Some free Windows 7 training resources

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

The Microsoft Official Curriculum courses for Windows 7 are not expected to be released until October but Global Knowledge is planning to run a selection of “hands-on master classes” for Windows 7 through the summer months, as well as securing some Microsoft e-learning titles – register at the links below for 60 days of free access:

UK iPhone users up in arms – and to think that people say I whinge on this blog…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

iPhone 3G S logoThis week’s announcement of a third generation of iPhone (the 3G S) has left existing UK iPhone users seething. You see, when last year’s iPhone 3G shipped, Apple’s UK partner (O2) let existing users upgrade regardless of the remaining contract length (they had to… it was in our contracts…) but, critically, the original iPhone was not subsidised – and its 3G replacement was. Now existing subscribers are waking up to the fact that they have to buy themselves out of their contracts if they want to move to a new device. Well, welcome to the big bad world of mobile telecoms guys – that’s the way it’s been for years and why should the iPhone be any different?

Don’t get me wrong – I have an iPhone 3G and I still have about nine months to run on my contract so I’m caught up in this with everyone else but I won’t be looking to upgrade to the 3G S. After all, Apple has committed to giving me the 3.0 software upgrade for free (something I wouldn’t get on a competitive platform – if I had a Windows Mobile phone I would have to wait for the telco to approve the software and, even then, they might not offer me an upgrade). I would like a better camera but I’ve managed with crappy iPhone optics for two years now and, anyway, I’m not convinced that the new one will be that good either – it’s still only 3MP and a camera phone is always hampered by a tiny sensor and poor quality glass (maybe even plastic!). I can live without a compass and, as for video… it’s hard enough to take a decent photo on an iPhone! Voice control will be good, but I don’t think that relies on the new hardware (I may be proved wrong on that). Finally, Apple claim that the 3G S is twice as fast as the 3G… but the network will still be the bottleneck!

The other gripe is the fifteen quid that O2 wants for using the tethering functionality on the iPhone. Here I think the complainers may have a point – after all we have unlimited data access on the iPhone already and why pay more (for what… more data than “unlimited” data!)? Then again, using a full-sized laptop (tethered) to surf with a larger screen will pull down larger graphics – which means more data – and a subsequent hit on O2’s network. The charge is broadly equivalent to that of taking out a contract for a 3G data connection but I would like to see a PAYG option for tethering – I’m simply not going to stump up fifty quid a month for a mobile phone contract (£35 for the base iPhone deal and another £15 for the tethering, minus a few pence from last year’s VAT cut).

If we’re lucky, someone will write a WiFi router application (like they did for Windows Mobile where the telco doesn’t know you are tethered – the laptop talks to the phone over WiFi and the phone looks like it’s using its 3G connection for its own data.

So, I’m sorry for my fellow UK iPhone users but this is the reality of signing up for a mobile phone contract – either buy an unsubsidised (expensive) phone and be free to move around or have a subsidised one with a contract that the telcos will enforce. As for tethering, it is an additional feature, so hoping that O2 wouldn’t charge for it was probably a little naive. With any luck there will be a 4th generation of iPhone this time next year and most of us will be freed from our contracts by then!

iPhone 3.0In the meantime, the iPhone 3.0 software is due out next week… it looks like I had better upgrade iTunes to 8.2 then…

Another one of my “How Do I?” videos makes it onto the Microsoft TechNet website

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of days back, I noticed that another one of my videos has made it onto the Microsoft TechNet website – this one looks at backing up a Hyper-V host using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1.

Those who’ve watched earlier videos may notice that the sound quality on this video is much improved as I finally bought myself a half-decent microphone. I’ve also dedicated a PC to the task of recording these videos (recommissioning my old Compaq DeskPro EN510SFF, which has been upgraded with a 250GB disk and 2GB of RAM, and more recently gained a Matrox Millennium G550 dual-display video card picked up for a few pounds on eBay). This machine is certainly no screamer but, as the videos are only recorded at 5 frames per second it’s perfectly capable of keeping up, although TechSmith Camtasia Studio falls over from time to time and the 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor does take a while to render the final output.

There are some more videos on the way as I’ve submitted three more that have yet to make it onto the TechNet site but, if you’re looking for step-by-step information on perform some common tasks with Microsoft products, then there are a whole bunch of guys working on these TechNet How Do I? videos and they’re definitely worth a look.

The Pirate Party takes 7% of the vote in Sweden… meanwhile the European Commission wants Windows users to vote for their browser!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last Friday saw the election of representatives to the European Parliament (MEPs) and the results were out today. Whilst this might not have the global impact of President Obama’s election in the United States, for the 375 million of us that live in the 27 EU member states (sorry, sovereign nations), it is pretty significant because, according to the eurosceptics, 75% of our national laws are passed down from Europe.

Here in the UK, minority parties faired well – partly as a protest against our own incumbent (or should that be incompetent?) Government and partly as a result of the proportional representation system that is used for the European elections. Whilst the UK Green party narrowly missed out on a third seat in South East England (but the far right British National Party gained significant support in the North of England…), it’s the result in Sweden that has perplexed me the most – 7.1% of Swedish voters said “yes” to the Pirate Party – formed in response to copyright laws and the impact of the Pirate Bay filesharing network!

Now, I’ve been very careful not to express any political views in this post but, with a new Parliament in place, it seems to me that now is the time to sort out the idiots in Europe who are pushing ahead with yet more action against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer in Windows (hey guys – you’re too late – the damage was done 10 years ago, the American Courts did very little about it, and Internet Explorer has credible competition in the shape of Firefox today). It seems that Microsoft’s componentisation of Windows and provision for the removal of Internet Explorer 8 is not enough for the European Commission – they want users to vote for their browser of choice when installing Windows!

Personally, I would like to install Windows quickly with the least possible user interaction. Then, once the base operating system is installed, I’d like to select roles/features (as I do for Windows Server 2008) and install any third party software that I choose – independently of the Windows setup routine. If we have to have something to please the minority browsers (Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc.) then Windows already lets me choose search providers, media players, mail clients, etc. – why not use the same mechanism for browsers? There’s more about this madness over on Mary Jo Foley’s All About Microsoft blog but I really do wish that my taxes (which pay for Neelie Kroes and her organisation to bring about action like this) were being used more effectively…

Camera raw support for my Canon Digital Ixus: enabling DNG support with CHDK

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Late last year, Garry Martin alerted me to an alternative firmware for certain Canon cameras – the Canon Hackers Development Kit (CHDK) – and I’ve been running it on my Canon Digital Ixus 70 ever since.

Importantly, CHDK makes no modifications to my camera’s firmware. The appropriate version for the camera model is downloaded and placed in a folder on the SD card that the camera uses and, when the card is write protected, this firmware is loaded at startup. If CHDK is missing or the card is not write protected, then the normal camera firmware loads. In addition to the extended functionality afforded by CHDK (which is significant – Lifehacker wrote a review of CHDK last year), I have full access to the standard camera features but the main advantages I find from CHDK include camera raw support, a live histogram and better battery information (I may also take a look at using it for time lapse photography at some point).

One of the frustrations I’ve had with CHDK is that the raw format it produces is not recognised by any of the major image editing applications (for me, that means using Adobe Camera Raw to interface with Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2 on a Mac). I tried installing an application that should convert these files to Adobe Digital Negative (.DNG) format (DNG4PS2) but the pre-built Mac version is known to be unstable on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and I was unable to make it compile using the latest source. There seems little point in running it on another operating system when I do all of my digital media work on the Mac, so I went back to getting the camera to store raw files in .DNG format at capture.

Unfortunately, each time I tried this, I was greeted with a message which said something like Cannot load/CHDK/badpixel.bin. Thanks to a comment from James W Manning on Flickr, I was able to work my way through creating this file: downloading a program to analyse an existing raw image taken with the same camera and identify any bad bits to create the required badpixel.bin file (I did need to run this on Windows though – the command was show_bad_b.exe rawfile.crw), which I could then copy to the CHDK folder on my SD card and enable DNG support.

Now my £130 compact camera takes raw images in .DNG format (as well as some JPEGs for reference) and I can work with the raw files just as I do with the ones produced by my DSLR. Of course, the tiny sensor means that the 7 million pixels on my Ixus 70 are inferior to the six million pixels on my old D70 (and way behind my full-frame D700 – more on that in another post!) but the additional flexibility is useful – as is the knowledge that I have the actual data that was recorded by the camera sensor, rather than with any post-processing in camera (e.g. boosted saturation that’s typically used with the compressed JPEG images).

Looking for a 64-bit notebook to run a type 1 hypervisor (Hyper-V… or maybe XenClient?)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier today, some contacted me via this website and asked for advice on specifying a 64-bit laptop to run Hyper-V. He was confused about which laptops would actually work and I gave the following advice (unfortunately, my e-mail was rejected by his mail server)…

“The main thing to watch out for is the processor specification. If you get the model number (e.g. T7500) and look this up on the Intel website you can see if it has a feature called EM64T or Intel 64 – that is Intel’s implementation of AMD’s x64 technology – and most PCs have it today. Other things you will need for Hyper-V are hardware DEP (Intel XD or AMD NX) and hardware assisted virtualisation (Intel-VT or AMD-V). This last one might catch you out – some quad core chips don’t have the necessary functionality but most dual core chips do (and I’ve heard some reports from people where the chip supports it but there is no option to enable it in the BIOS).

Also, if you’re running 64-bit, driver support can be a pain. Stick with the major manufacturers (Lenovo, Dell, HP) and you should be OK. I was able to get all the drivers I needed for my Fujitsu notebook too.”

If you want to run Hyper-V on a notebook, it’s worth considering that notebook PCs typically have pretty slow hard drives and that can hit performance hard (notebook PCs are not designed to run as servers). Despite feedback indicating that Virtual PC does not provide all the answers, Microsoft doesn’t yet have a decent client-side virtualisation solution for developers, tech enthusiasts and other power users but Citrix have announced something that does look interesting – the XenClient (part of what they call Project Independence), described as:

“[…] a strategic product initiative with partners like Intel, focused on local virtual desktops. We are working together to deliver on our combined vision for the future of desktop computing. This new virtualization solution will extend the benefits of hosted desktop virtualization to millions of mobile workers with the introduction of a new client-side bare metal hypervisor that runs directly on each end user’s laptop or PC.”

You can read more at virtualization.info – and it’s probably worth watching the last 15 minutes from the Synergy day 2 keynote (thanks to Garry Martin for alerting me to this).

Layered on top of XenClient are the management tools to allow organisations to ensure that the corporate desktop remains secure, whilst a personal desktop is open and the scenario where we no longer have a corporate notebook PC (and instead are given an allowance to procure and provide our own IT for work and personal use) suddenly seems a lot more credible. I’m certainly hoping to take a closer look at the XenClient, once I can work out how to get hold of it.

Want to get hold of Office 2010?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Soon after Office 2010 was pre-announced at TechEd copies began to circulate on the ‘net. I’m not sure of the source of these but like the unofficial Windows 7 builds, they are probably best avoided.

There is a way to add yourself to the list to be considered for the Office 2010 technical preview when it is released in July though – there are no guarantees that you will be successful (it is a limited programme), but worth a try anyway. For those whose applications are successful, the products available for preview will be Office Professional 2010 and Office Visio 2010.

There’s not a huge amount of public information about Office 2010 yet, but we do know it will feature web applications, more extensive use of the ribbon user interface and will be available in both 32- and 64-bit modes. In addition, Groove gets a new name (SharePoint Workspace) and both SharePoint Workspace and OneNote will be in the Professional Plus SKU (which replaces Enterprise Edition). It looks like Visio and Project will still be sold as separate products.

Windows 7 edges closer to release

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I keep saying that I don’t really do news here… but I’m excited about Windows 7 I heard a whisper that Microsoft was going to announce ship dates at a conference in Taiwan tomorrow (thanks Dave). I also heard via the OEM channel that there would be a programme for Windows Vista to 7 upgrades on new PCs purchased this summer… which was supposed to be top secret but that’s been announced too.

According to the Windows Team Blog (breaking Microsoft’s own embargo on this news…) Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will RTM in July and Windows 7 will be in stores for 22 October. The blog post also confirmed that plans are in the works for a Windows 7 upgrade option program (with more details expected soon).

Other Windows 7 related developments in recent days include that:

I'm a PC - and I'm running Windows 7Notice that I said “when my netbook is rebuilt” – I may be playing with OS X on my S10e but that’s just a geek project and I expect it to be a Windows 7 machine again soon. Perhaps more significantly, my everyday notebook PC (upon which I depend to do my work) is already running the RC build of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (64-bit). I may be reticient to say “I’m a PC” (I also use Macs and Linux at home) but the accompanying graphic has appeared on a few e-mails in my Inbox this week and, at least for work, it’s entirely appropriate for me.

Microsoft makes Storage Server 2008 (including the iSCSI software target) available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I was doing some work yesterday with the Microsoft iSCSI target software and noticed a post on Jose Barteto’s blog, indicating that Windows Storage Server 2008 is now available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Previously it was for OEMs only (or you could extract the iSCSI Target from an evaluation copy of Storage Server) but this will help out IT administrators looking to set up an iSCSI target using software only (alternatives are available, but they are not free – at least not the ones that support persistent reservations, which are needed for Windows Server 2008 failover clustering).

Now, if only I could get an add-on for my Netgear ReadyNAS Duo to support iSCSI…