Month: July 2007

Another bad encounter with Windows Genuine Advantage

For those that don’t know, Windows Genuine Advantage is software that Microsoft installs on your machine, usually via Microsoft Update, that checks to see whether you have genuine Microsoft software installed. If you don’t then you receive all kinds of messages to rectify the problem. Alternatively, if you have legitimate Microsoft software, then you SHOULD have no problems.

Our experience is that more and more problems are being caused by Windows Genuine Advantage. Prior to this recent incident we had an issues where Genuine Advantage wouldn’t allow Microsoft Update to function. The solution was to install Genuine Advantage manually. A definite pain having to manually install Genuine Advantage on all the workstations for our client.

Just recently we had yet another problem where Genuine Advantage prevented us from doing our jobs. We wanted to install the latest Outlook patch because it really speeds up your system :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c262bcfd-1e09-49b6-9003-c4c47539df66&DisplayLang=en

However, when we went to install it we needed to run Genuine Advantage to check our software again. With no other option we ran validation and were surprised to discover that it failed. Why? because we hadn’t as yet activated a version of Microsoft Project on the machine. So we couldn’t download the patch until we first ran Project and Activated it.

Now really, if Microsoft really wants us to install Genuine Advantage then they have gotta prevent things like this were we are totally prevent us from getting on with our work. How *@&*(@*(‘ing stupid is it to prevent us from installing a patch until we activate all Microsoft software?

Come on Microsoft, stopping making it so hard.

Boost Outlook 2007’s speed

Strange that this patch is not “critical” for Outlook because it is one of the few patches we have seen that really, really makes a difference. If you install the patch we mentioned a few days ago for Outlook 2007, then you should find that Outlook now running at turbo speeds. It really is amazing at how much quicker Outlook 2007 is after applying this patch.

Our advice, if you haven’t got it, go and download it now. You won’t be sorry.

Apply service packs manually

So we have been testing ISA Service pack 3 on our virtual machines without issue. Next stage was to load it onto our production machine. Normally, we recommend that any service pack be manually downloaded and installed rather than being applied from Windows Update. However, since we’d had such success at installing the service pack from Windows Update we thought, “What the hell?”

During the installation via Windows Update we got the following nasty error :

Error 0xc004038b

The Microsoft server storage service is unavailable

What the? Ok, now the firewall service is stopped and won’t restart. Hmmm…ok reboot. When the system reboots we get a failure to find a boot device. Ok, so now this is looking really bad.

Well, it turns out the CDROM was faulty and being the first boot device it was working just enough to allow the system to think that it could boot to it but failing enough to prevent it booting. So after replacing the CDROM we could boot to the server console screen again – Phew. Problem was the Firewall service still wouldn’t start. So we had to download ISA 2004 Service Pack 3 via another machine and then apply it to the server.

One more reboot later and everything is back the way it should be functioning happily. Lessons learnt :

– Only apply service packs for applications after downloading them manually

– A faulty CDROM can cause your system not to boot.

Now we just waiting on patch Tuesday from Microsoft. There should be a few updates tomorrow for us to install – again.

Shadowprotect IP address not "sticking"

We have been using Shadowprotect of late to image server hard disks. Typically, before we do a major upgrade or service pack install we boot to the Serverprotect CDROM and image the contents of the disk to an external USB hard disk. Now this is great provided the machine supports USB2 (480MB/sec transfers) but really bad if it only has USB1 (11MB/sec transfers). So whatta you do if the machine only has USB1, which many “older” servers have.

You can typically do a transfer via the network card, since network cards in servers typically support 1,000MB (Gigabit). With Shadowprotect you can enable networking and make use of Windows networking to image to another machine. Problem is when we booted to the latest version of Shadowprotect the IP address we wanted wouldn’t seem to “stick”. Turns out there is a bug in the latest version of the networking. The way that you overcome this is simply to boot into the “legacy” environment (which is an option during the boot of the Shadowprotect CDROM). Once in the legacy environment you set an IP address, map a network drive and then backup/restore data at high transfer speeds.

PC vs MAC ads – a new perspective

Ok, so we have all seen those really cool Mac ads? You know the ones that show how cool Macs are and how boring, difficult, cumbersome and so forth PC’s are right? if not then click here to go to the Apple web site and view them.

Yes, they are funny and clever but are they totally true? Well..maybe not. Have a look at these send ups of the Mac ads but from a PC perspective. Click here to view the “alternate” PC vs Mac ads (from the PC’s prespective).

Enjoy.