Category: NZTekonverse -> Uncategorised

It’s not often I get to review something, but here’s a look at a value for money option for scanning those photos, negatives and slides. Previously, if you wanted to scan slides, you were looking at something around $500 or more to get a reasonable result. At $299, the V100 is a lower cost way…

Like all NZ schools that have joined the MS license agreement, we received a Vista Business Upgrade DVD recently. There’s just one little problem: it’s not bootable. Here’s a practical illustration of the situation. In the picture above, you see the extraction from IsoBuster showing what is on a bootable DVD ISO image obtained from…

To bring the series about PC designs right up to the present day, here is a modern low profile desktop PC. This is a generic chassis, the Foxconn DH153, which like many chassis has been adapted to “Prescott” specification when Intel decided that a vent directly above the huge CPU cooler was needed. (From comparison…

Some proxy servers (generally non-Windows) require an Ident server running in each PC on the network so that the server can get the name of the user who is requesting Internet access. While there are limitations and security issues with the Ident protocol it is a simple easy to configure option for some applications. With…

The first form factor of the early PC clones was the AT style. This gave birth later to what became known as the “Baby AT” which was a common motherboard type for many years along with the AT type power supply. The original AT motherboard measured 305 x 350 mm. The BabyAT boards varied in…

eTrust ITM services are not started after installation on Vista. The Realtime agent will report that it cannot access the Realtime service. InoRT, InoRPC and InoTask services are all stopped. Windows Security Center reports that eTrust ITM is out of date. The PC is very slow with a high level of disk activity. Resolution: From…

These days with the increasing tendency to use double-barrelled surnames resulting in a username that could exceed 20 characters in length, it pays to be careful when setting up accounts for such people. Suppose we have our usernames in the form firstname.lastname and we have a user “abcdef.ghijkl-mnopqrs”. This username is 21 characters long including…

I’ve been testing the Windows Live Mail beta for some weeks at home now. Finally, Microsoft have put an official download page on live.com for it. One of the areas in which I have seen persistent problems is with blog feeds. If the server providing the feed returns invalid or incomplete data, WLM simply hangs,…

I have had a frustrating time trying to install Windows XP onto a PC that had previously had Vista installed on it (unactivated). I assumed that because the disk is recognised as NTFS and Windows can delete the existing installation, there would be no problem installing XP without reformatting the disk/partition. However things are not…

In all the years I have been either studying or working in the computer industry, Compaq has been one of my favourite kinds of brand-name PC due to their innovative and imaginative design. Like most brand-names, Compaq don’t use bland, boxy generic cases, they have often gone out of their way to create designs that…