Author: Paul Cunningham

Latest Articles

Vista Upgrade and Optical Drives

The Vista upgrade on my Dell Inspiron 6400 went pretty well in the end.  I took the time to update the system BIOS first as advised by the Vista Upgrade Advisor, and also downloaded the Vista drivers from the Dell website before I started. The upgrade itself was fine, no errors or problems whatsoever.  After […]

March 14, 2007

Small Business Server Backup Failures

I had one of those cases of bad timing recently when two things went wrong with a system at the same time. The system in question is a customer’s Windows Small Business Server 2003 server running on low end Dell server hardware – PowerEdge SC420. The first problem was relatively simple and I felt pretty […]

February 12, 2007

Windows Vista: Install now? Install later?

Internet forums are all abuzz at the moment with discussion on Windows Vista: how will it perform, which version to buy, will this application work, etc etc etc. Amongst all that there is a group of people who are sticking to a belief that serious users and businesses won’t bother installing Vista until the first […]

February 5, 2007

Windows Vista Public Launch

Today was the long awaited public release of the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, the successor to Windows XP. The operating system has been available to businesses and Technet subscribers for a few months now, and was released in public betas before then. From my own play with the betas there is no doubt […]

January 30, 2007

Free Software Advocates Resorting To Graffiti

Someone at the Free Software Foundation seems to think that an effective means of promoting free software is to actively campaign against Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, and created the Bad Vista website.  I personally think this is somewhat like negative campaigns in policital races – attack the opposition rather than promote your own strengths. […]

January 24, 2007

Modifying RIS Images For Smaller Hard Disks

I was out at a customer site on the weekend setting up their new computer. Should be no problems at all as it was the same Dell model as one they had purchased a few months before, and I had taken the time to create a RIS image when I built that first one.Having used […]

November 8, 2006

Windows Vista @ Black Hat

Austin Wilson of the Windows Vista Security Team reported back from the recent Black Hat conference about a demonstration in which a security researcher inserted unsigned code into the kernel of an x64 version of Windows Vista.  This demonstration has led many to declare the security of the upcoming Microsoft product to be poor. Of […]

August 11, 2006

OpenBSD (I like it)

I’m a big fan of OpenBSD.  I decided one day a few years ago to have a crack at this operating system that had such a reputation for security, since security is of much interest to me.  I printed out the installation guide from the website, dusted off an old P-90 with 32mb of RAM […]

August 10, 2006

Steve Riley: Mandatory Integrity Control in Windows Vista

Steve Riley has updated his Blog with a discussion on the new Mandatory Integrity Control features of Windows Vista. http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/archive/2006/07/21/442870.aspx If you don’t know who Steve Riley is you can read his bio here. I’ve seen Steve talk at TechEd and other Microsoft conferences before and he really captivates the audience with an entertaining and […]

July 23, 2006