The Vista upgrade on my Dell Inspiron 6400 went pretty well in the end. I took the time to update the system BIOS first as advised by the Vista Upgrade Advisor, and also downloaded the Vista drivers from the Dell website before I started. The upgrade itself was fine, no errors or problems whatsoever. After […]
Upgrading Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista Business Edition
My licenses for Windows Vista Business Edition arrived last week and so I thought I would document the process I followed for upgrading from Windows XP Professional. The first step I took was to download and install the Vista Upgrade Advisor, to test for software and hardware compatibility. Note: on one of my VMWare test […]
Small Business Server Backup Failures
I had one of those cases of bad timing recently when two things went wrong with a system at the same time. The system in question is a customer’s Windows Small Business Server 2003 server running on low end Dell server hardware – PowerEdge SC420. The first problem was relatively simple and I felt pretty […]
Windows Vista: Install now? Install later?
Internet forums are all abuzz at the moment with discussion on Windows Vista: how will it perform, which version to buy, will this application work, etc etc etc. Amongst all that there is a group of people who are sticking to a belief that serious users and businesses won’t bother installing Vista until the first […]
Windows Vista Public Launch
Today was the long awaited public release of the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, the successor to Windows XP. The operating system has been available to businesses and Technet subscribers for a few months now, and was released in public betas before then. From my own play with the betas there is no doubt […]
Free Software Advocates Resorting To Graffiti
Someone at the Free Software Foundation seems to think that an effective means of promoting free software is to actively campaign against Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, and created the Bad Vista website. I personally think this is somewhat like negative campaigns in policital races – attack the opposition rather than promote your own strengths. […]
New Year, New Site
2007 sees the transition of The Capslock Assassin website from a Mambo CMS site to a WordPress site. Mambo was all fine and well, but a bit much for a site that is really more of a blog than a heavy content website. I definitely feel at this stage that WordPress can provide the functionality […]
Modifying RIS Images For Smaller Hard Disks
I was out at a customer site on the weekend setting up their new computer. Should be no problems at all as it was the same Dell model as one they had purchased a few months before, and I had taken the time to create a RIS image when I built that first one.Having used […]
Windows Vista @ Black Hat
Austin Wilson of the Windows Vista Security Team reported back from the recent Black Hat conference about a demonstration in which a security researcher inserted unsigned code into the kernel of an x64 version of Windows Vista. This demonstration has led many to declare the security of the upcoming Microsoft product to be poor. Of […]
OpenBSD (I like it)
I’m a big fan of OpenBSD. I decided one day a few years ago to have a crack at this operating system that had such a reputation for security, since security is of much interest to me. I printed out the installation guide from the website, dusted off an old P-90 with 32mb of RAM […]