by WebKeyDesign | Jul 30, 2012 | Microsoft, Windows
After working in Information Technology for several years, you come to a certain understanding about the balance between work and personal time. For many people starting out in IT, the temptation to dedicate yourself 24/7 to work is hard to resist. There always seems to be a pending disaster or a deadline that must be met. With some experience you eventually learn that the world is always coming to an end. It has been that way since the beginning of time itself. Dedicating yourself fully to work is not going to change that! Once you figure out for yourself, where and when to draw the line and give yourself some time back, you end up tackling another dilemma, which I call the “Fix My PC” dilemma. When you are computer proficient, it is not just work that wants your skills, it is also friends and family. You end up being asked many times to fix people’s laptops or desktops. Since you are a nice guy, you have a hard time turning these people down, especially when they are your friends and family. However, just like work, you need to set some limits, since this is still taking away from your personal time.
Rule 1: It’s Not Always Free
It is a bad idea to let people think your skills have no value. In my case, I charge a modest fee to look at people’s computer problems outside of work. My time is valuable to me, and so charging a fee makes me feel better and I can invest the money back into my technology interests. It always amazes me when people balk at me charging them. It must be that they do not recognize the value of my work or they simply want something for free.
Rule 2: I’m Doing You A Favor
If you agree to look at someone’s computer, make sure that they understand you are doing them a favor. They have to make it convenient for you. The last thing you want to do is agree to something and then find out you have to drive to someone’s house at an inconvenient time for you.
Rule 3: Identify and Diagnose Their Problem
There are very few times that I have been asked to look at Macintosh. Almost always the computer is a Windows machine. After spending years working with Windows, there are multiple tweaks, fixes, and customizations that can be done to make Windows machines work better. You could dedicate multiple days to just tweaking Windows. Remember, you do not have the time and energy to fix every problem, just concentrate on the problem that they asked you to look at. Most often people tend to not communicate well, and so I have had many people tell me that they wanted their computer to run faster and then find out that they really wanted something else entirely. Once you find out what it is they want you to fix, tell them how it can be fixed and let them decide what they want to do. Many times you find that there is a component failure and there really is nothing for you to fix; they will have to spend money on replacing the component or buying a new computer.
Rule 4: Know When To Walk Away
Do not spend you time installing Windows Updates, running malware or anti-virus checks! These chores are something the user needs to do. If you can avoid these time consuming tasks do so. Where ever possible configure these things to run on their own; Microsoft and other software vendors provide schedule features in most of their software. If you cannot schedule these tasks, educate the user to do them on their own.
Final Thoughts
These days I devote most of my time to building my own computers, instead of fixing other people’s stuff. Every now and then I will do someone a favor and fix their Windows problem, but I resign myself to not having to fix every problem. Life is too short to spend countless hours in front of a keyboard.
by WebKeyDesign | Jun 2, 2011 | Windows
Adopting new technology is often a difficult journey. In the beginning the idea is simple, you want a home server. But then you begin to expand on the idea, add some requirements such as power efficiency, low noise, small form factor, good storage options. You take a look at the Mac-Mini and think it is interesting, but not for you, you still want something bigger. Eventually you come upon this little black box from HP. The HP MediaSmart Server is a good idea, right? It even comes with Windows Home Server, a customized version of Windows 2003 that is suppose to give you all these features. You even find a good price for an EX490 model on the Internet. Eventually it comes out of the box and you decide, the hardware needs upgrading, you install a faster CPU and max out the memory to 4GB and then add some 2TB SATA drives and you have yourself a pretty good looking box.
In the back of your mind though, you cannot help thinking that the HP customized version of Windows Home Server really is not performing. After all, it is 2010 and it is all about 64-bit software now. Windows 2003 looks as ancient as well, Windows XP. Microsoft keeps talking about Windows Home Server 2011 and how it will be based on Windows 2008 Server instead. You wait and you wait and you wait and well, you wait. Then finally you find an Internet retailer that has WHS 2011 OEM for sale! You order your copy and get it a few days later. You get to play with a new Windows version again and this is where the real story begins…
The Installation:
WHS 2011 is not an upgrade, so the first thing to do is to copy all your data off of the MediaSmart box. This was quite easy for me, since all I had was music and video files. Ironically the original reasoning for buying the MediaSmart Server was to use it to backup my main Windows 2003 Server. Something which for some reason I never was able to get it to do. I have had the pleasure of restoring the MediaSmart EX490 from the HP discs and that process was pretty complicated and involved using another WindowsXP machine. For WHS 2011, the installation process was so much easier, that I cannot understand why the recovery process was so much more difficult. I followed Sean Daniel’s excellent How To Install WHS 2011 Guide and was up and running in no time. I even used my Windows 7 (VMWare Fusion) on my MacBook to make the USB boot drive install. For my install I setup WHS 2011 to use the entire 1TB drive. This was perhaps the easiest Windows installation I have ever done.
Missing Drivers:
Once I was up and running, I used RemoteDesktop to connect and administer the box. The “Mass Storage Controller” driver is not installed by WHS 2011, so you will need to download the driver for it from Silicon Image Support. The driver to download is labeled: SiI 3531 64-bit Windows SATARAID5 Driver for Windows 7. You will want to download the latest version of course. To install the driver, unzip the file download and then go to Device Manager and click on the Mass Storage Controller and Update Driver, point it to the unzipped files and Windows will do the rest for you. Restart the machine.
Network Settings:
Next up, was to modify the network settings. Setup the box with a static IP address, and gave it the right DNS Server and Gateway addresses. Set the Network Card to 1GB Full Duplex if your network devices support this. The Windows Firewall is a lot more complicated in WHS 2011 and more useful than the old Windows 2003 one. If you decide to leave it on, be prepared to modify it frequently because it will shutdown a lot of applications and services.
Setup Applications & Services:
For Anti-Virus, I use ESET Nod32, so that was my first application to install and setup. Even though WHS 2011 is a server operating system, I had no problems installing the Home edition of Nod32 64-bit. After this came Mozilla Firefox, iTunes, Adobe Flash Player, VLC Media Player, and PlayOn.
Initial Pros and Cons:
WHS 2011 is faster. It is more responsive on the same hardware than WHS v1 ever was. Disk access is better without Drive Extender. Speed wise, WHS 2011 is a no-brainer, if you want a faster machine and you have a 64-bit CPU and 4GB of RAM, do it.
HP included Twonky Media Server, FireFly for Music streaming, and even an iPhone streamer with their WHS v1 setup, but I always found these solutions to be slow and buggy. With WHS 2011, there is only Windows Media Player which seems to work for me much better than HP’s solutions. Even before the WHS 2011 upgrade, I was already using PlayOn to serve my media, so I just ended up reinstalling PlayOn after the upgrade.
Backing up machines was suppose to be the main reason behind a home server, but in this respect, I really can’t take advantage of WHS. My main problem is that the only real Windows box besides WHS is my main domain controller, which is Windows 2003. WHS v1 always had problems creating the backup and so I ended up giving up on this. WHS 2011 is worse, because it does not even come with a connector for Windows 2003. It is not a supported client OS. This was a big let down, but oh well, I already had another backup strategy for the Windows 2003 Server. Most of the machines in the home are Macintosh. There are about three laptops and one iMac machine. Here is where the HP software actually worked better than Microsoft, at least for wireless Mac clients, because if you are on a wired connection, the HP solution did not work due to Apple limitations. With WHS 2011, Microsoft has no backup solution for Mac clients. There are ways to make wireless Macs work but you have to do the setup yourself and I still have not been able to make wired Mac clients work. Here is a situation where Microsoft really could have done better and chose not to.
This leads me to another point about Microsoft, mainly that Microsoft does not get consumers. Here is a product that they are selling as a Home Server and which they expect other companies like HP and Acer to improve upon to make it better for consumers. Out of the box, WHS 2011 does not support Macs very well, and it is pretty much as complicated as the original Windows 2008 Server. Other than a computer geek like myself, I am not sure who else would buy this, when there are simpler solutions like Apple’s Time Capsule and WD NAS drives.
No Support From HP:
It is kind of disappointing that HP stopped making the MediaSmart Servers and announced they would not support WHS 2011 on these machines. I think HP embraced the idea of a home server and they did not get it totally right, but I think Microsoft did not help either. With the EX490 running WHS 2011, I now have dead drive lights, never to be lit again due to lack of driver support from HP for WHS 2011, and a blinking activity light.
Additional Links & Resources:
At this time there really is not much out there in regards to WHS 2011. There are not really any new Add-Ins that are available. Hopefully there will be some soon. If you are looking for a manual, I do recommend purchasing Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 Unleashed (3rd Edition). This book was an overall good reference to WHS 2011 and provided some interesting insights, like installing SharePoint 2010.
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 23, 2009 | Firefox, Internet Explorer, Windows
On the Windows platform there is a memory wall that many people are experiencing. Namely, that Windows does not utilize all of your physical memory once you have 4GB or more of RAM, unless you are using Windows XP 64-bit or Vista 64. Instead of letting that extra memory go to waste, I thought why not utilize it in some other way. A long time ago we had the opposite problem with computers, where processors were slow and we tried to speed things up in any way possible. Today, we have a lot of processing power and abundant memory and now it is the software that needs to catch up to the hardware. Given this, I thought why not use a some of that extra memory and load it as a RAM disk. Then if you think about it, the most often used application in today’s computing is the web browser, which uses your hard drive to cache content. This sounds like a perfect opportunity to use a RAM disk and speed up your browser’s disk caching. IE and Firefox both make it easy to modify your disk cache directory too, so the biggest problem seems to be trying to setup the RAM disk in Windows. There are multiple commercial solutions, but only one free solution that I could find that works well.
First thing to do is setup the RAM disk. If you do not want to purchase a commercial RAM disk driver, you can implement this free RAM disk driver for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and 2003 Server. You will want to have a RAM disk that is slightly larger than both IE and Firefox disk cache sizes put together.
Firefox:
- Type about:config in Firefox’s address bar and enter
- Right-click and choose New – Integer
- Input the following in the dialog box: browser.cache.memory.capacity
- Input a value in the next dialog box, such as 24000, which means 24MB
- Then in the Filter: bar enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
- If this setting does not appear, then you will have to create a New – String with the above name
- The value should be a drive path to your RAM disk, such as M:\Firefox
- Once you have both settings, close out of Firefox and start it back up again.
IE:
- In Internet Explorer, click Tools – Internet Options
- Locate Temporary Internet Files and click the Settings… button
- Change the Amount of disk space to use: to the appropriate size you want
- Click the Move Folder… button to select a folder on your RAM Disk. If you used the free RAM Disk, your RAM disk should have a TEMP folder at the root, just choose this folder.
- Click OK and close out of IE
Note:
Depending on your computer, your experience may vary. On my Windows laptop and desktop, the speed with which Firefox 3.5 launches is vastly improved. I do not use IE much, so it is hard for me to evaluate the differences there.
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 13, 2009 | Apache, Windows
There appears to be a bug with Apache 2.2.13 which I ran into on Windows Server. See the following bug entry: Bug 23403. Opening the error.log for Apache showed the following warning:
warn Init: Session Cache is not configured (hint: SSLSessionCache)
Adding the following lines to the httpd.conf fixed the problem:
SSLSessionCache "shmcb:c:/Apache/logs/ssl_scache(512000)"
SSLSessionCacheTimeout 300
Note: your Apache installation directory is probably different, so you will want to modify the above file path.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 28, 2009 | Apple, Windows
For some reason, Apple has stopped supporting iTunes on Windows 2003 and changed their MSI installer to fail. However if you still prefer to run iTunes on your Windows 2003 Server, you can still modify the iTunes installer by using installer tools such as Microsoft Orca (see Microsoft’s Tutorial on how to modify MSI files) or InstEd. Using InstEd, I was able to install iTunes 9 on my Windows 2003 machine.
- First download the iTunes installer from http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/.
- Next use WinZip or WinRar to extract the contents of iTunesSetup.exe to a folder.
- Now comes the difficult part, you will need to check each of the .MSI files with InstEd or Orca. Open each file one at a time and look for the LaunchCondition settings. You will need to remove this parameter and its value: ((VersionNT=501 And ServicePackLevel>=2) OR VersionNT>501). Once you do that just Save and Exit.
- With the modified MSI files, now start installing them one at at time. Leave the iTunes.msi for last though. The SetupAdmin.exe can be ignored. You do not need to run that one.
If this was a perfect world, you would now be able to launch iTunes 9 on your machine, but since it is far from perfect, you might be staring at this error message:
The iPod Service service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
To complete the install, leave the error up on the screen and go launch Services.msc, find the iPod Service and open its properties. You will need to add an account with admin rights and then save the changes. Now click Retry on the error and see if it works.
Additional Resources:
Updates:
The easy fix that works, is to right click on the iTunes installer and choose Properties. Then go to the Compatibility tab and check “Run this program in compatibility mode for” and choose Windows XP from the pulldown list.
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 30, 2008 | Windows
The Internet of late has been very chatty about how Microsoft screwed up and released a Windows version that no one really wanted. Not since WindowsME, has Microsoft had such an unimportant Windows release as Windows Vista. Faithful and ever persistent Apple followers have chimed in with the prophecy that Apple will once again reign supreme and take over the world with Mac OS X. As a Mac user myself, yeah I too can dream of the coming of OS X to all things, but that simply is not going to happen. The Operating System is irrelevant at this point. Yes, I said it. As much as I love Apple for their cool gradients and perfectionist design, the truth is that the operating system war no longer matters. It is the network that matters now. People don’t care what operating system they run as much as, what they want to access, works. Today for technical people like myself, this means Firefox on Windows XP, Safari on Mac OS X and my iPhone, and whatever browser works on anything else. If it is IE, so be it!
In reality there are two markets out there. The consumer market which Apple has already won and which Linux is close to figuring out and the business market where Microsoft rules with iron fists. Apple’s OS X strategy on the consumer side has worked great. Today I can message, play, and communicate on my iPhone better than I ever could on my old Windows98 machine. Most people do not even know what the operating system is on the iPhone, they just know it works. In this respect, OS X has become a consumer operating system. Consumers like choices too, and so today you can buy an Apple widget that works and live with it or you can go with Windows, Linux, and dozens of other operating systems that are out there. Apple’s consumer price is a tad higher, but as the iPod and iPhone have shown, people don’t care as long as it works. As long as Apple keeps OS X running smoothly on all these $300 devices, OS X will be successful, so successful that no one will know that is what they are actually using. The irony is that Microsoft wanted this for Windows and it never really happened. Why? Because Microsoft is obsessed with recognition that they have never figured out that you do not have to blast everything you make with “Microsoft” and version names that make no sense to consumers. What exactly does IE Version: 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_qfe.080814-1242 mean? I am sure someone could tell you, but to the consumer it does not matter at all. Apple’s marketing is simple, one logo and one name.
Microsoft is a company that is going in multiple directions, and it is causing them to remain stagnant and sink in quicksand. The relevancy of Vista has been a wake up call, that perhaps Office and Windows no longer matter outside of the business markets that they control. Do not get me wrong, Microsoft makes very impressive products for business. Windows Server 2008 being more impressive than Windows Server 2003 which is my personal favorite version of Windows, but outside of business Microsoft has many ideas, many strategies, but one senses the ambition is gone. Google is the super power of the Internet and it is pushing hard into remaking the world in its image. Google has made products that actually matter to you and me. Google Earth, Maps, Reader, and so on have made an impact on how we live and use this thing called the Internet. Google’s strategy is to make the network work for everyone and it is succeeding in building toolsets that are cutting into Microsoft’s expensive products. This is why the operating system war no longer matters. It is the network that Google is building that is changing the world. The business market is watching this revolution and they are very interested, as they should be. The future will definitely have business going less Microsoft, just how much business abandons Redmond, depends on just how relevant Microsoft products are. Right now, Microsoft still has the podium on which to speak volumes on where they want to take us, but for how much longer can they keep control may be out of their hands entirely. Vista is boring compared to Ubuntu, OS X, RedHat, and others.
On the consumer side, Microsoft has pushed hard with little success to show for it. The XBox 360 remains uninspiring and in third place behind Nintendo Wii and the PS3. Windows Live Search is not even a real contender in search. And Microsoft wonders why Vista (an operating system that can cost upwards of $400 on cheap $300 hardware) is not enticing to consumers? The rise of the netbook laptop, something which neither Intel nor Microsoft saw coming, is now the driving force in the consumer market. Microsoft had to hack Windows XP to run on these $300 laptops, this alone speaks volumes of how stagnant Microsoft has been. If shareholders have not thought of this, they definitely should consider what would happen if business customers start buying netbooks instead of more expensive hardware and switch to Google Apps for their software needs! Microsoft’s Cloud idea has to materialize sooner than later. In essence Windows is doomed, or at least what we think of Windows is. Microsoft has to build the network in ways that matter to everyone. They do not have to follow the same path as Google, but they definitely need to change the way we live. Microsoft’s best strategy is to kill Windows before its competitors make it irrelevant. The clock is ticking away.
