A reminder that Windows XP availability is nearing end of life, and will not be available after June 30 2008.
Now Dell in the US have announced that they will be offering Windows XP pre-installed after June 30 2008 via the Vista Business/Ultimate "downgrade" feature, but there is no equivalent noises being made by Dell UK at this moment.
To avoid any problems, if you are considering buying a new PC in the near future and you wish it to have Windows XP installed, then I would advise you to buy now to avoid any uncertainty
We have come across a couple of instances recently where emailed pictures (.jpg and .jpeg) can not be opened in Outlook and just present the recipient with a white box with a red cross and the message that a preview could not be generated. The same result is given when the attachment is saved to the desktop (or other folder) and attempted to be viewed. If the email is accessed via webmail (OWA) the email and picture are displayed without a problem.
While there are other suggestions on how to rectify the problem the quickest and easiest that has presented itself so far is to check for the Security Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 (KB945432) and remove it.
This will fix the problem but I am unsure as to any other effects this will have at this time, the security update seems to have been released 11th March 2008. Microsoft Release Information
Here are runPCrun we use a lot of equipment - servers, routers, switches, workstations, if it has a plug then chances are we've opened the box, took a good sniff and installed it.
Since we have a large amount of clients it is good sense for us to standardise on what we use to make our life easier. One of the most important thing to standardise is the firewall. Our choice of firewall needs to have the following features:-
Affordable - it would be hard for us to recommend our SOHO clients to spend £1000's on expensive kit - they'd simply refuse. Also, we have seen firewalls that come with features locked unless you pay extra license fees. One firewall we replaced for a new client actually only had room for 3 port forwarding rules!
Flexible - Every client is different. Some clients have multiple internal machines on non standard RDP ports, some have FTP servers with strict IP lists. Once client wanted to block port 25 from all machines except one. The firewall we choose can do all of these and if not, chances are somebody has written an open source module that can be installed.
Easy to Manage - We have seen some firewalls that can require you to go on a course just to add a simple port forwarding rule. Of course, you do need to know what you're doing when working on any firewall but a easy to understand user-interface goes a long way to help. Our firewall has a simple GUI and if you want to get your hands dirty, a full command line interface.
Stable - You need a firewall that measures it's uptime in months and years not hours and minutes. Our choice has been running in some installations for over 5 years without a single problem. Now that is staying power.
The firewall of our choice is IPCOP It's free and it's fantastic!!
We use old P3 based Dell's but for our clients we like to use small mini-ITX based units for increased reliability. These cost approx. £300 + VAT which for our clients is reasonable. We have lost track of the number of times we have taken on a new client and found a complex, over specced firewall in place. Firebrick, Watchguard all good products but a nightmare to manage so they quickly find a new life on ebay or we simply chuck them.
The Internet Archive shows us that the PC of Dr. Thomas Pabst, creator of Toms Hardware Guide - in December 1997 was the following beast of a machine:-
As we all know, in 10 years our 4Ghz quad-core CPU, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb HDD machines will look as ridiculous as this - which is a sobering thought. Happy computing!
We seem to be seeing a bug in Adobe Acrobat 8.1.2 where printing a PDF from within Acrobat Reader prints out with red backgrounds on images with certain documents, it may be in conjuction with HP printers. But we've only seen 3 cases in various offices so it's hard to be certain of that at the moment.
There doesn't seem to be a fix that we've found at the moment, so we recommend as a temporary solution until it is fixed by Adobe is to either downgrade to an earlier version or to use an alternative PDF viewer.
I recommend the FoxIt PDF Reader as it is free, works well and is fast and solves this problem for the people that have come across it.
Seems rdpclip.exe misbehaves occasionally, preventing use of the "copy" function (via Ctrl+C or menu) in Windows or Office 2003
The temporary solution seems to be to kill the rdpclip.exe process. To do this go to the Start button and click Run. Then type
taskkill /F /IM rdpclip.exe
There is a hotfix for Windows 2003 server to prevent this, but in this instance there was no connection to a Win 2003 server, it was a Windows XP computer that was acting as the server being connected to.
