NZ Tekonverse

If you’ve ever set up DVD players with projectors in a school classroom, you know that you need something better than the tinny little speakers in the projector itself for sound. It was quite apparent that small computer speakers, which often have an output of 2 – 3 watts, would also be unsuitable, lacking both…

I have two Sandisk Micro Cruzer 512MB USB keys that I bought cheaply as they were end of line. These devices have a unique and excellent feature of a retractable plug built in, thus there is no cap to lose. The size is quite useful for many things. I got one of them formatted as…

In a word, don’t. When the master PC comes back up after sysprepping, it will crash in MSOOBE and refuse to complete setup. It then reboots, and repeats the whole schmozzle. There is no way out of this except to follow the steps set out below. This is caused by an incompatibility between MSOOBE and…

Registry tatooing refers to the old style workstation policies that Windows NT4 Server used. You also see these on a network if you are connecting to a Samba server, because it uses the old System Policy model. Policy changes in this system are permanently applied to the Registry as values that are never undone unless…

The next PC to try imaging was an old Compaq Pentium III/800. I had previously installed Vista on it and had bumped up the memory to 512MB and the HDD to 40GB. This PC is one I kept around for just this sort of testing. The biggest issue is its lack of USB ports especially…

Getting this started turned out somewhat difficult due to the way the PC recognises USB boot devices. I had both a USB key and a USB external HDD plugged into the master PC for the imaging. The key drive is used to boot Windows PE and the HDD is used to store the image. The…

In Windows XP the only kind of built in imaging technology we have is through RIS, when we run riprep and send the machine image back to the RIS server for deployment. Hence, we would use Ghost or another product to make images for deployment by some other means than RIS. Ghost commonly is used…

After writing the previous article I decided I had been a little hard on the S1 – after all, it has all these manual settings that you can use to speed up the time it takes to trip the shutter. So again I took my two cameras along on another train ride. The S1 was…

Once upon a time there was a computer technician, who decided to go on a train ride to Picton and back, which is a round trip of 700 km. He enjoyed a photographic hobby and he knew that this train had an observation carriage which would be great for taking photos from the train as…

One of the most annoying things you can ever have happen with a PC is the dreaded blue screen STOP message (colloquially known as the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD). Most times on XP you don’t actually see the blue screen itself because the system is automatically configured to reboot when it happens. Instead…