NZ Tekonverse

Repcos have had these vacuums on special at $99 in their March sale. This model appears to be at the bottom of the Vacmaster range. The US based company produces a number of models which appear to be solidly made and well designed. I couldn’t find this model on their website so it may be…

Canon recently announced the Powershot SX260 HS as the replacement for the SX230 (the GPS equipped superzoom compact with manual controls). This will probably be my next camera whenever it gets to NZ. It is interesting Canon have kept the 12.1 megapixel sensor. The lens has been increased to a 20x zoom and GPS is…

That is quite a statement, nevertheless I am seeing an increasing number of problems with hardware devices that will not run in Windows 7 despite having drivers available. There seems to be more and more difficulty in getting device drivers that are reliable under 7, or else getting Microsoft to look into these problems. The…

One of my little jobs here at work is to produce a report for two year groups of students that ranks their results on three different subjects that they take. The easy way to do this with MS Excel is to use the RANK function operating on a whole set of results and it works…

Some people find these subjects extremely divisive. Nevertheless it is true. The Apple Messiah just died. The company will never be the same without him, like they weren’t when he bunked off the first time in the 1980s. This isn’t just an Apple thing. There are lots of companies that fit that model in IT,…

When I specced out the upgrade of my home computer I decided on the Intel DG41RQ mainboard, which is nearly the same as the DG41TX mainboard that my new (at start of this year) work computer has. The DG41RQ is specced for DDR2-800 RAM with two slots and a maximum supported level of 8 GB.…

One of the more useful features for server admins on Windows is folder redirection. Basically this is a feature in which the user’s key folders such as Documents, Music and Videos can be redirected out of their user profile and into a fixed server based location. Taking the data out of the user profile speeds…

Here’s a conundrum. I can buy a new printer from the likes of Brother for around $99. The official Brother drum for this printer costs $150. Maybe instead of buying that new drum I should just throw the printer away each time the drum wears out. The same goes for projectors which now typically have…

We have had a huge saga with printer installation when trying to automate that and control these through logon scripts or the various Group policy settings. Some way back a few years ago, in the days of Windows Server 2003 R2, Microsoft added the Print Management MMC tool along with the ability to manage printers…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how our laptops which were set up with native boot VHD would all have to be V2Pd because VHDs on the native boot system tend to get corrupted more often. This week it is time to put that into reality by getting started on the 14 laptops…