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• Webserver Responses Hanging

  - by drscroogemcduck

  From some networks requesting certain images on our webserver is very flakey. I've looked at tcpdumps on both sides and the server sends back part of the file and the client ACKs the TCP packet but the server never receives the ACK. The servers view: 41 19.941136 212.169.34.114 209.20.73.85 TCP 52456 > http [SYN] Seq=0 Win=8192 Len=0 MSS=1460 WS=2 42 19.941136 209.20.73.85 212.169.34.114 TCP http > 52456 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5440 Len=0 MSS=1360 46 20.041142 212.169.34.114 209.20.73.85 TCP 52456 > http [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=65280 Len=0 47 20.045142 212.169.34.114 209.20.73.85 HTTP GET /map/map/s+74-WBkWk0aR28Yy-YjXA== HTTP/1.1 48 20.045142 209.20.73.85 212.169.34.114 TCP http > 52456 [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=522 Win=6432 Len=0 49 20.045142 209.20.73.85 212.169.34.114 TCP [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU] (Part of the content of the image 2720 bytes. i assume it is reassembled in tcpdump and it is fragmented over the wire.) ** never receives the ACK sent in frame 282 and will eventually resend the tcp segment ** The clients view: 274 26.161773 10.0.16.67 209.20.73.85 TCP 52456 > http [SYN] Seq=0 Win=8192 Len=0 MSS=1460 WS=2 276 26.262867 209.20.73.85 10.0.16.67 TCP http > 52456 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5440 Len=0 MSS=1360 277 26.263255 10.0.16.67 209.20.73.85 TCP 52456 > http [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=65280 Len=0 278 26.265193 10.0.16.67 209.20.73.85 HTTP GET /map/map/s+74-WBkWk0aR28Yy-YjXA== HTTP/1.1 279 26.365562 209.20.73.85 10.0.16.67 TCP http > 52456 [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=522 Win=6432 Len=0 280 26.368002 209.20.73.85 10.0.16.67 TCP [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU] (Part of the content of the image. Only 1400 bytes.) 282 26.571380 10.0.16.67 209.20.73.85 TCP 52456 > http [ACK] Seq=522 Ack=1361 Win=65280 Len=0 The network we are having trouble with is NATd. Is there any kind of explanation for this weirdness?

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• recommendations for efficient offsite remote backup solution of vm's

  - by senorsmile

  I am looking for recommendations for backing up my current 6 vm's(and soon to grow to up to 20). Currently I am running a two node proxmox cluster(which is a debian base using kvm for virtualization with a custom web front end to administer). I have two nearly identical boxes with amd phenom II x4's and asus motherboards. Each has 4 500 GB sata2 hdd's, 1 for the os and other data for the proxmox install, and 3 using mdadm+drbd+lvm to share the 1.5 TB's of storage between the two machines. I mount lvm images to kvm for all of the virtual machines. I currently have the ability to do live transfer from one machine to the other, typically within seconds(it takes about 2 minutes on the largest vm running win2008 with m$ sql server). I am using proxmox's built-in vzdump utility to take snapshots of the vm's and store those on an external harddrive on the network. I then have jungledisk service (using rackspace) to sync the vzdump folder for remote offsite backup. This is all fine and dandy, but it's not very scalable. For one, the backups themselves can take up to a few hours every night. With jungledisk's block level incremental transfers, the sync only transfers a small portion of the data offsite, but that still takes at least a half an hour. The much better solution would of course be something that allows me to instantly take the difference of two time points (say what was written from 6am to 7am), zip it, then send that difference file to the backup server which would instantly transfer to the remote storage on rackspace. I have looked a little into zfs and it's ability to do send/receive. That coupled with a pipe of the data in bzip or something would seem perfect. However, it seems that implementing a nexenta server with zfs would essentially require at least one or two more dedicated storage servers to serve iSCSI block volumes (via zvol's???) to the proxmox servers. I would prefer to keep the setup as minimal as possible (i.e. NOT having separate storage servers) if at all possible. I have also briefly read about zumastor. It looks like it could also do what I want, but it appears to have halted development in 2008. So, zfs, zumastor or other?

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• Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 CD 1 cannot boot: freeze at No Emulation

  - by TGP1994

  Hi everyone. I've been interested in the Windows Server line of OSes, so since I apply for DreamSpark, I thought I'd go download it and try it. I just so happened to have an old desktop that I was using awhile ago for Windows XP, so I imaged the drive in preparation for it to be overwritten with the new OS. (This system has an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ processor, and 1GB of RAM.) I tried burning the first disk image on my newer desktop computer, running Windows XP, although the CD burner consistently failed at a particular track area from cd to cd, so it seemed like the burner was toast there. Fortunately, I had a laptop, so I transferred the images over to that, then burned the first disc there. First time around went great, and the burning program reported no errors. I then took the CD over to the computer that I was intending to install Server onto, set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive, then I booted it up. Like normal, after the POST, it printed "Boot from ATAPI CD-Rom: No Emulation", which I was used to seeing with bootable cds. I waited for the "Press any key to continue..." message that I had become so familiar with in windows discs, although I saw none. The computer sat there for about 5 seconds with the cd spinning, then it spun down like it was done reading it. Nothing else happened. No response from the keyboard. I tried again, same result. I then downloaded IMGBurn, and I put the burned cd into the laptop that burned it originally. I also downloaded a fresh image from the dreamspark site. I ran a verify session, and everything checked out. I later tried getting various DOS startup discs, then I tried booting the winnt binary, which supposedly initiates the installation process. Either the shells reported that not enough memory was available (since they would be running in low memory mode), or FreeDOS in particular would report Illegal instructions right away. Is the image corrupt at dreamspark, or am I doing something wrong?

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• Which hardware to VM ratio for Build-Server virtualization?

  - by Martin

  Let's start with saying that I'm a total noob wrt. to server virtualization. That is, I use VMs often during development, but they're simple desktop machine things for me. Now to my problem: We have two (physical) build servers, one master, one slave running Jenkins to do daily tasks and build (Visual C++ Builds) our release packages for our software. As such these machines are critical to our company, because we do lot's releases and without a controlled environment to create them, we can't ship fixes. (And currently there's no proper backup of these machines in place, because they do not hold any data as such - it just would be a major pain to setup them again should they go bust. (But setting up backup that I'd know would work in case of HW failure would even be more pain, so we have skipped that until now.)) Therefore (and for scaling purposes) we would like to go virtual with these machines. Outsourcing to the cloud is not an option, not at all, so we'll have to use on-premises hardware and VM hosts. Each Build-Server (master or slave) is a fully configured (installs, licenses, shares in case of the master, ...) Windows Server box. I would now ideally like to just convert the (two) existing physical nodes to VM images and run them. Later add more VM slave instances as clones of the existing ones. And here begin my questions: Should I go for one VM per one hardware-box or should I go for something where a single hardware runs multiple VMs? That would mean a single point of failure hardware wise and doesn't seem like a good idea ... or?? Since we're doing C++ compilation with Visual Studio, I assume that during a build the hardware (processor cores + disk) will be fully utilized, so going with more than one build-node per hardware doesn't seem to make much sense?? Wrt. to hardware options, does it make any difference which VM software we use (VMWare, MS, Virtualbox, ... ?) (We're using Windows exclusively for our builds.) Regarding budget: We have a normal small company (20 developers) budget for this. ;-) That is, if it's going to cost a few k$ it's going to cost. If it's free - the better. I strongly prefer solutions where there's no multi-k$ maintenance costs per year.

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• How do you backup 40+ Centos5.5 servers?

  - by John Little

  We are embarrassed to ask this question. Apologies for our lack of UNIX expertise. We have inherited 40+ centos 5.5 servers, and don't know how to back them up. We need low level clone type images so that we could restore the servers from scratch if we had to replace the HDs etc. We have used the "dd" command, but we assume this only works if you want to back up one local disk to another, not 40 servers to one server with an external USB HD attached. All 40 servers have a pair of mirrored disks (dont know if its HW or SW raid). Most only have 100MB used. SErvers are running apache, zend, tomcat, mysql etc. Ideally we dont want to have to shut them down to backup (but could). We assume that standard unix commands like tar, cpio, rsync, scp etc. are of no use as they only copy files, not partitions, all attributes, groups etc. i.e. do not produce a result which can simply be re-imaged to a new HD to get the serer back from dead. We have a large SAN, a spare windows box and spare unix boxes, but these are only visible to one layer in the network. We have an unused Dell DL2000 monster tape unit, but no sw or documentation for it. WE have a copy of symantec backup exec, but we have no budget for unix client licenses. (The company has negative amounts of money). We need to be able to initiate the backup remotely, as we can only access the servers in person in an emergency (i.e. to restore) Googling returns some applications to do this, e.g. clonezilla - looks difficult to install and invasive. Mondo, only seems to support backup if you are local to the machine. Amanda might be an option, but looks like days/weeks of work to learn and setup? Is there anything built into Centos, or do we have to go the route of installing, learning and configuring a set of backup softwares? Any ideas? This must be a pretty standard problem which goggling doesnt give an obvious answer.

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• nginx rewrite for /blah/(.*) /$1

  - by skrewler

  I'm migrating from mod_php to nginx. I got everything working except for this rewrite.. I'm just not familiar enough with nginx configuration to know the correct way to do this. I came up with this by looking at a sample on the nginx site. server { server_name test01.www.myhost.com; root /home/vhosts/my_home/blah; access_log /var/log/nginx/blah.access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/blah.error.log; index index.php; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrites; } location @rewrites { rewrite ^ /index.php last; rewrite ^/ht/userGreeting.php /js/iFrame/index.php last; rewrite ^/ht/(.*)$ /$1 last; rewrite ^/userGreeting.php$ /js/iFrame/index.php last; rewrite ^/a$ /adminLogin.php last; rewrite ^/boom\/(.*)$ /boom/index.php?q=$1 last; rewrite ^favicon.ico$ favico_ry.ico last; } # This block will catch static file requests, such as images, css, js # The ?: prefix is a 'non-capturing' mark, meaning we do not require # the pattern to be captured into $1 which should help improve performance location ~* \.(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)$ { # Some basic cache-control for static files to be sent to the browser expires max; add_header Pragma public; add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate"; } include php.conf; } The issue I'm having is with this rewrite: rewrite ^ht\/(.*)$ /$1 last; 99% of requests that will hit this rewrite are static files. So I think maybe it's getting sent to the static files section and that's where things are being messed up? I tried adding this but it didn't work: location ~* ^ht\/.*\.(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)$ { # Some basic cache-control for static files to be sent to the browser expires max; add_header Pragma public; add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate"; } Any help would be appreciated. I know the best thing to do would be to just change the references of /ht/whatever.jpg to /whatever.jpg in the code.. but that's not an option for now.

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• High CPU usage - symptoms moving from server to server after bouncing

  - by grt3kl

  First off, I apologize if I didn't include enough information to properly troubleshoot this issue. This sort of thing isn't my specialty, so it is a learning process. If there's something I need to provide, please let me know and I'll be happy to do what I can. The images associated with my question are at the bottom of this post. We are dealing with a clustered environment of four WebLogic 9.2 Java application servers. The cluster utilizes a round-robin load algorithm. Other details include: Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_12-b04) BEA JRockit(R) (build R27.4.0-90_CR352234-91983-1.5.0_12-20071115-1605-linux-x86_64, compiled mode) Basically, I started looking at the servers' performance because our customers are seeing lots of lag at various times of the day. Our servers should easily handle the loads they are given, so it's not clear what's going on. Using HP Performance Manager, I generated some graphs that indicate that the CPU usage is completely out of whack. It seems that, at any given point, one or more of the servers has a CPU utilization of over 50%. I know this isn't particularly high, but I would say it is a red flag based on the CPU utilization of the other servers in the WebLogic cluster. Interesting things to note: The high CPU utilization was occurring only on server02 for several weeks. The server crashed (extremely rare; we are not sure if it's related to this) and upon starting it back up, the CPU utilization was normal on all 4 servers. We restarted all 4 managed servers and the application server (on server01) yesterday, on 2/28. As you can see, server03 and server04 picked up the behavior that was seen on server02 before. The CPU utilization is a Java process owned by the application user (appown). The number of transactions is consistent across all servers. It doesn't seem like any one server is actually handling more than another. If anyone has any ideas or can at least point me in the right direction, that would be great. Again, please let me know if there is any additional information I should post. Thanks!

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• What else can I do to secure my Linux server?

  - by eric01

  I want to put a web application on my Linux server: I will first explain to you what the web app will do and then I will tell you what I did so far to secure my brand new Linux system. The app will be a classified ads website (like gumtree.co.uk) where users can sell their items, upload images, send to and receive emails from the admin. It will use SSL for some pages. I will need SSH. So far, what I did to secure my stock Ubuntu (latest version) is the following: NOTE: I probably did some things that will prevent the application from doing all its tasks, so please let me know of that. My machine's sole purpose will be hosting the website. (I put numbers as bullet points so you can refer to them more easily) 1) Firewall I installed Uncomplicated Firewall. Deny IN & OUT by default Rules: Allow IN & OUT: HTTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, SSH, UDP port 53 (DNS), UDP port 123 (SNTP), SSL, port 443 (the ones I didn't allow were FTP, NFS, Samba, VNC, CUPS) When I install MySQL & Apache, I will open up Port 3306 IN & OUT. 2) Secure the partition in /etc/fstab, I added the following line at the end: tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,rw 0 0 Then in console: mount -o remount /dev/shm 3) Secure the kernel In the file /etc/sysctl.conf, there are a few different filters to uncomment. I didn't know which one was relevant to web app hosting. Which one should I activate? They are the following: A) Turn on Source Address Verification in all interfaces to prevent spoofing attacks B) Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv4 C) Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv6 D) Do no accept ICMP redirects (we are not a router) E) Accept ICMP redirects only for gateways listed in our default gateway list F) Do not send ICMP redirects G) Do not accept IP source route packets (we are not a router) H) Log Martian Packets 4) Configure the passwd file Replace "sh" by "false" for all accounts except user account and root. I also did it for the account called sshd. I am not sure whether it will prevent SSH connection (which I want to use) or if it's something else. 5) Configure the shadow file In the console: passwd -l to lock all accounts except user account. 6) Install rkhunter and chkrootkit 7) Install Bum Disabled those services: "High performance mail server", "unreadable (kerneloops)","unreadable (speech-dispatcher)","Restores DNS" (should this one stay on?) 8) Install Apparmor_profiles 9) Install clamav & freshclam (antivirus and update) What did I do wrong and what should I do more to secure this Linux machine? Thanks a lot in advance

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• My server's been hacked EMERGENCY

  - by Grant unwin

  I'm on my way into work at 9.30 p.m. on a Sunday because our server has been compromised somehow and was resulting in a DOS attack on our provider. The servers access to the Internet has been shut down which means over 5-600 of our clients sites are now down. Now this could be an FTP hack, or some weakness in code somewhere. I'm not sure till I get there. How can I track this down quickly? We're in for a whole lot of litigation if I don't get the server back up ASAP. Any help is appreciated. UPDATE Thanks to everyone for your help. Luckily I WASN'T the only person responsible for this server, just the nearest. We managed to resolve this problem, although it may not apply to many others in a different situation. I'll detail what we did. We unplugged the server from the net. It was performing (attempting to perform) a Denial Of Service attack on another server in Indonesia, and the guilty party was also based there. We firstly tried to identify where on the server this was coming from, considering we have over 500 sites on the server, we expected to be moonlighting for some time. However, with SSH access still, we ran a command to find all files edited or created in the time the attacks started. Luckily, the offending file was created over the winter holidays which meant that not many other files were created on the server at that time. We were then able to identify the offending file which was inside the uploaded images folder within a ZenCart website. After a short cigarette break we concluded that, due to the files location, it must have been uploaded via a file upload facility that was inadequetly secured. After some googling, we found that there was a security vulnerability that allowed files to be uploaded, within the ZenCart admin panel, for a picture for a record company. (The section that it never really even used), posting this form just uploaded any file, it did not check the extension of the file, and didn't even check to see if the user was logged in. This meant that any files could be uploaded, including a PHP file for the attack. We secured the vulnerability with ZenCart on the infected site, and removed the offending files. The job was done, and I was home for 2 a.m. The Moral - Always apply security patches for ZenCart, or any other CMS system for that matter. As when security updates are released, the whole world is made aware of the vulnerability. - Always do backups, and backup your backups. - Employ or arrange for someone that will be there in times like these. To prevent anyone from relying on a panicy post on Server Fault. Happy servering!

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• How to Deploy an ASP.NET Web API- and Browser-based Application to a Production Environment

  - by user69508

  (Please forgive if this is posted in an incorrect forum. We didn’t know exactly where to post it.) We have an ASP.NET Web API single page application - a browser-based app running in IIS to serve up HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript, which talks to the ASP.NET Web API endpoint only to access a database and transfer JSON data. Everything is working great in our development environment - that is, we have one Visual Studio solution with an ASP.NET Web API project and two class library projects for data access. While development and testing on development boxes, using IIS Express to a localhost:port to run the site and access the Web API, everything is fine. Now we need to move it to a production environment (and we’re having problems - or just not understanding what needs to be done). The production environment is all internal (nothing will be exposed on the public Internet). There are two domains. One domain, the corporate domain, is where all users login normally. The other domain, the process domain, contains the SQL Server instance that our app and Web API will need to access. The IT staff wants to put a DMZ between the two domains to house the IIS app and shield the users on the corporate domain from having access into the process domain directly. So, I guess what they want is: corp domain (end users) <– firewall (open port 80) <– DMZ (web server running IIS) <– firewall (open port 80 or 1433????) <– process domain (IIS for Web API and SQL Server) We’re developers and don’t really understand all the networking aspects, so we’re wondering how to deploy our browser/Web API application in this scenario. Do we need to break up our application so that all the client code (HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript/images/etc.) is on the IIS server in the DMZ, while the Web API gets installed on the server in the process domain? Or, does the entire app (client code and Web API) stay together on the IIS server in the DMZ, which then somehow accesses the SQL Server instance to get data? From the IIS server and app in the DMZ, would you simply access the Web API on the server in the process domain by going to "http://server/appname/api/getitmes"? In the second firewall between the DMZ and the process domain, would you have to open port 1433 or just port 80 since the Web API is a HTTP endpoint? Or, is there some better way of deployment (i.e., how ASP.NET Web API single page applications written all in HTML5 and JavaScript supposed to be deployed to production environments?)? I’m sure there are other questions, but we’ll start with these. Thanks!!! (Note: the servers are Win2k8 R2, SQL Server 2k8 R2, and IIS 7.5.)

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• Successfully concatenating multiple videos

  - by wiseguydigital

  My mission is to create videos out of old web slideshows. To start with I have jpegs and audio files that worked as Flash slideshows in an old system, structured such as this: Audio structure my_audio_1.mp3 (this file is a 3 second mp3 of silence) my_audio_2.mp3 my_audio_3.mp3 my_audio_4 etc... roughly 30 mp3s per slideshow Image structure my_image_1.jpg (this acts as the opening slide) my_image_2.jpg my_image_3.jpg my_image_4. etc... roughly 30 images per slideshow. As there are almost 100 slideshows that must be converted to video, I have created a web-based interface using PHP to automate the process, that sits on a local system and attempts to combine the files using shell_exec(). The process uses the following workflow: Loop through each slide and make an avi or mpeg. So for instance my_mini_video_2.avi would be a video that consists of my_image_2.jpg and has a soundtrack of my_audio_2.mp3. This slide would last the length of my_audio_2.mp3. Join / stitch / concat all of the mini videos to create the final video (Using a combination of cat and either mencoder or ffmpeg (I have also tried avimerge but to no avail). Transcode the new 'master' video to various formats such as flv etc. I thought this would be simple and have been close on many occasions but it still won't work. I can't get past stage 2 as I can't get a perfect 'master' video. I have now experimented with Mencoder, FFMpeg and seem to have been through every combination I can think of. The problem is that the audio and visuals never sync, no matter what I try. Also, I have even tried created audio-less mini videos, joining the MP3s into one long MP3 using both cat and mp3wrap and then assigning the new long MP3 as the audio track, but this always produces either a very short file or a badly slowed down file and makes the female voiceover sound like a male boxer!!! There appears to be no problems at all with the original files. Does anybody have any experience in producing a video successfully from the same kind of starting point? Or any ideas on what I may be doing wrong? As an example: If I create silent mini-videos, and stitch them together into 'temp-master.mpg' and then join the MP3s together into single MP3 called 'temp-master-audio.mp3', the audio file's duration is 09:10 and the video file's duration is 08:35. They should be the same and the audio will seem sloooow. I haven't posted code as I have written lots and lots of combinations.

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• [CentOS 4.8] nslookup resolves domains to IPs, but I can't get a response to pings to external servers

  - by Beco

  I have a fresh install of CentOS 4.8 running on an internal development server. I haven't done anything to it besides setting up sudoers and SSH. I can SSH into the server and from there resolve domains to IPs and ping internal servers, but for some reason I don't get any response from pinging external servers. The software firewall is disabled, and the problem is present with both static and DHCP-assigned network configurations. The network domain controller is a Windows Server 2003 box. $ nslookup google.com Server: 10.254.2.5 Address: 10.254.2.5#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: google.com Address: 74.125.47.147 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.47.99 <etc...> 10.254.2.5 is the Win2K3 server. $ ping google.com PING google.com (74.125.47.106) 56(84) bytes of data. It just hangs here indefinitely. $ cat /etc/resolv.conf ; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script search <...snip...>.local nameserver 10.254.2.5 nameserver 10.254.2.124 10.254.2.124 is the backup DC server, which is currently off and tombstoned by this point. The snipped section is our company name. # ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr <snip> inet addr:10.254.2.101 Bcast:10.254.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: <snip>/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:80066 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:4421 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:7810133 (7.4 MiB) TX bytes:590550 (576.7 KiB) Interrupt:225 Base address:0xc000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:32 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:32 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:8104 (7.9 KiB) TX bytes:8104 (7.9 KiB) # route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 10.254.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 10.254.2.5 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 And, for good measure, a snapshot of the current ethernet config via the system-config-network GUI. Edit: I don't yet have enough rep to post images, so here's a link. Sorry! system-config-network snapshot I'm pretty green when it comes to setting up *nix dev servers and network configuration in general, so please let me know if I've left out critical information, or posted information I shouldn't have posted. Thanks!

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• How To Configure Remote Desktop To Hyper-V Guest Virtual Machines

  - by Brian Jackett

  Configuring Remote Desktop (RDP) from a host Hyper-V machine to a guest virtual machine can be tricky, so this post is dedicated to the issues and resolution steps I went through to allow RDP.  Cutting to the point, below are the things to look for followed by some explanation about my scenario if you care to read.  This is not an exhaustive list of what is required, just the items that were causing problems for my particular scenario. Requirements Allow Remote Desktop Connections in guest OS. The network adapter type must allow communication with host machine (e.g. use an “Internal” virtual adapter.) If running Server 2008 R2 on guest, network discovery mode must be turned on. If running Server 2008 R2 on guest, the services supporting network discovery mode must be running: - DNS Client - Function Discovery Resource Publication - SSDP Discovery - UPnP Device Host My Environment     A quick word about my environment.  I am running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper V on my laptop and numerous guest VMs running Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  I run a domain controller VM and then 1 or 2 SharePoint servers depending on my work needs.  I’ve found this setup to work well except when it comes to the display window for my VMs. The Issue     Ever since I began running Hyper-V I haven’t been able to RDP to my guest VMs which means the resolution for my connection windows ha been limited to what the native Hyper-V connections allow.  During personal use I can put the resolution up to 1152 x 864, but during presentations I am usually limited to a measly 800 x 600.  That is until today when I decided to fully investigate why I couldn’t connect via RDP.     First a thank you to John Ross (@johnrossjr), Christina Wheeler (@cwheeler76) and Clayton Cobb (@warrtalon) for various suggestions while I was researching tonight.  As it turns out I had not 1, not 2, but 3 items preventing me from using RDP.  Let’s dig into the requirements above. Allow RDP Connection     This item I had previously taken care of, but it bears repeating because by default Windows Server 2008 R2 does not allow RDP connections.  Change the setting from “Don’t allow…” to whichever “Allow connections…” setting suits your needs.  I chose the less secure option as this is just my dev laptop. Network Adapter Type     When I originally configured my VMs I configured each to use 2 network adapters: one using the physical ethernet adapter for internet use and a virtual private adapter for communication between the VMs.  The connection for the ethernet adapter is an "”External” adapter and thus doesn’t connect between the host and guest.  The virtual private adapter allowed communication ONLY between the VMs and not to my host.  There is a third option “Internal” which allows communication between VMs as well as to the host.  After finding out this distinction I promptly created an Internal network adapter and assigned that to my VMs. Turn On Network Discovery     Seems like a pretty common sense thing, but in order to allow remote desktop connections the target computer must able to be found by the source computer (explained here.)  One of the settings that controls if a computer can be found on the network is aptly named Network Discovery.  By default Windows Server 2008 R2 turns Network Discovery off for security purposes.  To enable it open up the Network and Sharing Center.  Click “Change Advanced Sharing Settings” on the left.  On the following screen select “Turn on network discovery” for the currently used profile and click Save Settings.  You may notice though that your selection to turn on network discovery doesn’t save.  If this is the case then you most likely don’t have the supporting services running (as was my case.) Network Discovery Supporting Services     There are a total of 4 services (listed again below) that need to be running before you can turn on network discovery (explained here.)  The below images highlight these services.  In my guest VM I found that I had DNS Client already running while the other 3 were disabled.  I set them all to enabled and started the ones that were stopped.  After this change I returned to the Sharing settings screen and found that Network Discovery was turned on.  I’m not sure whether this was picking up my attempt to turn it on previously or if starting those services turned it on.  Either way the end result was a success. - DNS Client - Function Discovery Resource Publication - SSDP Discovery - UPnP Device Host Before and After Results     The first image is the smaller square shaped viewing window used by the Hyper-V native connection.  The second is the full-screen RDP connection in all its widescreen glory. Conclusion     Over the past few months I’ve found Hyper-V to be very useful for virtualizing my development environments, but I’ve also had a steep learning curve to get various items configured just right.  Allowing RDP connections to guest VMs was one area that I hadn’t been able to get right for the longest time.  Now that I resolved these issues I hope that others can avoid the pitfalls that I ran into.  If you know of any other items I left off feel free to let me know.        -Frog Out   Links Turning on Network Discovery http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2009/08/15/remote-desktop-connection-on-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx Services required for Network Discovery http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/2e1fea01-3f2b-4c46-a631-a8db34ed4f84

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• Complete Guide to Networking Windows 7 with XP and Vista

  - by Mysticgeek

  Since there are three versions of Windows out in the field these days, chances are you need to share data between them. Today we show how to get each version to be share files and printers with one another. In a perfect world, getting your computers with different Microsoft operating systems to network would be as easy as clicking a button. With the Windows 7 Homegroup feature, it’s almost that easy. However, getting all three of them to communicate with each other can be a bit of a challenge. Today we’ve put together a guide that will help you share files and printers in whatever scenario of the three versions you might encounter on your home network. Sharing Between Windows 7 and XP The most common scenario you’re probably going to run into is sharing between Windows 7 and XP.  Essentially you’ll want to make sure both machines are part of the same workgroup, set up the correct sharing settings, and making sure network discovery is enabled on Windows 7. The biggest problem you may run into is finding the correct printer drivers for both versions of Windows. Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 & XP  Map a Network Drive Another method of sharing data between XP and Windows 7 is mapping a network drive. If you don’t need to share a printer and only want to share a drive, then you can just map an XP drive to Windows 7. Although it might sound complicated, the process is not bad. The trickiest part is making sure you add the appropriate local user. This will allow you to share the contents of an XP drive to your Windows 7 computer. Map a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7 Sharing between Vista and Windows 7 Another scenario you might run into is having to share files and printers between a Vista and Windows 7 machine. The process is a bit easier than sharing between XP and Windows 7, but takes a bit of work. The Homegroup feature isn’t compatible with Vista, so we need to go through a few different steps. Depending on what your printer is, sharing it should be easier as Vista and Windows 7 do a much better job of automatically locating the drivers. How to Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Sharing between Vista and XP When Windows Vista came out, hardware requirements were intensive, drivers weren’t ready, and sharing between them was complicated due to the new Vista structure. The sharing process is pretty straight-forward if you’re not using password protection…as you just need to drop what you want to share into the Vista Public folder. On the other hand, sharing with password protection becomes a bit more difficult. Basically you need to add a user and set up sharing on the XP machine. But once again, we have a complete tutorial for that situation. Share Files and Folders Between Vista and XP Machines Sharing Between Windows 7 with Homegroup If you have one or more Windows 7 machine, sharing files and devices becomes extremely easy with the Homegroup feature. It’s as simple as creating a Homegroup on on machine then joining the other to it. It allows you to stream media, control what data is shared, and can also be password protected. If you don’t want to make your Windows 7 machines part of the same Homegroup, you can still share files through the Public Folder, and setup a printer to be shared as well.   Use the Homegroup Feature in Windows 7 to Share Printers and Files Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It Change which Files are Shared in a Homegroup Windows Home Server If you want an ultimate setup that creates a centralized location to share files between all systems on your home network, regardless of the operating system, then set up a Windows Home Server. It allows you to centralize your important documents and digital media files on one box and provides easy access to data and the ability to stream media to other machines on your network. Not only that, but it provides easy backup of all your machines to the server, in case disaster strikes. How to Install and Setup Windows Home Server How to Manage Shared Folders on Windows Home Server Conclusion The biggest annoyance is dealing with printers that have a different set of drivers for each OS. There is no real easy way to solve this problem. Our best advice is to try to connect it to one machine, and if the drivers won’t work, hook it up to the other computer and see if that works. Each printer manufacturer is different, and Windows doesn’t always automatically install the correct drivers for the device. We hope this guide helps you share your data between whichever Microsoft OS scenario you might run into! Here are some other articles that will help you accomplish your home networking needs: Share a Printer on a Home Network from Vista or XP to Windows 7 How to Share a Folder the XP Way in Windows Vista Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Delete Wrong AutoComplete Entries in Windows Vista MailSvchost Viewer Shows Exactly What Each svchost.exe Instance is DoingFixing "BOOTMGR is missing" Error While Trying to Boot Windows VistaShow Hidden Files and Folders in Windows 7 or VistaAdd Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program Guide TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi

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• Our Look at the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview

  - by Asian Angel

  Have you been hearing all about Microsoft’s work on Internet Explorer 9 and are curious about it? If you are wanting a taste of the upcoming release then join us as we take a look at the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview. Note: Windows Vista and Server 2008 users may need to install a Platform Update (see link at bottom for more information). Getting Started If you are curious about the systems that the platform preview will operate on here is an excerpt from the FAQ page (link provided below). There are two important points of interest here: The platform preview does not replace your regular Internet Explorer installation The platform preview (and the final version of Internet Explorer 9) will not work on Windows XP There really is not a lot to the install process…basically all that you will have to deal with is the “EULA Window” and the “Install Finished Window”. Note: The platform preview will install to a “Program Files Folder” named “Internet Explorer Platform Preview”. Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview in Action When you start the platform preview up for the first time you will be presented with the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive homepage. Do not be surprised that there is not a lot to the UI at this time…but you can get a good idea of how Internet Explorer will act. Note: You will not be able to alter the “Homepage” for the platform preview. Of the four menus available there are two that will be of interest to most people…the “Page & Debug Menus”. If you go to navigate to a new webpage you will need to go through the “Page Menu” unless you have installed the Address Bar Mini-Tool (shown below). Want to see what a webpage will look like in an older version of Internet Explorer? Then choose your version in the “Debug Menu”. We did find it humorous that IE6 was excluded from the choices offered. Here is what the URL entry window looks like if you are using the “Page Menu” to navigate between websites. Here is the main page of the site here displayed in “IE9 Mode”…looking good. Here is the main page viewed in “Forced IE5 Document Mode”. There were some minor differences (colors, sidebar, etc.) in how the main page displayed in comparison to “IE9 Mode”. Being able to switch between modes makes for an interesting experience… As you can see there is not much to the “Context Menu” at the moment. Notice the slightly altered icon for the platform preview… “Add” an Address Bar of Sorts If you would like to use a “make-shift” Address Bar with the platform preview you can set up the portable file (IE9browser.exe) for the Internet Explorer 9 Test Platform Addressbar Mini-Tool. Just place it in an appropriate folder, create a shortcut for it, and it will be ready to go. Here is a close look at the left side of the Address Bar Mini-Tool. You can try to access “IE Favorites” but may have sporadic results like those we experienced during our tests. Note: The Address Bar Mini-Tool will not line up perfectly with the platform preview but still makes a nice addition. And a close look at the right side of the Address Bar Mini-Tool. In order to completely shut down the Address Bar Mini-Tool you will need to click on “Close”. Each time that you enter an address into the Address Bar Mini-Tool it will open a new window/instance of the platform preview. Note: During our tests we noticed that clicking on “Home” in the “Page Menu” opened the previously viewed website but once we closed and restarted the platform preview the test drive website was the starting/home page again. Even if the platform preview is not running the Address Bar Mini-Tool can still run as shown here. Note: You will not be able to move the Address Bar Mini-Tool from its’ locked-in position at the top of the screen. Now for some fun. With just the Address Bar Mini-Tool open you can enter an address and cause the platform preview to open. Here is our example from above now open in the platform preview…good to go. Conclusion During our tests we did experience the occasional crash but overall we were pleased with the platform preview’s performance. The platform preview handled rather well and definitely seemed much quicker than Internet Explorer 8 on our test system (a definite bonus!). If you are an early adopter then this could certainly get you in the mood for the upcoming beta releases! Links Download the Internet Explorer 9 Preview Platform Download the Internet Explorer 9 Test Platform Addressbar Mini-Tool Information about Platform Update for Windows Vista & Server 2008 View the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview FAQ Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPMake Ctrl+Tab in Internet Explorer 7 Use Most Recent OrderRemove ISP Text or Corporate Branding from Internet Explorer Title BarWhy Can’t I Turn the Details/Preview Panes On or Off in Windows Vista Explorer?Prevent Firefox or Internet Explorer from Printing the URL on Every Page TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

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• Dec 5th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, Visual Studio

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series for another on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET ASP.NET Code Samples Collection: J.D. Meier has a great post that provides a detailed round-up of ASP.NET code samples and tutorials from a wide variety of sources.  Lots of useful pointers. Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work: Nice article that details a bunch of optimizations you can make to speed up ASP.NET project load and compile times. You might also want to read my previous blog post on this topic here. 10 Essential Tools for Building ASP.NET Websites: Great article by Stephen Walther on 10 great (and free) tools that enable you to more easily build great ASP.NET Websites.  Highly recommended reading. Optimize Images using the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework: A nice article by 4GuysFromRolla that discusses how to use the open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework (one of the tools recommended by Stephen in the previous article).  You can use this to significantly improve the load-time of your pages on the client. Formatting Dates, Times and Numbers in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has a great article that discusses formatting dates, times and numbers in ASP.NET.  A very useful link to bookmark.  Also check out James Michael’s DateTime is Packed with Goodies blog post for other DateTime tips. Examining ASP.NET’s Membership, Roles and Profile APIs (Part 18): Everything you could possibly want to known about ASP.NET’s built-in Membership, Roles and Profile APIs must surely be in this tutorial series. Part 18 covers how to store additional user info with Membership. ASP.NET with jQuery An Introduction to jQuery Templates: Stephen Walther has written an outstanding introduction and tutorial on the new jQuery Template plugin that the ASP.NET team has contributed to the jQuery project. Composition with jQuery Templates and jQuery Templates, Composite Rendering, and Remote Loading: Dave Ward has written two nice posts that talk about composition scenarios with jQuery Templates and some cool scenarios you can enable with them. Using jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker: Scott Mitchell has a nice tutorial that demonstrates how to build a dynamically updated “news ticker” style UI with ASP.NET and jQuery. Checking All Checkboxes in a GridView using jQuery: Scott Mitchell has a nice post that covers how to use jQuery to enable a checkbox within a GridView’s header to automatically check/uncheck all checkboxes contained within rows of it. Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service: Rick Strahl has a nice post that discusses how to capture form variables and post them to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service (.asmx). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet: Phil Haack has a nice post that demonstrates how to easily install a diagnostics page (using NuGet) that can help identify and diagnose common configuration issues within your apps. ASP.NET MVC 3 JsonValueProviderFactory: James Hughes has a nice post that discusses how to take advantage of the new JsonValueProviderFactory support built into ASP.NET MVC 3.  This makes it easy to post JSON payloads to MVC action methods. Practical jQuery Mobile with ASP.NET MVC: James Hughes has another nice post that discusses how to use the new jQuery Mobile library with ASP.NET MVC to build great mobile web applications. Credit Card Validator for ASP.NET MVC 3: Benjii Me has a nice post that demonstrates how to build a [CreditCard] validator attribute that can be used to easily validate credit card numbers are in the correct format with ASP.NET MVC. Silverlight Silverlight FireStarter Keynote and Sessions: A great blog post from John Papa that contains pointers and descriptions of all the great Silverlight content we published last week at the Silverlight FireStarter.  You can watch all of the talks online.  More details on my keynote and Silverlight 5 announcements can be found here. 31 Days of Windows Phone 7: 31 great tutorials on how to build Windows Phone 7 applications (using Silverlight).  Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Update: David Anson has a nice post that discusses some of the additional controls provided with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Visual Studio JavaScript Editor Extensions: A nice (and free) Visual Studio plugin built by the web tools team that significantly improves the JavaScript intellisense support within Visual Studio. HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio: Gil has a blog post that discusses a new extension my team has posted to the Visual Studio Extension Gallery that adds HTML5 schema support to Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness: Visual blogs about how to enable a continuous deployment system with VS 2010, TFS 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deploy framework.  Visual Studio 2010 Emacs Emulation Extension and VIM Emulation Extension: Check out these two extensions if you are fond of Emacs and VIM key bindings and want to enable them within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Ask How-To Geek: Dropbox in the Start Menu, Understanding Symlinks, and Ripping TV Series DVDs

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week we take a look at how to incorporate Dropbox into your Windows Start Menu, understanding and using symbolic links, and how to rip your TV series DVDs right to unique and high-quality episode files. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Add Drobox to Your Start Menu Dear How-To Geek, I use Dropbox all the time and would like to add it right onto my start menu along side the other major shortcuts like Documents, Pictures, etc. It seems like adding Dropbox into the menu should be part of the Dropbox installation package! Sincerely, Dropboxing in Des Moines Dear Dropboxing, We agree, it would be a nice installation option. As it stands you’re going to have to do a little simple hacking to get Dropbox nestled neatly into your start menu. The hack isn’t super elegant but when you’re done you’ll have the link you want and it’ll look like it was there all along. Check out this step-by-step guide here in order to take an existing Library shortcut and rework it to be a Dropbox link. Understanding and Using Symbolic Links Dear How-To Geek, I was talking to a coworker the other day about an issue I’d been having with a media center application I’m running. He suggested using symbolic links to better organize my media and make it easier for the application to access my collection. I had no idea what he was talking about and never got a chance to bug him about it later. Can you clear up this whole symbolic links business for me? I’ve been using computers for years and I’ve never even heard of it! Sincerely, Symbolic Who? Dear Symbolic, Symbolic links aren’t commonly used by many Windows users which is why you likely haven’t run into the concept. Symbolic links are essentially supercharged shortcuts—the newly introduced Windows library system is really just a type of symbolic link system. You can use symbolic links to do all sorts of neat stuff like link folders to your Dropbox folder, organize media, and more. The concept of symbolic links is pretty simple but the execution can be really tricky. We’d suggest reading over our guide to creating symbolic links in Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubunutu to get a clearer idea what you’re getting into. Rip Your TV DVDs into Handy Episode Files Dear How-To Geek, My wife got me an iPod for Christmas and I still haven’t got around to filling it up. I have tons of entire TV show seasons on DVD and would like to get them on the iPod but I have absolutely no idea where to start. How do I get the shows off the discs? I thought it would be as easy to import the TV shows into iTunes as it is to import tracks off a CD but I was totally wrong. I tried downloading some applications to rip them but those didn’t work at all. Very frustrating! Surely there is an easy and/or automated way to do this, right? Sincerely, Free My DVDs Dear DVDs, Oh man is this a frustration we can relate to. It’s inordinately difficult to get movies and TV shows off physical media and into digital (and portable media player-friendly) formats. There are a multitude of ways to rip DVDs and quite a few applications out there (some good, some mediocre, and some outright malware). We’d recommend a two-part punch to solve your ripping woes. You’ll need a copy of DVDFab to strip away the protections on the discs and rip the disc and Handbrake to load the disc image and convert the files. It’s not quite as smooth as the CD-to-iTunes workflow but it’s still pretty easy. Check out all the steps and settings you’ll want to toggle here. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines Google’s New Personal Blocklist Extension Kills Search Engine Spam KeyCounter Tracks Your Keystrokes and Mouse Clicks Add Custom LED Ambient Lighting to Your PC or Media Center The Trackor Monitors Amazon Prices; Integrates with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Four Awesome TRON Legacy Themes for Chrome and Iron Anger is Illogical – Old School Style Instructional Video [Star Trek Mashup]

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• 8 Backup Tools Explained for Windows 7 and 8

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Backups on Windows can be confusing. Whether you’re using Windows 7 or 8, you have quite a few integrated backup tools to think about. Windows 8 made quite a few changes, too. You can also use third-party backup software, whether you want to back up to an external drive or back up your files to online storage. We won’t cover third-party tools here — just the ones built into Windows. Backup and Restore on Windows 7 Windows 7 has its own Backup and Restore feature that lets you create backups manually or on a schedule. You’ll find it under Backup and Restore in the Control Panel. The original version of Windows 8 still contained this tool, and named it Windows 7 File Recovery. This allowed former Windows 7 users to restore files from those old Windows 7 backups or keep using the familiar backup tool for a little while. Windows 7 File Recovery was removed in Windows 8.1. System Restore System Restore on both Windows 7 and 8 functions as a sort of automatic system backup feature. It creates backup copies of important system and program files on a schedule or when you perform certain tasks, such as installing a hardware driver. If system files become corrupted or your computer’s software becomes unstable, you can use System Restore to restore your system and program files from a System Restore point. This isn’t a way to back up your personal files. It’s more of a troubleshooting feature that uses backups to restore your system to its previous working state. Previous Versions on Windows 7 Windows 7′s Previous Versions feature allows you to restore older versions of files — or deleted files. These files can come from backups created with Windows 7′s Backup and Restore feature, but they can also come from System Restore points. When Windows 7 creates a System Restore point, it will sometimes contain your personal files. Previous Versions allows you to extract these personal files from restore points. This only applies to Windows 7. On Windows 8, System Restore won’t create backup copies of your personal files. The Previous Versions feature was removed on Windows 8. File History Windows 8 replaced Windows 7′s backup tools with File History, although this feature isn’t enabled by default. File History is designed to be a simple, easy way to create backups of your data files on an external drive or network location. File History replaces both Windows 7′s Backup and Previous Versions features. Windows System Restore won’t create copies of personal files on Windows 8. This means you can’t actually recover older versions of files until you enable File History yourself — it isn’t enabled by default. System Image Backups Windows also allows you to create system image backups. These are backup images of your entire operating system, including your system files, installed programs, and personal files. This feature was included in both Windows 7 and Windows 8, but it was hidden in the preview versions of Windows 8.1. After many user complaints, it was restored and is still available in the final version of Windows 8.1 — click System Image Backup on the File History Control Panel. Storage Space Mirroring Windows 8′s Storage Spaces feature allows you to set up RAID-like features in software. For example, you can use Storage Space to set up two hard disks of the same size in a mirroring configuration. They’ll appear as a single drive in Windows. When you write to this virtual drive, the files will be saved to both physical drives. If one drive fails, your files will still be available on the other drive. This isn’t a good long-term backup solution, but it is a way of ensuring you won’t lose important files if a single drive fails. Microsoft Account Settings Backup Windows 8 and 8.1 allow you to back up a variety of system settings — including personalization, desktop, and input settings. If you’re signing in with a Microsoft account, OneDrive settings backup is enabled automatically. This feature can be controlled under OneDrive > Sync settings in the PC settings app. This feature only backs up a few settings. It’s really more of a way to sync settings between devices. OneDrive Cloud Storage Microsoft hasn’t been talking much about File History since Windows 8 was released. That’s because they want people to use OneDrive instead. OneDrive — formerly known as SkyDrive — was added to the Windows desktop in Windows 8.1. Save your files here and they’ll be stored online tied to your Microsoft account. You can then sign in on any other computer, smartphone, tablet, or even via the web and access your files. Microsoft wants typical PC users “backing up” their files with OneDrive so they’ll be available on any device. You don’t have to worry about all these features. Just choose a backup strategy to ensure your files are safe if your computer’s hard disk fails you. Whether it’s an integrated backup tool or a third-party backup application, be sure to back up your files.

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• Fix Windows Computer Problems with Microsoft Fix it Center

  - by Matthew Guay

  Fixing computer problems can often be difficult, but Microsoft is aiming to make it as simple as a couple clicks with.  Here’s how you can easily fix computer problems with Microsoft’s new Fix it Center Beta. Last year Microsoft began offering small Fix it scripts that you could download and run to help solve common computer problems automatically.  These were added to some of the most visited Windows help pages, and helped fix problems with things such as printing errors and Aero glass support.  Now, the Fix it scripts have been bundled together with the Fix it Center, making fixing your computer even easier.  This free tool works great on all editions of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Note: The Fix it Center is currently in beta, so only run if you are comfortable running beta software. Getting Started Download the Fix it Center installer (link below), and install as normal. The installer will download the remaining components, and then finish the installation. In Windows XP, if you have not yet installed .NET 2.0, you may see the following prompt.  Click Yes to go to the download site, and once you’ve installed .NET 2.0, run the Fix it Center setup again. Also, the Fix it Center uses PowerShell to automate its fixes, but if it is not installed yet the installer will automatically download and install it. Find Fixes for Your PC Once Fix it Center is installed, you can personalize it for your computer.  Select Now, and the click Next. It will scan your computer for problems with known solutions, and will offer to go ahead and install these troubleshooters.  If you choose to not install them, you can always download them from within the Fix it Center at a later time. While those troubleshooters are downloading, you can create a Fix it account.  This will give you additional help and support, and let you review Fix it solutions for all your computers from an online dashboard.  You need a Windows Live ID to create an account. Also, choose whether or not to send information to Microsoft about your hardware and software problems. Get Problems Fixed Now that the Fix it Center is installed and has identified issues on your computer, it’s time to get the problems fixed.  Here’s the default front screen in Windows 7, showing all of the available fixes. And here’s the Fix it Center running in Windows XP. Select one of the Troubleshooters to see more information about it, and click Run to start it. You can choose to either detect problems and have them fixed automatically, or you can choose for the Fix it Center to show you the solutions and let you choose whether to apply them or not.  The defaults usually work good, and only take a couple minutes to apply the fixes, but you can select your own fixes if you’d rather be in control. It will scan your computer for known problems in this area, and then will show you the results.  Here, Fix it determined that startup programs may be causing performance issues.  Select Start System Configuration, and uncheck any of the programs you do not usually use. Once you’ve run a troubleshooter, you can see the issues it checked for and any problems it discovered. If you created the online account, you can also choose to view the details online.  This will show all of your computers with Fix it Center and the fixes you’ve run on them.   Conclusion Whether you’re a power user or new to computers, sometimes it’s best to just get your problems fixed and go on with life instead of digging through the registry, forums, and hacking your way to a solution.  Remember the service is still in beta and may not work perfectly or solve your issues every time. But it’s something cool and worth a look. Links Download Microsoft Fix it Center Beta Fix additional problems with Microsoft’s Fix it Center Online Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable Windows Mobility Center in Windows 7 or VistaMake Outlook Faster by Disabling Unnecessary Add-InsUsing Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Disable Security Center Popup Notifications in Windows VistaHow To Manage Action Center in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi

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• Best WordPress Video Themes for a Video Blog

  - by Matt

  WordPress has made blogging so easy & fun, there are plenty of video blog themes that you can pick from. However there is always rarity in quality. We at JustSkins have gathered some high quality, tested, tried video themes list. We tried to find some WordPress themes for vloggers, we knew all along that there are very few yet some of them are just brilliant premium wordpress themes. More on that later, let’s find out some themes which you can install on your vlog right now. On Demand 2.0 A fully featured video WordPress premium theme from Press75. Includes  theme options panel for personal customization and content management options, post thumbnails, drop down navigation menu, custom widgets and lots more. Demo | Price: $75 | DOWNLOAD VideoZoom An outstanding premium WordPress video theme from WPZoom featuring standard video integration plus additionally it lets you play any video from all the popular video websites. VideoZoom theme also includes a featured video slider on the homepage, multiple post layout options, theme options panel, WordPress 3.0 menus, backgrounds etc. Demo | Price Single: $69, Developer: $149 | DOWNLOAD Vidley Press75′s easy to use premium WordPress video theme. This theme is full of great features, it can be a perfect choice if you intend to make it a portal someday..it is scalable to shape like a news portal or portfolios. The Theme is widget ready. It has ability to place Featured Content and Featured Category section on homepage. The drop down menus on this theme are nifty! Demo | Price $75 |  DOWNLOAD Live A video premium WordPress theme designed for streaming video, and live event broadcasting. You can embed live video broadcasts from third party services like Ustream etc, and features a prominent timer counting down to the next broadcast, rotating bumper images, Facebook and twitter integration for viewer interaction, theme admin options panel and more make this theme one of its kind. Demo | Price: $99, Support License: $149| DOWNLOAD Groovy Video Woo Themes is pioneer in making beautiful wordpress themes,  One such theme that is built by keeping the video blogger in mind. The Groovy Theme is very colourful video blog premium WordPress theme. Creating video posts is quick and easy with just a copy / paste of the video’s embed code. The theme enables automatic video resizing, plenty of widgets. Also allows you to pick color of your choice. Price: Single Use $70, Developer Price : $150 | DOWNLOAD Video Flick Another exciting Video blogging theme by Press75 is the Video Flick theme. Video Flick is compatible with any video service that provides embed code, or if you want to host your own videos, Video Flick is also compatible with FLV (Flash Video) and Quicktime formats. This theme allows you to either keep standard Blog and/or have Video posts. You can pick a light or dark color option. Demo | Price : $75 | DOWNLOAD Woo Tube An excellent video premium WordPress theme from Woothemes, the WooTube theme is a very easy video blog platform, as it comes with  automatic video resizing, a completely widgetised sidebar and 7 different colour schemes to choose from. The theme  has the ability to be used as a normal blog or a gallery. A very wise choice! Price: Single Use $70, Developer Price : $150 | DOWNLOAD eVid Theme One of the nicest WordPress theme designed specifically for the video bloggers. Simple to integrate videos from video hosts such as Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, MetaCafe etc. Demo | Price: $19 | DOWNLOAD Tubular A video premium WordPress theme from StudioPress which can also be used as a used a simple website or a blog. The theme is also available in a light color version. Demo | Price: $59.95 | DOWNLOAD Video Elements 2.0 Another beautiful video premium WordPress theme from Press75. Video Elements 2.0 has been re-designed to include the features you need to easily run and maintain a video blog on WordPress. Demo | Price: $75 | DOWNLOAD TV Elements 3.0 The theme includes a featured video carousel on the homepage which can display any number of videos, a featured category section which displays up to 12 channels, creates automatic thumbnails and a lots more… Demo | Price: $75 | DOWNLOAD Wave A beautiful premium video wordpress theme, Flexible & Super cool looking. The Design has very earthy feel to it. The theme has featured video area & latest listing on the homepage. All in all a simple design no fancy features. Demo | Price: $35 | Download

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• Test Drive Windows 7 Online with Virtual Labs

  - by Matthew Guay

  Did you miss out on the Windows 7 public beta and want to try it out before you actually make the leap and upgrade? Maybe you want to learn how to deploy new features in a business environment. Here’s how you can test drive Windows 7 directly from your browser. Whether you manage 10,000 desktops or simply manage your own laptop, it’s usually best to test out a new OS before installing it.  If you’re upgrading from Windows XP you may find many things unfamiliar.  Microsoft has setup a special Windows 7 Test Drive website with resources to help IT professionals test and deploy Windows 7 in their workplaces.  This is a great resource to try out Windows 7 from the comfort of your browser, and look at some of the new features without even installing it. Please note that the online version is not nearly as responsive as a full standard install of Windows 7.  It also does not run the full Aero interface or desktop effects, and may refresh slowly depending on your Internet connection.  So don’t judge Windows 7’s performance based on this virtual lab, but use it as a way to learn more about Windows 7 without installing it. Getting Started To test drive Windows 7, visit Microsoft’s Windows 7 Test Drive website (link below).  You will need to run the Windows 7 Test Drive in Internet Explorer, as it requires Active X support.  We received this error when attempting to run the Test Drive in Firefox: Now, click the “Take a Test Drive” link on the bottom left of the page. This site includes several test drives to demonstrate different features of Windows 7 and its related ecosystem of products including Windows Server 2008 R2, some of which, including the XP Mode test drive, are not yet ready.  For this test, we selected the MED-V Test drive, as this includes Office 2007 and 2010 so you can test them in Windows 7 as well.  Simply select the test drive you want, and click “Try it now!”   If you haven’t run a Windows test drive before, you will be asked to install an ActiveX control.  Click the link to install. Click the yellow bar at the top of the page in Internet Explorer, and select to Install the add-on.  You may have to approve a UAC prompt to finish the install. Once this is finished, click the link on the bottom of the page to return to your test drive.  The test drive page should automatically refresh; if it doesn’t, click refresh to reload it. Now the test drive will load the components.   Once its fully loaded, click the link to launch Windows 7 in a new window. You may see a prompt warning that the server may have been impersonated.  Simply click Yes to proceed. The test lab will give you some getting started directions; click Close Window when you’re ready to try out Windows 7. Here’s the default desktop in the Windows 7 test drive.  You can use it just like a normal Windows computer, but do note that it may function slowly depending on your internet connection.   This test drive includes both Office 2007 and Office 2010 Tech Preview, so you can try out both in Windows 7 as well. You can try out the new Windows 7 applications such as the reworked Paint with the Ribbon interface from Office. Or you can even test the newest version of Media Center, though it will warn you that it may not function good with the down-scaled graphics in the test drive.   Most importantly, you can try out the new features in Windows 7, such as Jumplists and even Aero Snap.  Once again, these features will not function the quickest, but it does let you test them out. While working with the Virtual Lab, there are different tasks it walks you through. You can also download a copy of the lab manual in PDF format to help you navigate through the various objectives. The test drive system is running Microsoft Forefront Security, the enterprise security solution from which Microsoft Security Essentials has adapted components from. Conclusion These virtual labs are great for tech students, or those of you who want to get a first-hand trial of the new features. Also, if you’re not sure on how to deploy something and want to practice in a virtual environment, these labs are quite valuable.While these labs are geared toward IT professionals, it’s a good way for anyone to try out Windows 7 features from the comfort of your current computer. Test Drive Windows 7 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mount Multiple ISO Images Using Virtual CloneDriveHow To Delete a VHD in Windows 7Keyboard Shortcuts for VMware WorkstationMount an ISO image in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 If it were only this easy SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver

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• 6 Interesting Facts About NASA’s Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’

  - by Gopinath

  Humans quest for exploring the surrounding planets to see whether we can live there or not is taking new shape today. NASA’s Mars probing robot, Curiosity, blasted off today on its 9 months journey to reach Mars and explore it for the possibilities of life there. Scientist says that Curiosity is one most advanced rover ever launched to probe life on other planets. Here is the launch video and some analysis by a news reporter Lets look at the 6 interesting facts about the mission 1. It’s as big as a car Curiosity is the biggest ever rover ever launched by NASA to probe life on outer planets. It’s as big as a car and almost double the size of its predecessor rover Spirit. The length of Curiosity is around 9 feet 10 inches(3 meters), width is 9 feet 1 inch (2.8 meters) and height is 7 feet (2.1 meters). 2. Powered by Plutonium – Lasts 24×7 for 23 months The earlier missions of NASA to explore Mars are powered by Solar power and that hindered capabilities of the rovers to move around when the Sun is hiding. Due to dependency of Sun the earlier rovers were not able to traverse the places where there is no Sun light. Curiosity on the other hand is equipped with a radioisotope power system that generates electricity from the heat emitted by plutonium’s radioactive decay. The plutonium weighs around 10 pounds and can generate power required for operating the rover close to 23 weeks. The best part of the new power system is, Curiosity can roam around in darkness, light and all year around. 3. Rocket powered backpack for a science fiction style landing The Curiosity is so heavy that NASA could not use parachute and balloons to air-drop the rover on the surface of Mars like it’s previous missions. They are trying out a new science fiction style air-dropping mechanism that is similar to sky crane heavy-lift helicopter. The landing of the rover begins first with entry into the Mars atmosphere protected by a heat shield. At about 6 miles to the surface, the heat shield is jettisoned and a parachute is deployed to glide the rover smoothly. When the rover touches 3 miles above the surface, the parachute is jettisoned and the eight motors rocket backpack is used for a smooth and impact free landing as shown in the image. Here is an animation created by NASA on the landing sequence. If you are interested in getting more detailed information about the landing process check this landing sequence picture available on NASA website 4. Equipped with Star Wars style laser gun Hollywood movie directors and novelist always imagined aliens coming to earth with spaceships full of laser guns and blasting the objects which comes on their way. With Curiosity the equations are going to change. It has a powerful laser gun equipped in one of it’s arms to beam laser on rocks to vaporize them. This is not part of any assault mission Curiosity is expected to carry out, the laser gun is will be used to carry out experiments to detect life and understand nature. 5. Most sophisticated laboratory powered by 10 instruments Around 10 state of art instruments are part of Curiosity rover and the these 10 instruments form a most advanced rover based lab ever built by NASA. There are instruments to cut through rocks to examine them and other instruments will search for organic compounds. Mounted cameras can study targets from a distance, arm mounted instruments can study the targets they touch. Microscopic lens attached to the arm can see and magnify tiny objects as tiny as 12.5 micro meters. 6. Rover Carrying 1.24 million names etched on silicon Early June 2009 NASA launched a campaign called “Send Your Name to Mars” and around 1.24 million people registered their names through NASA’s website. All those 1.24 million names are etched on Silicon chips mounted onto Curiosity’s deck. If you had registered your name in the campaign may be your name is going to reach Mars soon. Curiosity On Web If you wish to follow the mission here are few links to help you NASA’s Curiosity Web Page Follow Curiosity on Facebook Follow @MarsCuriosity on Twitter Artistic Gallery Image of Mars Rover Curiosity A printable sheet of Curiosity Mission [pdf] Images credit: NASA This article titled,6 Interesting Facts About NASA’s Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• My Interview with Microsoft

  - by Victor Hurdugaci

  This post is for those who want to apply or have already applied (but not finished the interview) for a Microsoft Job. The recruitment process is quite similar for everyone and consists of a few steps. Application E-Mail Interview Phone Interview On Site Interview I will tell you my story and how I went through the four phases. 1. Application My blog's title (Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit) means "Nothing Comes Out of Nothing". You can't get a job at Microsoft by not doing anything - this is true for anything else. The first step you need to complete is the application process. For this, many options are available. You can... ... apply online on Microsoft's Careers website as I did ... send your CV to different e-mail addresses (there are some dedicated e-mails for different positions) ... apply through some 3rd party organization (job shop, campus recruitment, job agency, etc) On MS Careers you just have to post your CV and choose the job you want. That's all! No recommendation letter, no cover letter, no nothing. Of course, not every CV passes the selection process. Here are some tips for improving your resume (worked for me): Don't write it just before applying! Write a draft version, wait a few days and then review it. This way you will find a lot of mistakes and stupid things you wrote initially. If you review it immediately after writing, your mind will not be criticism oriented and will just ignore mistakes. Repeat the write-wait-review process as many times as necessary, until you find that the review revealed no mistakes. After you did the final review and the CV is bullet-proof, ask others to review it. They will definitely find inconsistencies and mistakes and this will make you feel stupid. This is good because will open your eyes will make you go into an 'I want to improve' mode. You'll try to correct everything. After you come up with a modified version go again through steps 1 and 2. Repeat this as many times as necessary. [Special thanks to Lucian Sasu, Nadia Comanici, Andrei Ciobanu, Monica Balan and Lavinia Tanase for reviewing my CV!] Make it short and give only relevant facts. Initially, I come up with a 5 pages CV because I wrote every single technology with which I worked. There were a lot irrelevant things, I wrote Windows Workflow Foundation just because I played with it for a few days. I added extensive descriptions for every project, made a personal details section (name, birth date, address, etc) of 1/2 page. Others suggested to cut everything that was not necessary. You don't need to give extensive descriptions, just add a few words. For example, I wrote "VS Image Visualizer - Visual Studio 2008 debug visualizer for images" and added a link to the project's page - you submit formatted andcan embed links. Add something that makes it different. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I added some lines to separate items just like in the picture below. Definitely Microsoft gets thousands of CVs per day. You need something special. Don't lie! Tell exactly what you did and what is the proficiency level of your skills. For example, don't write "Advanced" for UML if you don't know the difference between composition and aggregation. Be realistic and don't under/over estimate yourself. Use the spell chick. Make sure everything is written in correct English and there are no grammar/spelling mistakes. Noddy likes a WC with grammar mi takes. You mght fail just because of that. Once you completed your CV, choose the job that suits best your needs, apply and wait... The waiting is a problem because all these big companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. will contact you only if they find something interesting in your application. If you're not suitable, then no rejection is sent. I applied for an Intern Software Development Engineer position at Microsoft Redmond. I cannot apply for a full time position because I want to finish the master program on time, in the next summer - an internship is just what I need. 2. E-Mail Interview January 20, 2010. Two months since I submitted the CV. I wasn't hoping anymore that MS will contact me, when I got an e-mail titled: "Victor Hurdugaci ES DK" from Holly Peterson saying: Read more >>

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• How to customise search core results web part Part1

  - by ybbest

  In this post, I’d like to show you how to customise search core results web part. It is a quite simple, most of the times what you need to do is to change the xslt to perform the changes. Here are the steps: 1. You need to change the xslt to the following, so that you can see the raw xml. <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" > <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" /> <xsl:template match="/"> <xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> a. To do so , you need to go to edit page>>Edit search core results web part >>Display Properties and then untick use Location Visualization b. Open the xslt editor and copy the existing XSLT code to your preferred xslt editor so that you can customise it. c. Now you can paste in the XSLT code above. 2.Perform the search after you have completed step1 and you will see the search results returned in raw xml <All_Results> <Result> <id>1</id> <workid>678</workid> <rank>100000000</rank> <title>Ybbest</title> <author></author> <size>137531</size> <url>http://ybbest</url> <urlEncoded>http%3A%2F%2Fybbest</urlEncoded> <description>Ybbest test site</description> <write>3/17/2012</write> <sitename>http://ybbest</sitename> <collapsingstatus>0</collapsingstatus> <hithighlightedsummary> <c0>Ybbest</c0> test site <ddd /> Add a new image, change this welcome text or add new lists to this page by clicking the edit button above. You can click on Shared Documents to add files or on the <ddd /> </hithighlightedsummary> <hithighlightedproperties> <HHTitle> <c0>Ybbest</c0> </HHTitle> <HHUrl>http://<c0>ybbest</c0></HHUrl> </hithighlightedproperties> <contentclass>STS_Site</contentclass> <isdocument>False</isdocument> <picturethumbnailurl></picturethumbnailurl> <popularsocialtags /> <picturewidth>0</picturewidth> <pictureheight>0</pictureheight> <datepicturetaken></datepicturetaken> <serverredirectedurl></serverredirectedurl> <fileextension></fileextension> <ows_metadatafacetinfo></ows_metadatafacetinfo> <imageurl imageurldescription="SharePoint Site Collection">/_layouts/images/siteicon_16x16.png</imageurl> </Result> <TotalResults>69</TotalResults> <NumberOfResults>50</NumberOfResults> </All_Results> 3. Then you can read what has been returned in the raw xml and start modifying the xslt to customise your search results page. 4.You can also link an external xslt to the web part.It can be set in the Miscellaneous of Web Part section. You can also set it pragmatically using a feature receiver , you can download the source code to do so here. References: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6548104/change-xslt-of-the-searchresultwebpart-during-the-featureactivated http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2010/04/05/a-quick-guide-to-coreresultswebpart-configuration-changes-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx http://www.tonytestasworld.com/post/2011/01/30/HowTo-display-SharePoint-Search-results-as-raw-XML.aspx

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• Review of Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7

  - by mbcrump

  I recently acquired a Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 device from AT&T and wanted to share what I thought of it as an end-user. Before I get started, here are several of my write-ups for the Windows Phone 7. You may want to check out the second article titled: Hands-on WP7 Review of Prototype Hardware. From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 Hands-on : Windows Phone 7 Review on Prototype Hardware. Deploying your Windows Phone 7 Application to the actual hardware. Profile your Windows Phone 7 Application for Free Submitting a Windows Phone 7 Application to the Market. Samsung Focus i917 Phone Size: Perfect! I have been carrying around a Dell Streak (Android) and it is about half the size. It is really nice to have a phone that fits in your pocket without a lot of extra bulk. I bought a case for the Focus and it is still a perfect size.  The phone just feels right. Screen: It has a beautiful Super AMOLED 480x800 screen. I only wish it supported a higher resolution. The colors are beautiful especially in an Xbox Live Game.   3G: I use AT&T and I've had spotty reception. This really can't be blamed on the phone as much as the actual carrier. Battery: I've had excellent battery life compared to my iPhone and Android devices. I usually use my phone throughout the day on and off and still have a charge at the end of the day.  Camera/Video: I'm still looking for the option to send the video to YouTube or the Image to Twitter. The images look good, but the phone needs a forward facing camera. I like the iPhone/Android (Dell Streak) camera better. Built-in Speaker: Sounds great. It’s not a wimpy speaker that you cannot hear.  CPU: Very smooth transitioning from one screen to another. The prototype Windows Phone 7 that I had, was no where near as smooth. (It was also running a slower processor though). OS: I actually like the OS but a few things could be better. CONS: Copy and Paste (Supposed to come in the next update) We need more apps (Pandora missing was a big one for me and Slacker’s advertisement sucks!). As time passes, and more developers get on board then this will be fixed. The browser needs some major work. I have tried to make cross-platform (WP7, Android, iPhone and iPad) web apps and the browser that ships with WP7 just can’t handle it.  Apps need to be organized better. Instead of throw them all on one screen, it would help to allow the user to create categories. PROS: Hands down the best gaming experience on a phone. I have all three major phones (iphone, android and wp7). Nothing compares to the gaming experience on the WP7. The phone just works. I’ve had a LOT of glitches with my Android device. I’ve had maybe 2 with my WP7 device. Exchange and Office support are great. Nice integration with Twitter/Facebook and social media. Easy to navigate and find the information you need on one screen. Let’s look at a few pictures and we will wrap up with my final thoughts on the phone. WP7 Home Screen. Back of the phone is as stylish. It is hard to see due to the shadow but it is a very thin phone. What’s included? Manuals Ear buds Data Cable plus Power Adapter Phone Click a picture to enlarge So, what are my final thoughts on the Phone/OS? I love the Samsung Focus and would recommend it to anyone looking for a WP7 device. Like any first generation product, you need to give it a little while to mature. Right now the phone is missing several features that we are all used to using. That doesn’t mean a year from now it will be in the same situation. (I sure hope we won’t). If you are looking to get into mobile development, I believe WP7 is the easiest platform to develop from. This is especially true if you have a background in Silverlight or WPF.    Subscribe to my feed

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