New certs!

The upgrade exams for the MCSE and MCSA2003 will be released on Monday 29^th October. For those with the MCSE cert exam 70-649 will cover exams 70-640, 70-642 and 70-643 and grant you the title of a Windows Server 2008 Technology specialist. Later down the track you can do 70-646 to earn MCITP Server Administrator and 70-620 and 70-647 to earn MCITP Enterprise Administrator. I don't believe release date has been set for these MCITP certs. Microsoft has made it quite straightforward to pick up the new certs so I'm pretty happy about that. I'm less happy about the MCITP Enterprise Messaging which requires three exams to pass. It's a real rip off that there is no upgrade from MCSE: Messaging and it's a big disincentive to it. I have already spent $360 on the two Exchange 2003 exams so to spend a further $540 is crazy - plus the cert only is good for three years!

Yorkfield

This thread over at Xtremsystems shows how promising the new 45nm quad cores from Intel will be. Intel's pricing charts show that the Q9450 will debut at US$316 and I'll sure that will drop quite a bit through out 2008. There's a good chance that Intel will drop the cost of the Q9450 to either the $213 or $183 price point. I just can't see how AMD will stay in business at these prices. On a overclocking note you can drop a Yorkfield into current P35 motherboards but I reckon overclocking will be difficult. The Q9450 has a multipler of 8x and 1333FSb. With cheap as chips DDR2 800 a standard P35 board will only reach around 450mhz to 500mhz fsb leaving quite a bit of headroom in the new chips.

Windows Server 2008

I've been running Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 x64 at home for a few months on cheap ($400!) Dell sc430. Originally I was running Window Server 2003 Std x68 on only 256mb RAM and it ran sweet for my purposes (rdp, utorrent, emule, ftp and smb). For longhorn I replaced the 256mb stick with 2x1gig sticks. Longhorn uses more memory with the default build needing about 512mb of RAM. I've found the new server manager a big improvement over Add/ Remove Windows Components as a way of adding roles and features.

A few nice things surprised me. There is very good x64 driver support out at the moment. I even found a signed driver for my yum-cha usb wireless adapter. The new policy based QoS feature works well. For instance with the appropriate policy RDP remains responsive over the internet even if I max out my upload with torrents. SSL based Terminal Services gateway is great when behind a firewall as is the new sstp vpn tunnel. Terminal services are much improved with application publishing and better scrolling and support for big screen sizes. On the file server side of things the reporting is much better.

Server core is a good concept and should work well with the new virtualisation. It's a bit dodgy having to configure a number of server core options via pre made vbs scripts but there are a good number of roles already support. I'm disappointed that the alpha build of the viridian hypervisor that shipped with RC0 doesn't support server core as of yet as I would like to test that.

There is something for everyone in longhorn and it's shaping up to be a very good product.

NZBPlayer

I urge anyone with a faster than 1.5mb broadband connection to get themselves a usenet subscription and check out NZBPlayer. This program is a real beauty and really leaves bittorrent for dead for movie and tv content. As most scene releases are posted to the newsgroups NZBPlayer is just an ideal way to stream them down to your PC. NZB files are also easy find (the built in search is very functional) with there are a number of search engines available. On a standard 8mb adsl connection most NZB's start within 30 seconds (the start time is determined by the size of the individual rars.) which is great for the x254 720p stuff. I also like ninan for grabbing non video content or formats not supported by NZBPlayer.

This program really changed my TV viewing habits. It gives you a lot of freedom as you don't have to schedule time to download the day's torrents or fool around with RSS based auto-torrent loaders. It evens works a treat over NextG on the train!

Vista - The good, the bad and the ugly

I'm currently using Vista ultimate x64 at home and Vista Enterprise in the test environment at work and here are my thoughts so far.

The good:

1. It's good we finally have a x64 OS that is widely supported by the IHVs. If you have new hardware you can be confident of driver support. Also with RAM prices so low at the moment it's easy to have more than 3gb of it in your PC and hopefully software developers will create programs to take advantage of it. That should be a compelling reason to upgrade.
   

2. I've used bitlocker at work and that is a really nice benefit for our mobile users. Actually my Vista test laptop (A Dell D620 with TPM module) was stolen a few months back so in theory I don't have to worry about identity theft!
   

3. The new start menu –it's a nice GUI enhancement
   

   
   

4. SSTP client in SP1!
   

   
   

5. UAC. I actually turned it off as the bugs the crap out of me. But the best thing about it will force ISV's to write software that will run without UAC prompts as a limited user. It's a real drawback in XP that much software needs to run as root. As a side effect hopefully ISV's will use user profiles more intelligently too.
   

   
   

6. Lots of needed under the hood changes.
   

   
   

The bad:

1. I can already most things in xp sp2. Eg .IE7, Windows Desktop Search for Outlook 2007, Print management console. Plus all my applications actually work in xp
   

   
   

2. Horrible, horrible software compatibility. Even half of Microsoft's own software breaks. I can believe MS didn't try harder to fix this before release.
   

   
   

3. Ntbackup crippled
   

   
   

4. Laptop compatibility –lots of weird issues with sleep such as usb not working, search indexing going nuts, networking breaking , etc
   

   
   

The ugly

1. The boys from Redmond telling us the best way to deal with the application compatibility problems in our test environment is to use Softgrid. Nice!

First Post!

Hi all

This is just a place for my own thoughts and musings on stuff I find interesting. Keeping with a technology theme I'm using Word 2007 to edit and publish my posts. I highly recommend to any technology enthusiast to get access to a Microsoft Technet direct subscription (or MSDN is you are a developer). It's well worth it for the number of activations you get on a huge range of MS products.