Pixel Shaders 2.0, DirectX 9 et 128 Mo de mémoire dédiée et prise en charge du format 32 bits par pixel (WDDM 1.1, DirectX 10, 256 Mo de mémoire)
- 40 Go de disque dur de 15 Go d'espace libre ;
- 1 lecteur DVD-ROM ;
- 1 sortie audio et un accès à Internet.

Mais vous avez également Windows Upgrade Advisor pour vous dire tout cela cela ;-)
http://msmvps.com/blogs/vista/archive/2009/08/17/windows-174-7-pr-233-installation-de-la-rtm-version-finale.aspx

L'avantage d'Aero® ?
- Placer le curseur sur l'icône réduite de la fenètre en barre des tâches; observez le contenu activé (en exécution) de cette fenêtre : son, vidéo, page web... dans une mini-fenêtre...
- Usez de la transparence à l'état pur ! Besoin de voir uniquement le bureau Windows ? Grâce à Aero® Peek, placez le curseur de votre souris sur le bord droit de la barre des tâches et... toutes les fenêtres deviennent transparentes...
- et Windows® Snap ? Oh eh, je ne vais tout de même pas tout vous raconter .

Découvrez tout cela vous-même avec Windows 7

Bonne journée et bon surf (attention au phishing spécial Caisse d'Allocation Familiales ces jours-ci)

Patrice.

SBS 2008 – a 64-bit OS to Love

xperts64 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

As many of you know, I wrote the book on Windows Small Business Server 2008, as well as earlier editions. It’s an operating system and a good deal more, giving most small businesses (up to 75 users or devices) pretty much all the infrastructure and enterprise environment they need.

We’ve run our writing business on SBS for years, and we recently moved our production environment over to SBS 2008. This was the last piece of the puzzle, and we’re fully 64-bit here except for two old workstations that don’t have the hardware for it, and that can’t quite go away yet.

This does, of course, leave us with a question? What to do with that old SBS 2003 R2 server? It’s only 32-bit, but it has 3GB of RAM, and lots and lots of RAID array. Maybe we’ll turn it in to an iSCSI SAN, using StarWind’s iSCSI software. That would be a good way to repurpose the hardware and let us rationalize our storage here a bit.

So, back to SBS 2008, which is what started all this. The Official SBS Blog has a new post on Why small businesses use SBS, complete with links to some smoking deals from Dell and HP, amongst others. Check out the blog for some compelling reasons to consider SBS 2008, grab a copy of our book on it for detailed planning and configuration information, and then make the move to 64-bit on the back end and you’ll love the differences.

Charlie.

La madre de todas las demos, de nuevo

lopez — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

El año pasado ya había escrito sobre el tema:

La madre de todas las demos

La historia es relatada en más detalle en la entrada de Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968 demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) at the Convention Center in San Francisco, in which a number of experimental technologies that have since become commonplace were presented. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext.

La semana pasada, en una lista de correo privada, recibí esta lista de videos. Veánlos, más de 40 años atrás, ya se demostraba muchas de las tecnologías que hoy tenemos. Según la info del usuario de youtube bigkif:

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse.

Pero no fue solamente el mouse:

But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Nos leemos!

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com
http://twitter.com/ajlopez

The Savvy-Tech’s Hardware-Independent-Restore

cgross — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Ok, so I thought I’d share a real-world support scenario that happened to me today:

So I have a new contract customer I just signed a couple weeks ago, and they went live as of 9/1. I was doing various maintenance tasks on their network over the weekend, removing unnecessary apps from PCs to improve performance, getting patches installed, etc. So about the only thing that was left last night was patching their Windows 2003 terminal server. So I push the patches out via Kaseya, patches install successfully, the server initiates a reboot – but never comes back. Now, I’ve been doing remote patching / reboots for years now, and this has only ever happened a handful of times.

I log in to their SBS and attempt to ping the TS – no response. The TS is a whitebox server that is about 4 years old and doesn’t have a remote access card or IP-KVM connected. The client is in bed, and not having the TS really isn’t going to be an issue until their approx half-dozen remote users try to access Great Plains in the morning. So I didn’t bother calling to wake anyone up – instead, I more or less surprised the VP when I walked in at 7:30 this morning to address a problem they didn’t know they had yet.

Short story was that the server was pretty much on its deathbed – the alarm LED on the case was coming on whenever the processor tried to do anything. It took 5 attempts before I was able to get the server to boot, and when I did get logged in the CPU was grinding constantly with the error LED lit, but looking at the task manager I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, besides the fact that the system was so slow it was virtually unusable for one user at the console, let alone a half-dozen plus remote TS users trying to use Great Plains. Quick diagnosis & gut instinct told me this was a hardware issue. Being a 4-year old whitebox, it was long out of warranty. I knew the server just needed replaced, but the remote users couldn’t wait a week to 10 days for me to get approval, get a box ordered from Dell, and get it installed. Additionally, for the state of the machine, it would probably take days to get an image-based backup using Shadow Protect, since this is a new customer and they aren’t backing up the TS since there’s no data on it.

SO – I ran back to my office and grabbed a spare PC I use for random stuff on my bench (Acer - about 3 yrs old, but has a dual-core Pentium CPU @ 2.8 GHz & has been upgraded to 2GB RAM). I also grabbed my old Adaptec 1205SA PCI SATA host controller off the shelf and returned to the client.

The TS in question was running a RAID 1 array using an on-board SATA RAID controller. I shut down the TS, and installed the Adaptec SATA controller in an open PCI slot, then after 4 tries the server finally booted again. I logged in, the OS found the Adaptec SATA controller & I installed drivers from my thumb drive. Once the driver installation completed successfully, I shut down the TS again.

I removed the Adaptec SATA controller & drive 0 from the TS. I installed the Adaptec SATA controller in the Acer PC, inserted & connected drive 0 from the TS to the Adaptec SATA controller, then disconnected the existing SATA hdd in the PC. I powered-on the PC, and since drive 0 was connected to the Adaptec SATA controller, AND the Win2k3 OS on drive 0 already had drivers for that controller installed, the Win2k3 TS OS booted successfully in (almost) completely different hardware. On the first login, the OS detected the various new hardware (on-board boot controller, DVD drive, on-board NIC, etc.). Once drivers for new hardware were installed & onboard NIC configured, I powered down the Acer PC, removed the Adaptec SATA controller card, & connected drive 0 to the on-board primary SATA port. Powered on the PC – the Win2k3 OS again booted successfully, and we verified that remote users were able to successfully log in and launch Great Plains.

Obviously, using a 3-yr old desktop PC as a terminal server is not a long-term solution. But – this minimized downtime for the remote users (having them all online before noon), and provided both myself & the customer with valuable breathing room / time to resolve the root issue and get the ball rolling on replacing this server. And given the small number of users and basic Dynamics GP use, the performance of this temporary hardware is more than sufficient for the remote users (and beats the alternative )

And yes, there is more than one way to skin a cat – and multiple ways this problem could have been addressed. In this particular situation, I felt this was the best approach to get to a working system in the least amount of time possible, considering the severe instability of the original hardware, the lack of an existing image backup of the TS, and the fact that I could easily break the mirror to run off a single HDD from the server.

HP ML350 G5 – 26 Months Later (Part 2)

xperts64 — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Well, sorry about that. Got a bit distracted after I started writing up my experiences with the ML350 and buried in a project and forgot to get back here. And I’m still a bit buried, so I’ll keep this a bit shorter than I might otherwise.

First, the good stuff: Overall, I love this server. It’s quiet (well, as long as the ambient temperature stays under 30 degrees or so), which is a real plus in a small business where the server may well live in a room where people have to work. It’s a workhorse. It runs at 95% memory utilization 24/7, with CPU utilization running in the range of 5-10% most of the time. That’s pretty good, and means that if I could put more RAM in here I could definitely run more VMs. The thing that makes all this possible is the incredibly good disk I/O subsystem. With a P400 RAID controller, and 8x 2.5” SAS disks for the main array, plus a separate Adaptec SAS controller that runs a pair of 750GB SATA drives (RAID 0) for miscellaneous transient storage (ISOs and such), and a pair of SAS drives in RAID1 for the boot disk, this server can really handle a lot. I could wish it had more network I/O built in. If I were buying one today, I’d spec it with at least one, and probably two, quad-port GigE NICs. More and more I’m finding that networking is my limiting factor. I’ve added an Intel dual-port server NIC, and that helps, but it’s just not enough for the kinds of things I end up doing.

Overall, this is an extremely well build server, and it’s a joy to work on. I had to swap out a couple of FB-DIMMs that went out in our last heat wave, and it was trivial to do it. Everything is well marked and easy to get at, and I only had to unclip the fan shroud to easily pop the DIMMs.

So, what don’t I like? The base I/O isn’t that great, with only a single NIC (Broadcom at that), and only the P200i for a built in RAID controller. But both of those are easily fixable. Less easily fixed is that the only way to upgrade the CPUs from dual-core to quad-core is to change the motherboard. That really is annoying, since with the dual-core CPUs the box is limited to 16 GB of RAM. If I could just buy new CPUs, I could easily extend the life of this server by quite a bit, since the quad-core CPU configuration supports 32 GB of RAM, and at a very reasonable cost. But that’s not an option.

And one ongoing annoyance is that the built-in iLO port, which takes the place of a second NIC, is of very limited usefulness without buying a very expensive add-on software package. Give me a break, HP! It should not cost extra to use the iLO as a spare management NIC for whatever I want to use it for. (And I have the same complaint about the iSCSI addon for the integrated multi-function NIC.)

So, would I buy one? Oh, yeah. And I’d really love to get my hands on the new G6 version, which looks like a very worthy successor. But that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, unless HP sends me an eval unit again.

Charlie.

Acer Ferrari Repair

xperts64 — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I've had my Acer Ferrari 4000 for four years now, and it has been a great laptop. Yes, I wish I had a dual core. Yes, I wish I had a laptop that had 4 GB or even more. But honestly, the Ferrari was still a quite good little laptop, iwth a great display (1680x1050 on a 14" screen is hard to find!), a perfectly usable keyboard, and the whole thing is a carbon fibre case that looks cool and weighs in at under 6 Lbs. But a few weeks ago, just as we were getting ready to go on vacation, it came up dead. Not a little dead, not limping, but power on, no boot, no BIOS, D E A D. I was totally bummed, and knew I just didn't have the spare $$ floating around to buy anything to replace it that I really wanted. But after I'd had a chance to recover from the shock, I did a quick search on eBay for solutions. First I asked my friend Barb if it were possible to squeeze an Acer 5000 motherboard into the 4000 case, since I know she has both laptops. Nope, not an option. Too bad, I could have used a dual core. Then I searched for a repair solution and came up with this offer: For a flat $175, including return shipping and all taxes, they would fix pretty much anything on the laptop by doing component level repair of the motherboard, etc. And in the small percentage where they couldn't fix it (~5%), they'd ship it back to you for $25 and refund the rest of your PayPal payment. I checked the seller's ratings, and they were 100% good, so I figured I had very little to lose and bought the package.

I pulled the hard drive out (they say right up front they'd prefer NOT to have it), and dropped it off at Pony Express, who packaged it up and sent it off for me, and two days later, on a Friday, I get a call from the seller saying they'd received the Ferrari and were beginning work on it and giving me a work order number.So far, so good. I like communications, it gives me confidence.

Now besides the wouldn't boot, there were a few other little problems that had cropped up over the years. Three of four USB ports were dead, for one. And the PCCard slot was also pretty much dead. I'd been living with both problems. They were an annoyance, but not really more than that, though the PCCard slot was getting to be a real pain, since I couldn't run a second wireless network. And my networking here is a bit "interesting", so that was a nuisance. I'd listed all of these problems on the sheet I'd taped to the top of the laptop, but frankly I was just hoping they'd get me back to the booting stage. Anything beyond was nice, but not essential.

On Wednesday of the next week, I get another call (I'm still on vacation at this point, but I'd given them my cell number). They've repaired several things already, but they're going to have to replace the CPU. Great, I figure this is where they stick it to me and expect more money. Nope. Not even a hint of that. What they're calling about is that they have the 1.6 GHz model CPU in stock, but will have to order the 2.0 GHz one so it will take a couple of extra days, or they can put the 1.6 GHz processor in, my choice. I said I'd prefer the 2.0 GHz,and she said no problem, they should be able to get it locally, and would ship when it was completely repaired.

Well, just when we get home from vacation, there's the email with the tracking number. Great, that will mean an extra trip to the Pony Express office, but we'll deal with it. Well, last night I actually got the Ferrari back in my hands, and I am completely satisfied. All four USB ports are fully working again, the laptop booted right up into 64-bit Windows 7 when I plugged in the hard disk, and even the PCCard slot is working, with my D-Link DWA-652 in it! The one thing they didn't fix (and this is completely disclosed in their flat rate offer, so I have zero complaints) was the broken Del key on the keyboard. It just needs a dab of glue to keep the cap in place, but I haven't bothered since it mostly stays where it's supposed to be anyway.

Now, if you think that a flat rate of $175 for repair is a bad deal, and you'd rather just get a free estimate and go that way, they do that too. http://laptoprescuer.com/ is there main location. But I really liked the confidence of a prix fixe . I knew the Ferrari was worth $175 to me, if it was working. And I had a pretty good idea that they'd have to do quite a bit of work to get it all fixed. I have no idea what they would have charged had I opted for a T&M deal, and frankly I don't care. But however you go about it, I highly recommend them. They did exactly what they promised, they did it in about the time they said, and they communicated clearly and appropriately at every step of the process. And I think at a very fair price.

Charlie.

Monitor Aspect Ratios unraveled..

mikehall — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, the native resolution of a newly purchased monitor can make it hard to read for those who do not have 20:20 vision. And then there are those who like to see more on their monitors and have good enough eyesight to cope. I have to use reading glasses for working on the computer anyway, so I have my two 19” CRTs set for UXGA 1600 x 1200.

The table below shows the alternative resolutions which will work for the most popular aspect ratios.

Screen type	NTSC TV	Standard CRT	Standard LCD	Wide LCD	Wide LCD	Wide LCD and HDTV	Acer Aspire Eee PC
Aspect	3:2	4:3	5:4	5:3	16:10	16:9
1	NTSC 720 x 480	QVGA 320 x 240	SXGA 1280 x 1024	WVGA 800 x 400	WXGA 1200 x 800	WVGA 854 x 400	WVSGA 1204 x 768
2	1152 x 768	VGA 640 x 480	QSXGA 2560 x 2048	WXGA 1280 x 768	1440 x 900	HD 720 1280 x 720
3	1280 x 854	PAL 768 x 576			WSXGA+ 1600 x 1050	1366 x 768
4	1440 x 960	SVGA 800 x 600			WUXGA 1920 x 1200	HD 1080 1920 x 1080
5		XGA 1024 x 768			WQXGA 2560 x 1600
6		1280 x 960
7		SXGA+ 1400 x 1200
8		UXGA 1600 x 1200
9		QXGA 2048 x 1536

Web Browser Icon Missing from Blackberry?

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I saw this yesterday. This can happen (and is reported quite heavily) when a major update is performed on a Blackberry device. It was reported to me that the Internet browser had uninstalled. After a bit of research it was learned that the browser component still existed on the device, just that it was missing from the Apps screen.

To get the icon back do one (or both) of the following:

Step one:

1. With the BB still powered "on", remove battery from the device

2. Leave the battery out for at least 30 seconds

3. Replace battery and let the device reboot

Step two: (if step one did not solve issue)

1. From the device go to Options

2. Select Advanced Options

3. Select Host Routing Table

4. Select menu, then 'Register Now'

It’s simple..

mikehall — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

This morning, I read a post in a newsgroup where a computer user had endeavored to use the Vista backup facility. The backup software selected the D drive, but the computer user did not realize that the D drive was the recovery partition. The backup reported as failing, so the user FORMATTED the D drive, and tried again without success because the partition held the system recovery files before the format, and was never going to be large enough for a full system backup.

So what can this person do now? If the machine is not exactly new, the chance of the OEM manufacturer having a recovery set is not good and, through no fault of his/her own, the user has lost the ability to do a full system recovery and still has no full backup!!

Every PC should have a backup device as part of the configuration, but how to do it?

I have, at the side of me, a hard drive taken out of an old laptop. It measures 100mm x 70mm x 7mm, and would easily fit into a space occupied by floppy drive. It is more reliable and has a greater capacity than a flash drive, and it doesn’t require a separate power supply because it could easily plug into a PCMCIA style socket, have a release pin like a PCMCIA socket which would release the drive from the pins to keep it isolated when not in use, and the socket could have an LED which lights up when the drive is pushed in and active. The same kind of idea could be used on a laptop in place of the PCMCIA slot.

So why has nobody done this? It could be built in to new models and also be available as an accessory desktop add-on for for fitment into the front panel. Economies of scale would make it a relatively cheap item, and because it is part of the case would not be left in the original packaging as perhaps would be the fate of a fully external drive.

To save cost and space, the multi card readers could be dropped. I would imagine that most people connect a digital camera via the original cable supplied. Owners of digital cameras that I know don’t even realize that the camera memory card is removable.

Links for Dell and HP Deployment Packs for ConfigMgr

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Dell:

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Dell+Deployment+Pack+for+Configmgr+(Server+Deployment)

HP:

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPICE-SC