Sorry Dell – still not even close.
For intents and purposes, they perform the same. The Macbook is much thinner and lighter.
Unfortunately – we still need Windows based systems for business use.
Archive for the ‘IT’ Category
Dell 6430u vs Macbook Air
Friday, April 26th, 2013Q. Can I put two mSATA SSD’s in my Dell Latitude 6430u?
Friday, April 26th, 2013No, you can’t. 
Yes, there is a spare Mini-PCIx slot for a WWAN card. Yes the mSATA SSD card will fit in that slot.
Unfortunately neither the BIOS or the OS will see the storage.
Here is why – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#mSATA
SSD Sadness (and the Cloud to the rescue)
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012My first SSD, a 60Gb OCZ Vertex II ceased to be last week. I didn’t take “no moving parts” to mean “no pulse”. This wasn’t the vague threat of “SSD wearing” – but simple undetectable dead drive.
Luckily, I sync most of my data to the cloud, so the interruption was inconvenient, but not catastrophic.
SSD’s – great new tools, but they still fail. I mustn’t get complacent.
Unfortunately everything on my desktop was gone. The most commonly used “workspace” – but it doesn’t sync readily to the cloud. There goes quite a few hours work. I’ve since made a simple script to copy the desktop to the cloud folder each night – at least that will reduce the future impact to just a day’s work.
Media Centre – New Hardware
Monday, May 10th, 2010I rebuilt the media centre recently, as the AMD was only a temporary stand in. It was using far too much power compared to the old mobile CPU.
The new i3 is perfect for this. Enough CPU grunt to ditch the 3rd party video card power hog, everything on board. I’m an energy saving nut, so this is the lowest power system I could put together.
A low power media centre PC.
Specification
- CPU – i3 530 2.93GHz
- MB – Gigabyte Motherboard GA-H55-USB3
- RAM – 2 x 2GB
Finally – Reliable Cordless Phones and VOIP on Naked ADSL
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010When I changed over to Naked ADSL2+ with Internode, I had to sort out a replacement for the home phone. It was a tough journey and about 12mths of problems before I found a reliable combination of devices.
The problems ranged from
- Failure to ring
- Low Volume
- Dropped calls mid call
- One way voice
- Poor call quality
After 12 mths of drama’s I found only Panasonic DECT handsets where reliable with the VOIP solutions.
I also found that running a “single box” solution is less hassles than “multiple box” solutions.
DECT has a much greater cordless range than most other handsets.
What was Microsoft smoking when building their QoS stack?
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
QoS is somewhat of a confusing area. The most common method of marking packets at Layer 3 (IP) is with a DSCP tag. This method replaces the earlier Type Of Service (TOS) tag, and uses the same space in the IP header.
Whilst DSCP has a far greater range of values than TOS, there are some that are commonly used in most implementations. DSCP values also overlap with TOS values. There is a table showing the relationship between DSCP and TOS here. This is all likely to lead to confusion in implementation.
How much longer can your corporate network compete?
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Like most people I have been watching the “Cloud Services” develop and participated in some of the discussions surround the space. These are a collection of the best articles I have found that have shaped my thinking heavily.
Tearing down the walls that limit business
A series of articles on designing Open Networks – Jericho Forum
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-04/bh-us-04-simmonds.pdf
http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/
TechEd Australia ‘08 Locknote
This is the future of IT over the next 10 years as predicted by Microsoft’s chief navel gazer. I gotta say, I think he’s right.
Inergen is interesting
Monday, January 19th, 2009I noticed something very strange with a new fire suppression system. There were no valve controls on the system, of the four bottles, only one was controlled. I had to look further into this.
One of the sites I work on had installed an Intergen Fire Suppression system. The basic idea is that in the event of a fire, enough oxygen is displaced from the room, that a fire cannot be sustained, but humans will remain conscious.
Combining Vista Media Centre & a Virtual Windows Home Server
Thursday, December 4th, 2008The time came to decommission the Home Server once I realised how much power it was pulling. My power meter debacle had concealed the 24/7 150w consumption, chewing into my solar feed in tariff at 44c in the daytime and my green power rate at 21c at night. This was costing me about $400/yr in power bills – it had to go.
I have toyed with various options, but the most obvious was using the other machine that was on 24/7 – the Vista Media Centre.
WD External USB HDD’s do Spin Down
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.
One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.
The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.
The hurdles of setting up Vista Media Centre
Thursday, September 18th, 2008OK – it came time to rebuild the media centre.
Here are ALL the steps I went through to getting the software install right. A Vista Media Center Build Document.
The changing of hardware, testing codecs, utilites, guides and apps had led to some long running config and stability issues that I couldn’t resolve. Application errors, crashes, codecs, screen sizes, resolutions and audio were all problematic.
After round one a while ago, I had managed to stabilise and expand the system somewhat. The stable hardware config now is
- Case – Zalman HD160 Case (IR, Display & Card Reader disabled)
My digital home just isn’t quite there yet
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008I’ve been trying to have the whole digital home experience for a while now. I’ve reviewed Vista Media Centre, Home Server, Wireless N before, the experiences there are documented.
The impossible dream I am thinking of consists of seamless integration between:
- So lets look at the current state of play for these things.
Live (Passport) is Not Live – it’s down (again)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008C’mon guys – no logins for Technet subscriptions – if you can’t keep your directory up maybe you should consider OpenID.
Jesper had a similar problem last week.
Here’s a AD DNS Screwup I have seen firsthand
Monday, August 11th, 2008This is why I learnt a long time ago – if you have an AD problem – it’s probably DNS.
Creating an empty DNS zone with the same name as your internal zone can lead too all sorts of frustration – especially with the multiple locations in AD that it can end up in. You’ll find yourself knee-deep in ADSI Edit faster than you would ever want to be.
I love DNS, but it’s gotta be right, and it’s easy to get wrong.
Windows Home Server & PP1 – I’m impressed
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008When I first heard about Windows Home S
erver (WHS) – I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.
With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.
OK – at it’s simplest WHS does three things
Interesting research into Excel problems in Business
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm
And this is why we have to wean business off Excel.
Just like programming – it’s all mistakes mistakes mistakes.
Netgear Dual Band Wireless N Review – WNDR3300 & WNDA3100
Sunday, June 15th, 2008Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.
Windows Mobile 6 and Poxy Proxy Settings w/ Vista
Monday, June 2nd, 2008I had the same problem as before – Activesync changing my Proxy settings in my Jasjam to use the work proxy, breaking web browsing on the thing via my Telco.
Activesync is different to the Mobile Device Thingy on Vista and although the fix was the same, it took me a bit to find.
Think of this as a Vista Version of KB915151
VPN client fails with Windows OneCare
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008My Vista SP1 Laptop refused to connect to our MS ISA VPN for work at some point. There was no error given on the connection interface, but the Application Event Log recorded an Event ID 20227 – RASClient
The user somewhere\someone dialed a connection named WorkVPN which has failed. The error code returned on failure is 800.
Some searching showed others with similar results. The common cause is Windows OneCare. It’s interaction with the Windows Firewall blocks VPN protocols by default. I’m not sure why it doesn’t prompt to allow the traffic, a problem with the application.
Not bad uptime – err, I think
Monday, April 28th, 2008
So with today’s perspective on updates vs uptime, is that impressive, or scary?
