April 1, 2008
I thought I would wait a little longer but decided to pull the trigger and mountainvistatech.com is now operating fully on WordPress 2.5. I followed the upgrade directions provided by wordpress.org and it went smoothly. Turned on all my plugins and they worked as well and the first thing that I did was use the update plugin feature within the admin interface. That was quick and painless. The admin section is very different and will take a bit to get used to. I think functionally, it will work better than the old interface but aesthetically, it will take a while before I warm up to it. The site is working well, no errors or bugs yet to be seen. All is well…. so far : ).
Posted in Designs, Internet, Software 
No Comments »
March 31, 2008
In a previous post, I mentioned that since the iPhone will support Microsoft push/pull come June, we would give the iPhone a shot. Two weeks have now passed and the iPhone is as advertised. It is the best cell phone I have ever owned. But there are still some issues that I hope Apple
will address in the 2.0 upgrade in order for it to really function in the enterprise.
- Battery Life: I can usually get a by a full work day with a full charge and that is only maybe an hour or so talk time. If I use the phones features like the browser and am constantly check email, the life is much shorter. I have heard similar issues from other uses and this needs to be better. I have found some ideas that will give you more battery life. What has worked for me is to turn off WiFi when not needing it, have the iPhone only check mail every hour instead of 15 minutes and turning the click off keyboard. There are more features you can turn off but my issue with this is that when you turn off feature after feature on the phone, you take away some of the experience that is the iPhone and it becomes a little more like an ordinary phone. Somebody that is truly out of the office constantly needs something that won’t need a charge in the middle of the day. I’m also not happy with the idea that I can’t change a battery for my users. This is unacceptable and one more consideration against using the iPhone in the enterprise.
- IMAP is undependable: I know that when push/pull is supported, this won’t be an issue but I’m fearful it will function as badly as IMAP. I think I have been able to connect to my email successfully about two times these past two weeks. I either get a “checking email” message that never goes away or I get the “downloading emails” message but I never see them. Once again this is pretty common and I’ve seen plenty of people have the same trouble but then I will see one iPhone that works flawlessly. I sure hope that push/pull will work better than IMAP has. Because if it does function like this, the iPhone will not have a place in the enterprise. I’m sure that this is why it won’t be until June when we see the upgrade. I wouldn’t doubt if it will be later.
With all that said, only two things seem to be a pretty good, but they are some major issues that I’m sure(hope) will be addressed. At least I hope they are because I do love this thing. The user interface is the best I’ve used, the Internet browsing is 2nd to none and it only took a week for me to get comfortable with keyboard. I’m typing just as fast, if not faster, as I did on my Treo 750. To top it off, it is an iPod as well. Can’t wait until June because I do miss push/pull.
Posted in email, iPhone No Comments »
March 31, 2008
The other day, I upgraded to Vista SP1 and really haven’t noticed any significant changes but here are some things that I have discovered in the past 24 hours since the upgrade.
- Copying files to a network drive is faster. First thing I noticed is that I didn’t get the “calculating time to copy files” message, which seemed to take forever. Copying about 30 files that totaled approximately 500 MB, only took about 2 minutes compared to the 15 or so minutes it took before.
- I now have a way to get ride of the “The identity of the remote computer cannot be verified” message when using remote desktop connection. In pre-SP1, there wasn’t real easy way to get rid of this message permanently and it was just annoying. Anyway, now there is an option you can check to tell remote desktop to not “..show this warning again for connections to this computer. ”
- Performance for creating thumbnails and viewing pictures on my hard drive is much better. There were times where it was a bit slow before SP1 but after I installed it. I even deleted my thumbnails cache and had Vista re-create them and performance was still better than pre-SP1.
- Customer Experience Program request comes up again for me to say no to. Just annoying, I guess.
- I hear there is better performance in battery lifetime but I couldn’t make out any real increase in battery life. I’m sure if I did some intricate testing, I might find an increase of a few minutes but nothing worth noting in my book.
- Windows Live Messenger did update after the upgrade but no real noticeable changes that I could make out.
There are quite a few more improvements and changes according to Microsoft, but some don’t apply to me or I haven’t noticed them yet. I’m just glad I am able to get rid of that Remote Desktop warning.
Posted in System Support, Vista No Comments »
March 30, 2008
Vista SP1 has been out for a couple of weeks now so I thought it was time to upgrade to see how it goes. There are two ways to update your Vista and that is either through Windows Update or downloading the entire package, which is about 435 megabytes. I decided to do the whole package because I will be updating many computers once we decide to. If you do it through Windows Updates, you may have to wait because MS is staging the roll out in phases. I think it’s partly because of the hardware because there are some device drivers that are missing for some computers. Anyway, I updated my laptop (Gateway M-685E) today and all seems to be well.
Installation:
Downloaded the executable and double clicked to install. Took a bit to start because the OS had to verify but it eventually started and the first thing was that it gives you a warning that the whole installation will take about an hour or more. It also gives you an option to automatically reboot during the process. I recommend doing this because you will probably walk away for a while and forget to check and reboot manually. Walked away for about 45 minutes and came back and it was ready to reboot. Thought I was done but I was just getting started. The installation then started a 3 stage process that took another 30 minutes or so and at least two reboots happened during this time before it was all done. Final reboot and then I logged in and got an “installation successful” message.
First Impression:
Well, the installation of Vista SP1 was just as it should be, uneventful. This isn’t an upgrade where new features are installed like browsers or Windows Media player and thankfully it isn’t like the XP SP2 fiasco. The only thing I noticed is that the “Search” option is gone in the start menu but knew that was going to happen. You can still find it in explorer so not too big of a deal. All programs seem to be working fine and no apparent hardware problems. One improvement that I’ve been hearing about with this upgrade is that copying files to a network drive will be faster. I haven’t tried this yet and will report back when I do. If this is true, it will make me very happy because that is one of my biggest complaints about Vista.
Final Thoughts:
Use Windows Update to upgrade, it will be much faster easier if you do. If you absolutely can’t wait, download the executable and wait about an hour or longer until you can use your computer again. Also check with your hardware and spyware/antivirus manufacturers to see if there is any updates that you might need for SP1. I have heard those are the problems that most encounter but I have also heard most are fixed. I’m using Sophos Antivirus and it’s functioning perfectly after the upgrade.
Posted in System Support, Vista No Comments »
March 26, 2008
Problem: Any email that was sent to our mail server was being rejected by what looked like our spam filter. Getting a “550 Open Relay Database - see http://ordb.org” error. Made sure our spam filter was up to date, installed the update and rebooted. Still got the error.
Solution: Looked in the Spam settings and saw that Ordb.org was still listed in the RLB list. Removed it from the list and email was passing fine again. Read up on ordb.org and saw that it has been out of service for about a year and half. Don’t know why it all of a sudden gave false positives on all our email. At least it’s fixed now.
Posted in email No Comments »
