I’m writing with reference to a colleague’s blog post where he has found a very useful fix for a very annoying start up and log-on delay issue in Windows 7 SP1. Here’s his post, worth a read: http://blog.solarfusion.co.uk/2011/12/windows-7-please-wait-or-welcome-screen.html We were finding that computers in shared areas which had been logged on by many users (i.e. [...]

As of 1st December 2011 there is now a new version of the Lync Server 2010 Resource Kit Tools available to download. You need to uninstall the old version before you can install the new one. This update brings us to version 4.0.7577.172 and it is downloadable from here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=21165 It is recommended that you [...]
I read last night that the latest (and last) service pack for Office 2007 was out. After googling this morning I found it way too hard to find the ‘actual’ download for the damned thing, so I’m presenting the results of my efforts here for easy finding… List of all 2007 Office system SP3, 2007 [...]

Say you have a need to add a registry key into the 64-bit registry hive but you’re stuck with doing it from a vbscript running in a 32-bit process. For example SCCM always runs vbscript in a 32-bit process, even on a 64-bit Windows machine! If you try this normally Windows 7 64-bit will redirect the key [...]
I finally realised where to get hold of version 5 of Orca – the one most suitable for Windows 7 able to validate .msi files for Windows Installer 5. It was of course in the Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4. Unfortunately there’s no mini-download for the msi sdk like with version [...]
On-line privacy is getting harder and harder as more and more services and shops go on-line. As a person highly concerned with privacy tracked advertising is just one of the many things that I despise.
Not sure how I missed this one but I’ve just discovered a way of opting-out of a lot of tracked advertising, and it involves setting special opt-out cookies…
Here’s the link to get you started: http://www.youronlinechoices.com/opt-out

Getting hands-on with the new MacBook Air (late-2010)
I have just finished a relationship. Not a normal kind of relationship you understand, this one was with a laptop. A rather special laptop. Last new year a friend showed off his MacBook Air to me and I was smitten ever since. So when Apple announced their latest incarnation of the Air I leapt at the chance to get one for myself…

(Please note this article is now somewhat out of date as D-Link have started to trickle out a new version of software for this router which changes its ipv6 functionality and completely fixes the ipv6 router advertisement issue – here is an EU beta version that I found after scouring the d-link forums: DIR-825 2.05EU, and [...]
We recently started trying to configure the UM role in Exchange 2007 and had to buy an AudioCodes IP gateway to translate traffic from our legacy PBX into SIP traffic for the Exchange server. Very early on we ran into an issue where we if we diverted a phone to the Exchange UM pilot number [...]
This week I decided to move this blog over to WordPress. For the last few years it’s been on Blogger and I’ve never really had cause to complain. However now that I know the power and flexibility of WordPress I’m ashamed that I kept it on Blogger for as long as I did! I have [...]