Andy Kemp

I was watching a couple of videos this lunch time that were on the BBC website about Windows 7 and one other them was highlighting the new Windows Live Essentials.  The Windows Live Essentials contains Windows Messenger, Windows Mail and the Live Photo Gallery. What they also announced what that Windows Live had partnered with facebook so that your statuses and photos on facebook could then be shared with your contacts within your MSN network. I have yet to try this out fully but it let me sign in to facebook from within Live Messenger and gave...

I was recently trying to get on to the console's of my Windows Server 20003 servers using RDP, however for some reason it would not connect me to the console, each time I did a start run mstsc /console /v:servername I was logged onto the server with a separate session. I did a start run mstsc /? to bring up the RDP options and noticed that is now said /admin and not /console. It appears that this has changed since Service Pack 3 for XP and Service Pack 1 for Vista. Why would they change...

If you're like me then you will use the keyboard for a lot of things that every day users use the mouse for. Also for going back a field, rather than cycling through the entire form/window using the Tab butting you will use Shift and Tab Key. However for some strange reason it stopped working on all my vista machines. Initially I thought it was a profile issue, so I deleted the locally stored profile, renamed the network profile logged on and let it re-create, but no that did not fix it. I then installed a new PC with...

  OK so I have been using the Mimecast Outlook Connector for some time now, however I had to re-install my laptop (well I chose to). so I installed Vista on there and then threw Office 2007 on there. after I had got everytihg else that I needed on there I then installed the Mimecast Outlook Connector. The install was the same as before required the C++ Runtime libraries, nothing was different. I configured it to use my settings and then re-started outlook. Once I had re-started outlook I went to my Mimecast Folder and opened up an email... ...it only showed...

I put up a post on how to get Subtext to run locally on your PC, however I recently had to do a full re-installation of my laptop. and when I went to put a local copy of subtext back on during the install I got the error that you see below. So I did a search for the problem, some one mentioned that you need to make it so the Public Key is in Caps but no that didn't work. it turned out that it was because I had not installed the Ajax Extensions...

So you have PHP and MySQL installed now but your local copy of Wordpress just isn't wanting to play ball.... Well it turns out that you need to make a few changes to your php.ini file. if you do a search for extension=php_mysql.dll and un comment it ie delete the ; at the beginning of the line then search further up in the ini file for extension_dir="./" and replace ./ with c:\php\ext (assuming your php is in c:\php) so it will look like: extension_dir="c:\php\ext". This tells php that the dllfor the php_mysql.dll is located in c:\php\ext. save your php.ini Also copy libmysql.dll from c:\php...

So you have installed and got PHP running on Vista/IIS 7, the next thing to do is to install MySQL. I had some issues with MySQL 5.0.51a so I stuck with MySQL 5.0.45. Download a copy of MySQL from: http://downloads.mysql.com/archives/mysql-5.0/mysql-5.0.45-win32.zip Before you run the setup you will need to disable the User Account Control (UAC) Open Control Panel in classic view Select User Accounts Click on Turn User Account Control on or off uncheck Use User Account Control and then click on OK ...

I have been able to get subtext to work locally pretty easily as it uses the .net framework, but what if you wanted to play around with blog engines like wordpress or drupal on your local PC? Answer install PHP on your IIS installation. After searching a bit on the net I came across a blog on blogs.iis.net then went through the install of PHP on IIS 7. I was suprised at how easy it was, here is what I did to get PHP working on Vista/IIS 7: If you have not done so already install IIS, include ISAPI Extension component (for PHP-ISAPI)...

So I have been using Vista for some time now on both my laptop and desktop and I have been getting to like it quite a bit, I mean it was very much like the switch from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, my initial thoughts were that it was just a nicer looking operating system. After a few weeks I started to get to like some of the new features both aesthetically and more importantly user ability. The one thing I noticed and liked initially was the Alt + Tab now called the Windows Flip. Windows Flip...

OK so I found the All Users Desktop so I thought that the Start Menu would also be in the public profile folders.... well some where in there...... ....I was wrong how silly of me to have thought it would have been that easy hey! I mean what were Microsoft thinking??? that would be far too easy to put the start menu in that profile folder too. I had a wee peek in the All Users and nope not in there either! No where could it be I wonder? SO I decided to do a search...

OK so I have been using Vista for some time now and really getting to like its little features, one of them being I can log on as a regular domain user with no admin rights on the Laptop and when ever i need to install something it prompts me for credentials. So any way I was installing another laptop with Vista on it for one of our Application Developers and I was wanting to put a shortcut on the all users desktop. So I went to C:\Users (as that is where the profiles are kept these days no...

OK So I have had no real problems on my Vista Laptop now for quite a while but strangely enough, when I want to print something from excel and want to set it to one page wide etc... excel crashes, I first thought that it was a problem with Office 12.... Well after the application crashed I then went into printers and none of my printers were listed strange one hey! (to be honest I have not tried the page setup in Word). Ever since I have tried that my Spooler service has continued to crash,...

So I have been using Subtext for quite some time now.. ok so my Blog only looks like it has been running since Jan 2008, but I had some issues on my Database I tried to repair it but no joy so I decided to kill it and re-start with a fresh one. When I started my blog originally I had an "offline" copy running on my XP on IIS 6, however since then I have got myself a new laptop running Vista Ultimate. so I installed IIS on it and downloaded a backup of my Subtext Database and...

OK so what has Microsoft now done with the Run As command? it appears they have replaced it with the Run as administrator command: The Run as administrator will only allow you to run applications as the local admin, so if you want to run an MMC as the domain admin, (as MS best practices is to not run interactively as a domain admin) what do you do? My first thought was that of what I thought before; System Admins are going to need to run two OS's if you are wanting to try out Vista... Your...

Well I finally decided to think about using Windows Vista, we have a copy of it at work for use with our MSDN Subscription. So I commandeered a decent laptop with plenty of RAM and good processor and installed Vista on it. The install was pretty straight forward, installed the OS, installed the drivers, installed some updates and we were ready to rock and roll. I then installed the Active Directory Tools, these went on no bother. Then I thought I'll install ESM 2003, now, as this needs IIS 6/IIS 5 installed I thought I'll install IIS. question was where? I opened...

I got the info here from http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/930056: You experience installation errors and compatibility problems when you install Windows Server 2003 management tools on a Windows Vista-based computer Download the Adminpak.msi for Windows 2003 Server SP1 from MS if you do not already have it on your network: click here to download it. Once you have installed it and you run the ADUC you will get the following error: MMC could not create the snap-in. You will need to create and run the following CMD file. This will register all the DLL's needed for the Adminpak to run, you can just register them yourself but this...