More bad news for Vista Service pack 1

August 31, 2007 4 Comments

Apart from the long wait for a service pack for Vista (over a year from initial release) and the hugely bloated size of the “stand-alone” option to apply the service pack to machines without connecting them to the internet, I just learned some bad news.

David Overton posted an article about what’s coming in the first service pack for Vista. In it he links to and quotes this BetaNews article which says:

the service pack will uninstall the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and GPEdit.msc will edit local Group Policy by default

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Filed under Group Policy, Patching + hotfixes, Windows Vista Tagged with , , ,

Patching XP and Vista with Service Packs and Hotfix "rollups"

August 31, 2007 1 Comment

In the last few days a couple of contradictory things seem to have happened:

  • Everyone and his dog seems to have blogged about the release dates for Vista service pack 1 and separately XP service pack 3 -both in 2008
  • Microsoft seem to have requested that the popular patching utility “AutoPatcher” be taken down and no longer distributed.

Ironically, I started reading an excellent post on Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen blog about his favourite Windows tools and utilities for developers and power users, updated for 2007. He posted this on 23rd August. I started to follow and download several of the applications he linked, in some cases to do something new, in others to see how they stacked up against tools I already used. I was still downloading today, when I found that one of his links, to AutoPatcher, showed me this page

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Filed under Patching + hotfixes, Utilities + Tools

Microsoft Licensing Sales Specialist exams changing

August 29, 2007 1 Comment

Thanks to Susanne for the heads up that the Microsoft MLSS and MLSE accreditations are about to change.

I renewed my Licensing Sales Specialist accreditation in May, but had not got round to taking the other five modules to become a MSLE. I’ve done two of them today and hope to get through the rest this week, in plenty of time to avoid the 11th September deadline.

It will be interesting to see how the new model works, but at least this way I will be able to use the accreditation for a year before I have to renew my qualification.

Filed under Licensing, Training + certification

Group Policy best practice analyser tool available

August 28, 2007 Leave a Comment

I have not yet had a chance to try this out, but still thought it was worth giving people the heads up. The description given on the download page for the Group Policy Best Practice Analyzer for Windows Server 2003 is:

The Microsoft Group Policy Diagnostic Best Practice Analyzer (GPDBPA) for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is designed to help you identify Group Policy configuration errors or other dependency failures that may prevent settings or features from functioning as expected.

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Filed under Group Policy, Utilities + Tools Tagged with , , ,

Using British English spelling in Windows Live Writer

August 28, 2007 7 Comments

I finally found a way to get Live Writer to stop “correcting” my correct spellings, which makes me really happy. It is so frustrating when my screen is covered in coloured wavy lines because I chose to utilise an English spelling rather than an Americanized one. I’m not saying US spellings are inherently “wrong”, but they are wrong in the context of me being British, and if I were to mix my spellings it would be very inconsistent.

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Filed under Utilities + Tools, Web publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Further changes to Getting IT Right

August 27, 2007 3 Comments

Since the changes in June the amount of content on the blog is growing and the number of daily visitors continues to rise. August is the first month with more than 1,000 visitors, and should end with a cumulative total of 5,000 visits since the blog began in January.

So I chose a new theme, this time it’s Fadtastic which I think has a nice clean feel to it. I hope you like it too. My main reasons for choosing it were not just aesthetic, but practical – it is highly customisable so I can choose exactly what navigation aids and information to include in the right hand pane.

I know that many readers arrive after following links on forums or search engines to some of the more technical “tutorial” type posts, especially “The One About DSMod” (sounds like a geeky episode of Friends!). The new navigation should help to find some of the other content more easily.

Incidentally, the BlogRoll of sites I like to use is now at the bottom of the page. I need to update this with more places that I have been using a lot recently.

Let me know what you think of the new layout.

Filed under Blog updates

10 great features to use in Windows Vista – part 1

August 18, 2007 Leave a Comment

I am going to be very careful in introducing this article. This is my personal view of some features that have been included in Windows Vista and why I like them. I do not claim they are the best features. I have no opinion on whether these are better implemented than in some Linux build or Mac OS. This is simply about the things I have found added to my productivity over the last 6 months of using the RTM version of Vista Ultimate. This is the first 5 of 10 useful things which are right there, out of the box, no third party applications or tweaks required. Items 6 to 10 will follow in a second article very soon.

Note: I certainly do not think these are necessarily big enough to merit an upgrade to Vista on their own. They are probably good enough to choose to have Vista on your next machine rather than sticking to your old ways and asking for XP to be installed. In a follow-up article I may discuss more of the technical reasons why Vista is worth having (and potentially upgrading to if those factors are important to you). Today’s list is built around things the everyday user will benefit from in their daily interactions.

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Filed under Utilities + Tools, Windows Vista

Industry Insiders article – Don’t Secure Your Documents!

August 16, 2007 Leave a Comment

An article I wrote for Microsoft’s Industry Insiders blog site has just been published.

This week I was asked by the IT support guy who works for one of my clients about how a user could put a password on a document. Since I am both their external consultant and their MS Office trainer, I was the right person to call.

To me this question is always a red flag as it implies that the user does not understand the places which already exist for them to save documents in such a way as to give access to the correct group of colleagues (or just themselves). My answer was therefore “I’ll show you how to do it for the sake of argument, but you should tell the user that they should not do this”.

Read the whole of this article about a proper approach to document security and avoiding mere security theatre.

The Industry Insiders site looks at various topics affecting corporate IT, with a slight lean towards information security, which is unsurprising since it is maintained by IT Pro Evangelist for Security, Steve Lamb (and evangelist manager Eileen Brown)

Filed under Office System, Security and Malware, Work and profile

Why I’m using Foxit reader for Acrobat PDF files

August 13, 2007 2 Comments

For a while I had been reading good things about Foxit Software’s tools for reading, creating and editing PDF files, but never bothered to actually try them out. I recently switched from using Adobe’s Acrobat reader when I finally got fed up with the oversized, bloated product and it’s constant nagging to go off and update itself online (especially since this causes a UAC prompt on Vista). I used to dig around and kill off the update functionality, but enough was enough – why should I have to struggle to try to make the software behave how I want when it might just be easier to switch to a different product.

So, after a very quick download of the 3MB installation file and a simple, no frills installation, I was ready to go. Compare this with the vast and unnecessary 21MB of Adobe’s Acrobat reader – and don’t get me started on the fact that they force me to first download a download manager before I can finally download the actual setup file, when I could have just used my several highly competent browser plugins to get the install files so much quicker. Foxit also comes as an MSI – so much easier than Adobe’s EXE file when it comes to deployment using standard tools such as Group Policy Software Installation (GPSI) or scripts. These download sizes are reflected in the relative amounts of memory consumed by these two products when opening files to view.

Why do I care about my PDF file reader so much? Well, I actually use PDFs fairly extensively for storing “read-only” copies of my own documents, which I then want to access, print, share or publish as easily as possible.

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Filed under Training + certification, Utilities + Tools, Web publishing Tagged with , , ,

9 patches from MS for August Patch Tuesday

August 10, 2007 Leave a Comment

This is the August Advance Notification bulletin about the Microsoft patches which are due on the next patch Tuesday on 14th August 2007.

On the security updates list there are 6 critical updates and 3 important ones. One of the updates is for Office, and is deemed critical for Office 2000 but only important for Office 2003 (and interestingly also Excel viewer 2003).

What’s really odd is this bit:

Non-Security, High-Priority Updates on MU, WU, WSUS and SUS

For this month:

  • Microsoft is planning to release four non-security, high-priority updates on Microsoft Update (MU) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).
  • Microsoft is planning to release two non-security, high-priority updates for Windows on Windows Update (WU) and Software Update Services (SUS).

Yes, that’s right, despite saying that SUS was now definitely end of life as of 10th July it looks like they are still releasing patches for it to use. Even back in January they were releasing some patches through MU and WSUS only (not WU and SUS). Maybe they found too many people were simply not getting patched properly.

Filed under Patching + hotfixes

Vista updates available for performance and compatibility

August 9, 2007 Leave a Comment

There are a couple of updates which have been released for Vista which are outside the WSUS infrastructure (or rather they don’t seem to show up as updates at the moment). KB938194 is a compatibility and reliability update and KB938979 is supposed to improve performance and reliability. Essentially the first one fixes a variety of seemingly unrelated things to do with stability and things which fail or stop completely, while the second is more about things which just take a lot longer than they should. There are 64 bit versions available as well here and here.

Filed under Patching + hotfixes, Windows Vista

Creating better web pages and site design

August 7, 2007 1 Comment

I have recently been doing some restructuring of my company website at www.meteorit.co.uk – it’s still very plain and simple but I have tried to tick all the appropriate boxes for accessibility, usability, standards compliance and above all giving people clear information about what my company does and does not offer.

Later I may give it a bit more corporate gloss and “pictures of people in smart suits drinking cappuccinos in a meeting, and someone good looking with a headset on smiling at the camera” (to quote a friend who kindly gave me their thoughts on what it was missing).

As regular readers will know, clear presentation of information is a hot topic of mine, particularly when I am delivering software training. As I am a MOS: Master I do a lot of Microsoft Office courses, and try to focus not just on the features of the applications but also advise on good practices. This might include clear layout of a Word document, suitable formatting of an Excel chart, or the whole process of designing a professional presentation to deliver your message clearly and avoid “death by PowerPoint”.

BadPowerPointNews

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Filed under Presentation design, Web publishing Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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