NZ Tekonverse

Today was the day that I rashly decided to do what I didn’t want to do yesterday. That is, to turn the D915 (old XP box) into a dual boot Vista/XP system, and the Q35 (old Vista box) into Windows 7. All this would be relatively simple, just a matter of moving some HDDs and…

Today was relatively ho-hum, the main excitement has been turning the Vista box into dual boot XP/Vista and taking some bits out of the old XP box to put into the temporary 7 box. But that four year old Intel 915 system won’t get the boot just yet. When 7 becomes real next year, the…

Having set up a PC at work with the Windows 7 x64 RC installed on it a few weeks ago, I decided that today would be the day that I would start doing as much as possible of my day to day work on 7. It has been reasonably straightforward so far although this PC…

With the imminent introduction of Windows 7 and consequent phase-out of XP, all schools in NZ (and elsewhere) will be compelled to consider upgrading older PCs if their spec is insufficient to be able to run Windows 7. I am currently interested in whether this would be a viable option for some of our school’s…

Everyone knows that Windows 7 has progressed through its various stages and been well-received. It is now in production having been released to manufacturing a few weeks back and will appear in retail channels towards the end of October. Windows 7 is a mixture of new technologies and features, and fixes to parts of Vista…

Our Exchange Server has been in production now for a week and there are some significant issues coming up that relate to speed. It appears that running IPv6 on this server creates a major speed issue. This could be seen in very slow client access (oftentimes you will see a message like “Trying to connect…

Last time I looked at this was some 9 months ago. It will become more important as time goes on, but it hasn’t been a priority much lately. The main difference is that with a Hyper-V server I now have some Vista VMs to use as test configurations. If we ever went to a lab…

Refer to my previous article about setting appcompat settings for Omnis.exe to Windows 2000 in order to eliminate calls to EncodePointer and DecodePointer (functionality added to Windows XP Service Pack 2). On a new Windows Vista system, RM Integris (Omnis.exe) crashed upon first execution when it reached the “Open / Create Datafile” dialog. The application…

After capturing our new Vista image using Ghost and ImageX, the reference PC was rebooted to effectively apply it. A second PC of identical hardware configuration had the image applied to it using Ghost. First time startup with the image takes around 20 minutes to complete before the normal Windows logon comes up. Issues found…

Continuing the series on automation of Windows Vista installations, the first article covered the creation of our first Vista image. Prior to this time I had some experience of ImageX from using it to image a PC that was running Vista, however I had not used Sysprep with this PC and therefore the image was…