News

OK, first of all, I know MSX 2010 is EoL but that does not mean that some clients are not still using it. Exchange is expensive, the hardware it needs is expensive and the setup costs can be as well. Also, Microsoft's drift/sprint to move away from VLA licenses to SAAS adds even more to those costs. And Office 365 is just...just... Office 365 and [...] Read more

ESXi and vSphere/vCentre are, generally, very stable products and it's not uncommon to find client installations which have been running for hundreds of days or even several years without a reboot! But, just like any software VMware has bugs, some of which really need to be fixed to maintain the security of the system. So how best to do this? I [...] Read more

Probably the most boring thing in the world is having to hunt through hours of CCTV security system footage for 'interesting events'. By this I mean locked off cameras inside buildings or similar where the picture only changes when somebody or thing walks across the camera field of view. So do I rally need to spendf hours and hours looking through [...] Read more

Just don't ask why... So, a Dell Latitude LS laptop, with a Pentium 3 processor, from about the year 2000. Powers up, dead CMOS and main battery of course, but at least I get to a logon screen. Which of course I can't logon to as I've no idea of the user, password or Domain name. And before any says 'Easy, just boot a Hiren etc USB key', no it is [...] Read more

I guess the first question is .. why? - to which the answer in this case is as Outlook is used for some automated message handling and if the server reboots, then Outlook (of course) doesn't start, so the processing fails. Then somebody has to RDP into the server, log on and run up Outlook. The solution seems to be quite simple - run Outlook as a [...] Read more

I have a client who uses Wi-Fi enabled laptops as demo machines and these sometimes drop their connections and then need IT to reach out and re-connect 'by hand' - dull. So after a bit of thought, this seems to work, assuming that the Wi-Fi profile already exists. C:\>netsh wlan show profile Assuming the Wireless autoconfig service - wlansvc - [...] Read more

I have a client who uses Wi-Fi enabled laptops as demo machines and these sometimes drop their connections and then need IT to reach out and re-connect 'by hand' - dull. So after a bit of thought, this seems to work, assuming that the Wi-Fi profile already exists. C:\>netsh wlan show profile Assuming the Wireless autoconfig service - wlansvc - [...] Read more

Logging an inactive user off a Windows PC should be an easy thing to do, but no, believe me it's not. The best way I've found to achieve this is by using a small Open Source tool from Github, called Lithnet idle logoff. This needs to be installed, set up and run once on a PC and it then becomes effective for all subsequent users. It can be [...] Read more