Monday, April 3. 2006
If you have any spare flash ram laying around unused, and you have a machine that is starved for memory, which I suspect a lot of machines will be when they want to run full blown Vista sessions, pop in the flash drive and enable Superfetch on the drive by going o the 'Memory' tab of the Drive property. If you are using a card memory reader as a 'ghetto' flash drive, you will want to make sure it is USB 2.0 or Firewire. Sandisk Ultra CompactFlash comes to mind, off the top of my head.
Vista won't 'announce' it as an available option on a drive if it doesn't pass a few media speed tests.
You can read more about it here:
http://thelazyadmin.com/index.php?/archives/401-Enabling-Vista-SuperFetch.html
I'm not certain that it is a supported configuration but it certainly made my laptop run a lot faster when I upgraded from MSDE to SQL 2005 Express. Simply install the CRM client, which in turn will install MSDE, then once you have sync'd with the CRM database, install SQL 2005 Express and tell it to upgrade your CRM database on your local machine.
I haven't done any real world time trials but the application responsiveness is a lot better after the upgrade. My laptop might be a bit of a strange one, with 2GB of RAM, but I think even RAM starved machines will run better with the new backend.
I don't know if it makes a difference, but I used the March CTP of SQL Express 2005 SP1.
I forgot about this one today when I was migrating a server from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003.
The current server handles DHCP, file services, and print services, and the main goal is to get everything moved while people work. Obviously, at some point there will have to be a cutover but I like to make things as transparent as possible with file server migration tools, print server migration tools, and DHCP migration tools. One of the sticking points is that this file server hosts most of the user profiles, so that makes it a little more cumbersome. Your best techs are the ones that have end users that are not aware that anything on the backend has changed.
Since I wanted some freedom of downing the old server when I needed to, I moved DHCP services to another server in the domain, running Windows 2003. I used the resource kit tool DHCPExim to export from 2000 and deactivate the DHCP scopes involved. I tried to import that data into the 2003 server but I should have remembered that the jet database/schema/file structures changed between 2000 and 2003.
Netsh to the rescue - a simple 'netsh dhcp dump >dhcpdump.txt' on the 2000 server gave me a usable configuration file to work from. I did a search and replace for the old and new IPs, saved the new file and then ran 'netsh exec dhcpdump.txt' on the 2003 box. Bam, DHCP has been migrated, except for the client database, so I made sure to set DHCP to do conflict detection under the 'Advanced' tab.
So far, so good (so what?).
Now back to robocopy'ing the file system structure...
I still like VMWare better than Microsoft Virtual Server, mostly because I'm more familiar with VMWare, but it is nice to know that free enterprise (pun intended) still works in the US.
It is even better news for Windows 2005 R2 since you can run 4 virtual machines off 1 license, legally.
http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2006/04/03/424050.aspx
Friday, March 31. 2006
KB 912945 and the upcoming April IE patches will change ActiveX behavior due to a software patent ruling and so far the biggest application that has trouble with it are the Siebel CRM applications. Siebel is working on getting their software updated to get it to work correctly but you will most likely want to install the 'compatibility patch' that will be available as a manual download from the MS Download Center.
I have a feeling as Patch Tuesday hits, we will see a lot more applications having this sort of problem.
Speaking of the compatibility patch, here is some more info on it:
http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/jeff/archive/2006/03/31/1524.aspx
Thursday, March 30. 2006
Great idea. Once I get better versed with CRM 3.0, I am going to use this quite a bit I believe.
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikemill/archive/2006/03/24/560334.aspx
Is it possible to use SQL 2005 Express with the CRM 3.0 'fat' client instead of MSDE? I'm tempted to try it but I'm also worried that it might break my install. I haven't seen much mention of it but I've been such a fan of SQL 2005 over SQL 2000 that I'd really love to give it a shot.
I can't seem to find much on the internet about people trying it.
Please drop me a line if you figure it out.
It looks like you can run the server portion of it on SQL 2005 according to this link:
http://thenorwichgroup.blogs.com/mscrm/2006/03/sql_2005_and_ms.html#more
No mention of the client.
A few years ago there used to be a freeware application from DABCC that would go through your event logs and make recommendations on printer driver mappings based on that. This new tool does the same type of thing and it's free too.
Printer drivers on TS are always a tricky combination so anything that can help map drivers is always a good thing.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9AD27BE9-40DB-484F-862E-38A094EEEAF7&displaylang=en
Wednesday, March 29. 2006
My grandma, the one fighting stomach cancer, needed her brakes fixed on her car. All of her money right now is going towards medicine for cancer treatment. 2 guys at her office redid her brake system just for the cost of the parts.
Hearing about that really made my week. You don't hear about things like that enough these days.
So, the people at the Grandville office of Greenridge Realty get my thumbs up.
I've mentioned it in the past but the upcoming Internet Explorer update in April is going to surprise a lot of end users and unfortunately I am sure will end up with many help desk calls to various organizations. Thankfully, there is going to be a workaround available for the short term. My biggest concern is that instead of installing the (needed) updates, people are going to avoid them in order to keep their unsupported/unupgradable programs.
In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a problem but I know there are a lot of places that are required, for one reason or another, to keep older software working unpatched. If anything, I hope the end result is more software patent awareness.
You can read more about the changes and workarounds here:
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2006/03/29/423560.aspx
Tuesday, March 28. 2006
If you have a TechNet Plus account, you'll already get the beta content, but if you want to test drive these new programs, especially Exchange 12, you can sign up at the TechNet Pre-Beta Release site.
From the site:
Lead evaluations for new technologies and understand their impact on your IT environment and their potential for your company by pre-registering here. You will be the first to be notified when the Windows Vista, Office "12," and Exchange "12" public beta releases become available. Additionally, you will receive updates and information regularly through the Microsoft TechNet Flash newsletter, from the time you pre-register until the launch of the product.
Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/beta/preregister.mspx
As much 'bad press' as Internet Explorer gets, I think this is a step in the right direction to get known bugs and issues logged and tracked from the public. Great news for IE 7 and future versions.
File your bugs/etc here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=136
Monday, March 27. 2006
Cassandra found it and bought it first. I am in love with this tiny keyboard. It is originally made for the Playstation 2 but since it is USB, it is also a perfect keyboard for a desktop or X-Box.
It is smaller than an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper. The best part is that if you use Fn-Up and Fn-Dn, they will do Page Up and Page Down with the arrow keys just like a ThinkPad 240. Fn-Left is Home and Fn-Right is End. I always wanted a desktop keyboard that did that without remapping keys!
It comes with an 8 foot cord and doesn't have any annoying media buttons or F-Lock keys to deal with that normally drive me crazy.
Logitech's product information on it:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details/US/EN,CRID=2282,CONTENTID=6636
Sunday, March 26. 2006
Excellent little Python script that can 'phone home' and get a list of known bad IPs out on the internet.
http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/
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