NZ Tekonverse

This was originally going to be a post about my experiences of switching my broadband from Telecom to Slingshot. I didn’t necessarily expect this to be plain sailing, as problems can occur any time, but I did expect to receive a broadband connection that functioned. Instead, the first post in this series ended up having…

A month or two back I wrote that I was considering switching ISPs. I took the plunge mid-January and finally decided to change over. Firstly I went to Slingshot’s website and signed up there for Naked DSL, being assured that everything would be happening and they would send me texts to keep me up to…

A disposable OS (my definition) is one that is essentially supported for only one major release of a product that comes out in a similar timeframe to it. Imagine releasing a major server product that will not run on current and currently in development major operating systems that the same company markets. The name of…

System admins have had to wait quite a while for Windows to provide them with means of mapping drives and printers without using a logon script. I started with mainly Windows 98 computers on a non-MS DC, then we got to XP and WS2003, but we were still using the scripts written in VBScript to…

After looking into this in more detail I’m starting to think the reason for the problems is trying to install onto a domain controller. There are so many instances where people have had no trouble at all with just basic steps, all the steps I did, getting PHP (even just the 32 bit release) working…

Moodle is a free Learning Management System that is supported on various platforms. A lot of these big open source packages are primarily developed for Linux/Unix these days. If you are very blessed then someone has gone to the effort to produce a Windows port or installation package. Happily, that is becoming more and more…

As we are upgrading one of our servers at present, we are also buying a new Windows Server 2008 64 bit license for it. This allows us to have 8 GB of RAM in the server, and it will also have a RAID-5 disk array. The use of a 64 bit operating system is a…

I can now report that a clear choice has emerged in my quest to find a new ISP that offers a good and competitively priced package for my communication needs. That is Slingshot, whose nDSL offering will be of more use to me than a full featured broadband/phone package. This is because my home phone…

The latest version of Windows Live Mail (currently in development) has addressed a major reason why I couldn’t switch to it, the failure to update feeds. When it was clear that IE was able to update its feed count, there seemed no clear reason why WLM, which uses IE to supply it with feed XML,…

Unfortunately it didn’t take long to burst my bubble over the idea that we were going to roll out Vista on student desktops. It was not easy to predict. We have a modest amount of experience with Vista mainly on my own desktop where I have been using it all year, and I saw few…