jamesb

Just had a quick look for some for you: Virtually Indestructible Keyboard Apparently these silicon ones are washable too, though I doubt that means machine-washable

They have a house. They have a television. They have mobile phones. They can afford cigarettes and trips down the cafe. Hell, they even quite obviously have food. I had to live off free tea and biscuits for my first few days in the job.

160 miles, and all I had was a van, a couple of months car insurance, one suit and a job to start. I borrowed from the bank so that I could afford to put down a months rent on a rather pathetic place, and scraped until now when I can afford to rent a nice little house, and pay my own way.

And as someone who chooses to work and achieve surely I should have the freedom to spend my money as I wish and not see it pay for the lifestyles of those who can't be bothered to work? I have no problem paying for those who are out of work for a short time, or who are actually unable to work, but as far as I'm concerned if someone's choosing not to work then they can also choose to not have any money.

What's the actual size of your database, and which backup method are you using? Depending on what its doing it may take this long, particularly if its compressing a large backup to a .zip format. One thing to try might be using one of the other available methods to do a backup, without compressing the result, and see if there's a difference in time. If there is then you can run the dbupgrade console without doing a backup using the command dbupgrade /nobackup.

Probably best just to replace it in that case. That way you get a brand new warranty to go with your brand new board.

Well done on the exam by the way. I'm curious though, what sort of thing did they actually cover?

Fuse? I recommend checking with whoever supplied it how much a repair would cost, checking the age of the board, and looking up the price of a nice shiny new one. If its an older board then standard wear and tear will take its toll even if you have it repaired, so from a long-term point of view it may be cheaper to replace it.

Looks like its time for techs to come up with new jargon.

XP Home computers are not able to join a domain, you'd have to upgrade to XP Pro. Its possible to work around this, but XP Home will only recognise local accounts so you'd need to get all of the local accounts set up on every computer. If you have volume licensing then your best bet would be to talk to your licensing supplier about getting licenses to upgrade them all to XP Pro.

SIMS .net doesn't have a problem with 64 bit server 2008, however FMS will not work on a 64 bit operating system currently.

There have been cases of MS pulling updates after release. User impact can be huge from some updates, I've had MS updates kill components of my system before, and AV updates which suddenly start issuing false alarms. As to everything that worked before the update continuing to work afterwards, you must've been exceedingly lucky if you've never had to roll back a Windows update. Administrative input for MS updates varies, depending on how much care you take not to fry your network. You'll note that Microsoft make WSUS available so that people can restrict updates until after they've been tested. I'd count this as administrative input.

I'll take one.

Not exactly rubbish. If you are authorised for the upgrade, then you'll need to apply it before you can apply any more patches via SOLUS. If you get the upgrade un-authorised, or apply patches via another method, then you can continue to apply them.

I actually find the ribbon a lot easier to use, now that I've got used to it.

Are all of the machines where its happening on a domain? What GPOs do you have applying to Windows Firewall?

Could potentially be this, though I don't know if its digitally signed. What version of Windows is running on these, and do the machines have anything in common?

I have had trouble in the past trying to use GPOs with CC3, however I seem to remember getting around it be enforcing loopback processing and assigning it to the computers rather than the users.

I wish you good luck with that, from what I've heard the next full upgrade'll be March. Edit: Just checked the road map, no February release has been planned at any point by the looks of it.

At one school I worked in we used these guys to get a batch of sticks for each new year, all nicely branded and fairly well priced.

Damn! I'll have to see if I can get a refund on that goose...

From what I can gather the HTC touch is at the least a decent rival to the iPhone, and probably something of an improvement (no Apple software store is a good start). Orange also seem to be quite a good network, so I'd recommend sticking with them if you can, particularly with that package.

Every time you install Hackintosh OSX Tux kills a fanboi.

Hi-spec desktop system with Windows on it. Always irritates me when people ask this though, you can't really compare the two. Microsoft Windows will run on most computers you can buy or build. OSX will (unless you feel like breaking the lock-in) only run on Apples. So a Mac is a single product, whereas a Microsoft PC is a PC of your choice, which happens to have Windows installed. As for choice of operating system, I'd go with Windows or Linux. I don't feel like forking over a small fortune to have a system I can't crack open and upgrade or play around with, covered with brushed aluminium. Gimme something in a good steel case with extra ports and the ability to throw in any modifications I want any time. The idea of an operating system which is meant to only run on one manufacturer's computers kinda rubs me the wrong way. I like choice.