I finally got round to renaming my new (now six months old) PC to its perminent name today. Or at least, I tried.¬¨‚Ć Normally, I’d go to System in the Control Panel, and rename from there, but when I tried that… (click it for bigger!) It seems that Windows found an error, and to fix it wants me to try renaming the computer (like I’m doing) using System, in the Control Panel. You know, like I’m doing.
Today at work, I took delivery of a shiny new Dell Mac mini Studio Hybrid. I booted it up, and was confronted with this: That’s nice, isn’t it? I’m accused of being a criminal before I’ve even started using the thing. Amazing! So I clicked “Go online and resolve now”, which took me to this message: I’m not surprised it was invalid. I haven’t typed anything yet – it’s not given me the option!¬¨‚Ć I tried typing a “different” product …
The time came to finally trial redirecting user Application Data folders to a network share, rather than have them roam on the network. I knew how to do it, but it never seemed to work properly, so I’d not done it previously. This week, I gave it another crack. And it works! Sort of. Unfortunately, although it correctly maps Application Data back to the server, all the settings in Internet Explorer (like the branding and, most importantly, proxy stuff) fail …
Glue your left index finger and thumb together by accident.  Like I did.
Our batch of new Inspiron Minis arrived at work today. And very, very lovely (and shiny) they are too. Strange quirks include no F-keys (there are replacements via the Fn button and home row) and some difficulty getting sound drivers working when replacing XP Home with XP Pro, but they’re working now and run pretty fast and cool. Some obligatory pictures: Things of note: The Mini is almost the same size as the 701, only very slightly longer and slightly …
A couple of days ago, I was asked, again, to download more Teachers TV programmes for staff at work. I don’t mind doing it, and it doesn’t take long, but I did wonder if there was a way of automatically downloading them.¬¨‚Ć Looking on the site, it seems they publish all new videos in a podcast. You can find out more about that here. So I fired up iTunes, and subscribed to the new videos RSS feed. And then the …
For the last couple of days, Outlook has been throwing up the following error: Task ‘Microsoft Exchange Server’ reported error (0x8004010F): ‘The operation failed. An object could not be found.’ Googling it wasn’t much help, as there seemed to be more than 20 reasons for the fault. Emails were syncing OK, and everything else appeared to be normal. However, checking the Exchange (2003) server, and looking at the Offline Address List settings (alluded to in the majority of the search …
This appeared in my pigeonhole at work today. I’m assuming it was put there because it mentions computers, and therefore is obviously my responsibility. Anyway, as is always the way with these things, it’s a scam. The company, TLAC Ltd, at Kemp House, 152-160 City Road, London EC1V 2NX (address included for the benefit of Googlers) appears to offer “thankyou prizes and awards”, not unlike Survey UK. As before, I hunted around on the internet, and found this message on …
At work, I’ve facetiously named all our servers with actual proper names. “Server 1” or “Mail Server” are dull, boring, and – most importantly – rubbish names for servers. So they have names. Some were named after specific people, others were named because the machines were different colours and the name started with the same letter as the colour. Roxy is the Proxy. So there’s no real pattern to them all. Anyway. This week, we killed several of the older …
I’ve had a HP laptop in several times in the last week, suffering from severe audio stuttering – in Media Player, VLC, when playing DVDs, and even just playing the Windows start-up jingle. It’s almost like when I had a nasty 16-bit ISA soundcard in my ancient PC and tried to play Half-Life. We tried all sorts – scanning for viruses, defragging, reinstalling drivers, reducing the hardware acceleration, adding more memory, changing the volume… everything. But it still kept doing …
We ordered an MSI Wind laptop (rebadged and sold in the UK as a PC World Advent 4211 Netbook) for work recently, and it arrived yesterday so I’ve had a chance to have a play with it. My very first impressions were quite poor. It looked very nice, is small, light and seems reasonably well built. However, it wouldn’t power up. Every time it tried to boot past the POST screen, the hard drive squealed and it switched itself off. …
Actually, it’s backing up. Do you see? In fact, they’re all backing up, pretty much. Which means I can’t do very much. So I’m bored. If you’re bored too, why not have a look at some, all, or none of these April Fools from yesterday? http://www.wow-europe.com/wrath/features/bard/bardclass.xml http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html http://i28.tinypic.com/25s8zlv.jpg http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/moltencore/ http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article985644.ece http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/01/teacher_head_explosion_april_fool/ http://www.game.co.uk/CoolStuff/Miscellaneous/~r334349/GAMEware-Double-Bass-Controller/ http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/promotions/2008/spring/default.htm http://a.viary.com/blog/posts/dodo-web-based-time-machine http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/04/announcing-google-weblogs-beta.html http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/16095/Postals-Cat-Silencer-Enters-US-Armys-Arsenal/ http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
And other tales. For the last couple of days, I’ve been struggling to get Server 2003 installed on a new Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server. I didn’t think ¬¨¬£500 for the OS and Dell to install it was value for money, when I had some spare licences lying around. Unfortunately, wishing to save this money was a real headache. First of all, OS-less Dell servers come with… nothing. No software at all (aside from some drivers). When you turn them …
We got a couple of Philips Freevents 11NB5800 laptops at work this week, and they’re actually very nice. Of course, they come with Vista installed, so we had to remove that. Problem #1 There are no XP drivers for the Freevents 11B5800. There’s nothing in the box (not even a Vista restore disc), and Philips have no mention of any of their laptops on their website. In fact, outside of PC World’s online store, the Freevents doesn’t appear to exist. …
I got this email today at work: Sorry to be pedantic but whoever did the pop-up for interview day has spelt pracitse wrong. I should point out that it wasn’t me that did the pop-up.