Posts Categorised: Computing

1Internet Explorer 9 LogoInternet Explorer 9 — Better than many expected?

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Just a quick post, it seems that Microsoft have finally made a reas­on­able web browser, or at least the folks at Tom’s Hard­ware seem to think so.  I’m still look­ing for­ward to Fire­fox 4, and hop­ing Moz­illa will deliv­er a 64bit ver­sion as prom­ised, but a bit of com­pet­i­tion from the (still) dom­in­ant play­er in the browser mar­ket can­’t be a bad thing.

0Inside HDD LogoDisk Speeds

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

Since a post about a year ago where I com­pared the speed of sev­er­al flash drives (for Speed­ing up Media Browser) I’ve been keep­ing a track of the speed of vari­ous drives / devices. As I’ll soon be obtain­ing quite a few new drives it seemed a good time to organ­ise all the bench­marks and start a post with the data I’ve collected.
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5Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree anti-virus / anti-malware for Windows Server 2008

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Microsoft are offer­ing a down­load­able Beta of ver­sion 2 of their free secur­ity app Secur­ity Essen­tials.  This works on Win­dows Serv­er.  For any­one (like me) who is using Serv­er 2008 at home (e.g. on a file serv­er) and needs anti-vir­us, I highly recom­mend this.

Update: [int­link id=“96” type=“post”]Version 2 final[/intlink] is now available.

1Inside HDD LogoHardware RAID and consumer HDD problems

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the oppor­tun­ity to pur­chase a second hand hard­ware raid 5 card (an Areca 1220) for a very low price. Since then I have used the card along with sev­er­al sets of drives (ori­gin­ally 300gig, then 750gig and cur­rently 1Tb) in a ded­ic­ated serv­er PC as a large net­work file-store for the fam­ily’s music, pho­tos, videos and back-ups.
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0Group Policy LogoCustom ADM file for Windows Server 2003 / XP domain

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I was dig­ging thru an old back-up CD today and stumbled upon a cus­tom ADM file I cre­ated when I was admin­is­ter­ing a Win­dows Serv­er 2003 / Win­dows XP Domain. To use, copy the fol­low­ing code into note­pad, save the file with a .adm exten­sion on the system32 folder of a domain serv­er. Open Group Policy edit­or and add the file, then browse to the “Tech­ni­cians Set­tings” to enable any of the settings.
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