Posted by mikeg on September 9, 2009
My setup is a 2 year old custom built system with recently purchased drives: Quad 2.4, 4GB Ram, 64GB SSD (super talent) system drive, 2TB data drive
Installation:
- Was installing on the clean disk (just bought SSD specifically for reinstall)
- I was able to browse Internet 22 minutes after seeing “starting setup” screen — very impressive
- Over impression: installation is “pretty” and requires a lot less user involvement — i think you only need to select the following: time zone, home or work network, configure automatic updates
- Devices/Drivers — no warning flags in device manager. It even includes ATI Radeon X1950 GT support — looks like it is MS’s driver. ATI’s support page that Windows 7 is not supported yet, but users are welcome to install Vista drivers — I decided against it for now as my resolution is recognized and everything looks great.
First Impressions
- Feels snappy, very different from first impression of Vista
- I use Paint quite a bit for screen captures and Windows 7 Pain is significantly improved. There is also “snipping tool”, but it lacks rectangle tool to be useful
- Ships with Sync Center — looks like it is based on PowerToy Sync
- Screen saver is not enabled by default and selection is pretty much the same from Windows 95 times
- Backup allows Image Backup as well as “windows chooses which files should be backed up” and “you choose”
Next steps is to install all the soft that I normally use at home. Let’s see how that goes.
Posted in Windows 7 | Tagged: first impressions, install, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mikeg on September 2, 2009
It bothered me for quite some time: I take a lot of screenshots to paste into emails/documents and when it is a screenshot of code block I like to add borders to that image to give it dimensions. In Word / Outlook 2003 it worked as expected keeping contents of the image as sharp as text, but…
- Word 2007 — makes picture a bit blurry when adding a border. Works as I would expect it to work if you save in DOC compatibility mode
- Outlook 2007 — makes pasted picture a bit blurry even without adding border (I tried all the options under Paste Special with the same result)
On the left is DOCX with the same image pasted twice and then I added border to the top image. On the right is the DOCX saved as DOC — as soon as I saved it into DOC format, image became clear again. Bizarre…
Posted in Misc | Tagged: blurry image, border, office 2007, Word 2007 | 1 Comment »
Posted by mikeg on August 29, 2009
After being prompted a few times by FF and reading a few positive reviews I decided to upgrade. Within 20 minutes I regretted my decision. While I didn’t experience startup issues described here, the following issues caused me to downgrade.
- RoboForm didn’t work right — didn’t look like it was notified about current location so it didn’t show proper login option. RoboForm is essential to my productivity and even if issues were limited to it only I would downgrade as well.
- It looked like there is an issue with keystrokes and mouse clicks — in both search and location box I would type a word and sometimes only half of the word would show up. Same with Page Down/Up
- Clicking on the tab would not always switch to that tab
- Ctrl+R or F5 sometimes would not refresh the page until clicking within the page
Luckily downgrading is easy: download the latest 3.0.x version here
A friend and colleague Bora reported having issues with 3.5 on OSX as well.
Posted in Misc | Tagged: downgrade, Firefox 3.5 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mikeg on June 13, 2009
Very detailed introduction by Jaap Wesselius
http://www.simple-talk.com/exchange/exchange-articles/windows-server-virtualisation-hyper-v,-an-introduction/
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was released in the summer of 2008 and is Microsoft first real hypervisor virtualization solution. It is not an emulated environment like Virtual Server or Virtual PC, but as a hypervisor solution it “sits” between the hardware and the Operating System. With the Integration Components installed you can fully use the functionality offered by Hyper-V. You have to secure the Parent Partition as much as possible to prevent compromising the complete system.
In the next articles I will talk more about the Hyper-V best practices, deploying Virtual Machines, using the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 and the “high availability” options and why these aren’t really high available in the current release of Hyper-V.
Posted in IT, Virtualization | Tagged: Hyper-V, Virtual Server, vmware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mikeg on June 13, 2009
We are considering moving some of our websites from a managed server into the cloud, but we like the convenience of a “managed support”:
- available 24×7, minimal hold time
- ability to setup SOP (standard operating procedure) of what needs to happen if anything goes down
- escalation procedure — try to restart service, clean this and if that doesn’t work only then call one of predefined phone numbers
- etc
There are monitoring tools that are available for EC2 specifically (see my previous post here) or just standard networking tools (Nagios, Spiceworks, etc) but most of them still require us to hire staff to react to unexpected events
I looked into GoGrid and while it has a potential, it is not suitable for us just yet.
Positives:
- 24×7 support — don’t know what it means. My expectation is outlined above
- Graphical interface — while I didn’t like the design, it was user friendly
- Free Load Balancer
- Free Public IPs
- Windows 2008 Images
Negatives:
- Cannot use my own image, cannot backup/clone an image that I setup within GoGrid — that pretty much explains why they don’t have auto scaling (next bullet point)
- No auto scaling (roadmap)
- Even if machine is “off” — they still charge you money as if it was ON. On their roadmap.
- Only 4GB machine gets its own single Xeon core (equivalent to P4 2.0 chip). Lower RAM images get fractions.
- No multi-core support
- While their Cloud Storage pricing is inline with Amazon, Data Transfer is $.50/GB Vs Amazon’s $.17/GB for first 10 and then goes down from there. Significant difference
- Amazon offers CDN and GoGrid doesn’t
- Amazon offers multiple datacenters and GoGrid doesn’t
Posted in Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Tagged: ec2, GoGrid | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mikeg on June 13, 2009
Posted in Wireframes, iPhone | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mikeg on June 13, 2009
We were asked by a client to find an offshore company to do 24×7 network/system monitoring/administration. Clients runs Windows network/servers. Title of this post is a quote from one of the responses. Very funny.
Posted in Funny, IT | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mikeg on May 10, 2009
I’ve been a big fan of X1 (excellent email/desktop search) for a long time and have been introducing people to it. Not only it is an excellent product, when I ran into issues on Windows XP 64-bit (OS that is not officially supported), customer support went beyond my expectation to try to find the reason for my problems. Very impressed with their approach — I don’t know how big the company is, but it gives off an impression of a large corporation that mostly focuses on Enterprises with consumers being a small part. My experience have been very positive as a “consumer” and I will certainly continue recommending X1 to my “consumer friends” as well as my Enterprise customers.
Special thanks to Chris Wheaton who tracked and worked with me on the issue for over 2 months.
Overview of the issues I encountered:
I recently switched to XP 64-bit to take advantage of 4GB RAM (I tend to run many applications at the same time) and experienced a few issues with X1:
- deskbar is not available (x1 said that it is a known issue on XP 64-bit)
- I experienced intermittent crashes, which seemed to be related to standy/hibernate
Over the course of 2 months since I reported the issue to X1 there were a few Windows Updates and the issue with crashes seemed to almost go away. It is not completely gone, but is very infrequent. As I didn’t update X1 to the new version, I imagine Microsoft changed a few things that favorably affected X1 stability.
While I am pretty happy with 64-bit (waiting to use it for 6-12 months to make my final judgement), random applications (Ex: Skype, Pidgin) crash once in a while. Not enough to bother me too much, but also giving some indication that X1 crash problems might be more of OS issue than their code.
Posted in Utilities | Tagged: 64-bit, x1 | Leave a Comment »
