You may have seen that registration for UK TechDays events from 12 th to 16 th April is already open - but you probably won’t have seen this newly announced session, even if you are following   @uktechdays   on twitter After Hours @ UK Tech Days 2010 – Wednesday 14th April, 7pm – 9pm. Vue Cinema...

In a post a while back about Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) I wrote “I’ve got a bad track record choosing scanners” and described the most recent one I’ve bought as a  “piece of junk”. Because my experience has been bad I don’t scan much, and because I don’t scan much I won’t spend the money to...

No. I’m not talking about sorting out the music for one’s funeral* … I think every manager I have had in my 10 years at Microsoft has grumbled that I’m not great with planning – it’s a fair criticism and I try to work on it. When the subject comes up a quote from a book by William Gibson comes into my...

On the MDOP blog there is an announcement   of new releases of both APP-V (which runs applications in a Virtualized “bubble” so they don’t clash with each other) and MED-V (which runs a centrally managed virtualized OS) App-V 4.6 can be accessed immediately via MDOP 2010 . Existing MDOP customers...

I had a mail earlier telling me about desktop virtualization hour , planned for 4PM (GMT) on March 18th. (That’s 9AM Seattle time, 5PM CET … you can work out the others I’m sure). More information and a downloadable meeting request are Here . Some effort seems to be going into this one, which makes me...

I mentioned a few days back that I was going to write some posts about deploying Windows 7, but there is some good material out there already and there is no sense re-inventing the wheel So I’d like to recommend 3 posts from fellow evangelist and all-round good chap Alan Le Marquand, Choosing the path...

Over on the Windows blog there is a post talking about the update we are about to send out which is designed to catch some of the tricks being used by large scale pirates against Windows 7.  There was a time were an update to this technology would have me reaching for my tin hat and flame-proof...

Arthur : “You mean you can see into my mind ?” Marvin: “Yes.” Arthur: “And … ?” Marvin: “It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small” Looking back down the recent posts you might notice that this is the 8th in a row about my new phone (so it’s obviously made something of an impression...

I know from experience that the people I meet in this job , and those who read this blog are more likely to be early adopters than the population at large so you, as a reader may well be on Windows 7 by now, and had a better chance than most of running Vista. But we know there is a lot of Windows XP...

A few days ago I linked to a post of Viral’s which showed some of the holes in the hype around Google’s “Chromium OS” or more accurately just-enough-os-to-run-a-browser.   He had an interesting link showing the work from Phoenix to slash the POST time – and you can’t help but be impressed when...

A couple of posts back I put talked about how easy it is to use Windows Deployment Services with a video to reinforce the point: some roll outs of Windows 7 will need nothing more. Depending on exactly what is needed there are plenty more tools out there. Looking for something else over the weekend I...

I saw something recently – it must have been in the discussion about Google’s bootable browser new “operating system” which talked about it taking hours to install Windows. I didn’t know whether to get cross or to laugh. Kicking around on youtube is a video I made of putting Windows 7 on a Netbook from...

I’ve mentioned here before background noise drives me nuts (it’s one of boxes that gets ticked doing Asperger’s questionnaires). Some noise in the office is unavoidable, but it’s long been my view that filling other peoples workspace with noise from your computer is plain rude :  I have been known...

For as long as we have been talking about “Green IT” I’ve thought the opportunity to save carbon emissions by using IT to reduce travel was far greater than the opportunity to reduce the carbon emissions of IT itself. That’s not an excuse for leaving your monitor on or not using the Power saving features...

In my previous post I mentioned a correspondent – his name is Andy – who’d written asking the question “What the hell is the point of libraries and if you have the name of the person whose idea they were please post it for summary flaming” He made another comment which I think goes to the heart of it...

I don’t think you can have missed that today was the day Windows 7 became generally available. I’ve been trying to come up with some unique angle on this for a blog post and not getting anywhere. Two thoughts related thoughts I will share. The first: sometimes on these occasions the press turn up and...

I’ve had plenty to say about the uses of VHD files on different occasions. They get used anywhere we need to have a file which contains an image of a disk. So from Vista onwards we have had complete image backup to VHD, we use VHD for holding the virtual disk to be used by a Virtual Machine (be it hyper...

Somehow, in all the other activities of the last couple of weeks I missed the release of Microsoft Security Essentials which is our FREE* anti-virus / anti-malware product aimed at home users. (We have the more business oriented Forefront Client Security as well). My experience with it has been too limited...

From the betas of Windows Vista until the start of September I ran the Ultimate edition of Windows, rather than the enterprise edition. We had a perfectly good enterprise edition as a network installation, but in Vista there one some features missing from enterprise and from time to time I needed to...

Long title, and I’m afraid I’ve been on a bit of a voyage of discovery about some of the things Windows 7 (and Vista) can do with photos and first thing I wanted to cover here was something I’ve been trying to ignore: Cameras have two USB modes. In “Mass Storage Class” (MSC) mode, the computer sees...

For the last few weeks, on and off, Andrew and I have been working on a set of Videos on Windows 7 and Server 2008-R2 , which are now available  on youTube. When we were kicking ideas around we came up with the idea of filming Andrew drawing cartoons of what the Screencasts will cover. Like most...

I’ve done more than my share of Windows upgrades. I’m fond of telling people that my first proper project in IT as a professional involved updating the software supplied on the company’s computers from Windows 1.03 to Windows 2. I didn’t run NT as my desktop OS until version 4, and never ran Windows...

Having begun my previous post with an explanation of “ I have a professional disregard for …” it bubbles up again… Quite near were I live is the headquarters of Sophos, as a local company I should be well disposed to them but I’ve had occasion before now to roll my eyes at what their spokespeople have...

Some while back I wrote about boot from VHD. To re-cap, in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 (including core, and Hyper-V Server R2) the boot loader is capable of mounting a VHD file and booting from it as though it were a physical disk. There is no virtualization going on, just the necessary smarts to use...

I’ve just bought a new digital SLR camera. Being a dyed in the wool Pentax person, I’ve upgraded to their new K7. Being fairly serious about (some of) my photography I shoot quite a lot in RAW format.(In case you didn’t know higher end digital cameras can save the data as it comes off their sensor without...