I’ve changed jobs and am now working for a large insurance firm in Surrey, UK. I am firmly in second line support with delusions of 3rd line (although those delusions are slowly turning into reality). It’s a great environment, a great team to be in and a great computing department to be part of, work in, and work with the people ...

I ought to put a plug in for the little utility GetRight. I found it many many years ago and has saved me thousands of minutes (if not hours) in re-downloading files, resuming files, busting through tight bandwidth restrictions and connection ratios. I used it today to download the latest JRE from Sun, something that IE failed to download due to ...

Well the rain held off until I got home – so so much for that reducing the number of people who actually attended. However there were noticeable spaces, so MS were right to overbook it (as is the general practise anyway). So what did I get out of “The Best of MMS”? I’ve got to say that those 15 min breaks weren’t long enough.There were some ...

Ever since the Exchange migration we've had this rouge distribution group that hasn't appeared in anybody's Offline Address Book. If you're an online Outlook user then you're fine, otherwise you just had to remember who the members of the ''Americas'' group were. Until today when I decided to get to the bottom of this issue. After trying to ...

Our network administrator sticks with NTBackup for all his backups. He routinely checks Event Viewer on all the servers to ensure that the backup started, went smoothly and finished OK. Except on Friday when one of our remote servers failed to finish although it didn’t log a reason why. Our network manager rebooted the server twice, each ...

When setting up a guest machine under VS, “Virtual Machine Additions” is a recommended addition. Simply put, installing VMAdditions will give you greater integration between the guest OS and the host you are running on as well as provide monitoring information to the host OS. To install VMAdditions, log on to the Virtual Server ...

I’m in the process of migrating a test server on to two test servers. I want to have SQL, SMS and MOM running on one box, and another justing being a DC (the main MOM application won’t run on a DC you see). I’m also making use of Windows 2003 Server, which I am slowly tweaking. I want to run my DC headless (i.e. with no keyboard, mouse or monitor ...

Firstly, a big thank you to Adam, at Microsoft, whom I spent nearly two and a half hours on the phone to. Today started at about 8:30 am, when I walked into the office. It ended at 18:30, with me feeling totally exhausted and knowing that whilst today was full of mind extending information, tomorrow would be mind numbing tedium being relegated ...

Whilst I was downloading several MOM management packs, I came across a link which said “Sign up for Download Notifications” and pointed me to: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39737 . After following a few links I managed to sign up for a shed load of emails from Microsoft. Time will tell just how many of them are useful/of any use. One ...

All, Hot on the news that Microsoft have re-released the MS04–028 scanner (that scans for the GDI+ vulnerability): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c4745685-9521-4b63-a338-0b3e2dcbf2bb , I want to know how people keep up to date with these developments (and other announcements) from Microsoft?