Posts Tagged ‘IT support chester’

April 8th, 2010 by admin

Ipad Biz Apps

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One of our clients in Chester, Cheshire who we provide IT support for has recently purchased an Ipad.

One of the reasons the IPhone has been so successful besides the fact it’s pretty much the perfect mobile smart phone is because of the business applications available to users.

When the IPhone was first released without exchange integration I did wonder how it was going to compete with HTC and Blackberry in the business arena – great for watching films and listening to music but not much good if you want to sync your calendar. The subsequent release of the IPhone 3G put it miles in front of the other devices which included exchange integration. The HTC devices required you install a certificate which was a pain for none technical users and the blackberry device required Blackberry Enterprise Server or desktop sync tools. All very messy.

It doesn’t look like apple will be making the same mistake with the IPad. Already business apps are available for it with The Roambi App, one of apples best biz apps available. Many company execs will see this as an extremely attractive complimentary device to the IPhone and wont be able to miss the opportunity of strutting round the office with an IPad under their arm shouting “sell, sell sell”!

Since it is such a unique device it is hard to say if it will take off as a real business device used by real business people with a real business persons need. Unless you really, really want an Ipad id stick with a laptop but keep an eye on things – it most likely will get even better over the coming months.

A good alternative is a decent tablet laptop like the Latitude XT2 – already has more biz apps because it runs Windows 7.

February 22nd, 2008 by admin

Fun and games with Vista Service Pack 1

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Microsoft is warning Windows Vista users that a forthcoming service pack for the operating system may stop some third-party programs working.
The software giant has released a list of programs that may be broken by the SP1 update for Vista.

Most of the software hit by the upgrade are security programs that prevent Windows users falling prey to viruses, trojans and booby-trapped webpages.

The Windows Vista update will be released to the public in mid-March.

Update loop

Service Packs are among the biggest updates Microsoft issues for its various operating systems. The software firm said SP1 makes Vista more secure and reliable and introduces some new features.

The list of programs affected by SP1 is divided into three. Some will be blocked by the update, some will not run and others will lose some of their functions.

PROGRAMS HIT BY SP1

BitDefender AV
Fujitsu Shock Sensor
Jiangmin KV Antivirus 10
Jiangmin KV Antivirus 2008
Trend Micro Internet Security
Zone Alarm Security Suite
Iron Speed Designer
Xheo Licensing
Free Allegiance
NYT Reader
Rising Personal Firewall
Novell ZCM Agent

Of the 12 programs mentioned, six block viruses or keep an eye on the places someone visits online.

Microsoft warned that its list was not “comprehensive” and asked people to get in touch with the maker of any affected software to fix problems.

Although the update will become widely available in March, Microsoft is releasing it to business customers in February.

Microsoft has also been forced to withdraw an update to Vista that was required before Service Pack 1 could be applied.

Writing on the Windows Vista blog, Nick White, Microsoft product manager, said the company had withdrawn the preparatory update while it investigated.

Isolated reports suggest that some machines on which the preliminary update has been applied go into an update loop.

He wrote: “We are working to identify possible solutions and will make the update available again shortly after we address the issue.”

 Source – BBC

February 21st, 2008 by admin

Vista Service Pack 1 on ice

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Microsoft has suspended distribution of one of the updates required for Vista service pack one (SP1), after customers complained that their PCs wouldn’t boot up properly once KB937287 had been applied.

The servicing stack update, which was pushed out to the Windows Update site last week, is an essential part of the Vista SP1 puzzle – without it, the operating system’s full service pack can’t be installed.

Despite Microsoft’s decision to hold the update back until its engineers fix the PC reboot error, Redmond insists that Vista SP1, which was released to manufacturing on 4 February and is already available to MSDN subscribers, will still be available for general consumption in mid-March as planned.

Microsoft product manager Nick White said last week that the pre-SP1 release of two final prerequisite updates, which included KB937287 and multi-component update KB938371, were “just one more example of how we’re continuing to actively invest in improving the Windows Vista experience through Windows Update”.

BUT yesterday – following the spillage of plenty of blood in the TechNet forums – he scaled back that somewhat optimistic claim.

“So far, we’ve been able to determine that this problem only affects a small number of customers in unique circumstances,” White said. “We are working to identify possible solutions and will make the update available again shortly after we address the issue.” He did not, though, indicate exactly how many customers had actually experienced the error.

White said that any Vista customers who have been hit by the problem should either call Microsoft or use System Restore to fix the problem.

The Vista team had already admitted that it’s been wrangling with driver failure problems during installation of SP1. This latest issue raises the stakes ahead of the planned mass-release in March.

Source – The Register

February 20th, 2008 by admin

XP Service Pack 3

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Microsoft has flung open the door for anyone interested in getting their mitts on release candidate 2 of Windows XP SP3.

The software giant had made RC2 of the final service pack of XP already available to several thousand beta testers a few weeks ago. Now, it feels brave enough to pump it out to the masses.

Redmond has pushed back the release date of XP’s final service pack several times, and is withdrawing the operating system from the market in June. Of course, it must support legacy XP software customers for many years to come, and so must patch the OS, as new vulnerabilities and bugs are uncovered. Only, not in service packs.

Will XP’s official retirement encourage conservative corporates to mosey over to XP’s successor, the much-lauded Vista? No, but they will upgrade in due course.

Microsoft will sort out the more egregious performance issues – Vista SP1 is pencilled for release next month (although with Microsoft, as this story from today illustrates, you never can tell). And corporates will be happier to dovetail upgrades with their PC hardware refresh cycles.

Source  – The Register

February 18th, 2008 by admin

Toshiba to ditch HD DVD

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Sony’s Betamax lost out in the 1980s, but its Blu-ray has better prospects Shares in Toshiba have gained more than 5% as speculation intensified that the electronics giant was set to pull the plug on its high definition DVD format. The firm said it had made no decisions but admitted that it had started a review of its HD DVD business.

The format has suffered from the defection of most of the major film studios to Sony-backed rival Blu-ray.

Analysts said that an end to the war meant Toshiba could refocus on other areas and the industry would gain too.

“It doesn’t make sense for Toshiba to continue putting effort into this,” said Koichi Ogawa, a chief portfolio manager at Daiwa SB Investments.

“It needs to cut its losses and focus its resources on promising businesses.”

Swift resolution?

Blu-ray and HD-DVD have fought to become the pre-eminent high definition format to help revitalise the $24bn global home DVD market.

But the two formats are incompatible with each other and so consumers have had to choose between machines that played only one type of disc.

As a result, many have held back to see which would become the industry standard and, like the battle between Betamax and VHS video recorders in the 1980s, this has been damaging to the industry as a whole.

The video machine war lasted a decade, so the prospect of Toshiba abandoning its HD DVD just two years after launching the player have been cheered by investors and analysts.

Toshiba shares surged 5.7% to 829 yen, topping the benchmark Nikkei 225, which rose 0.1%.

Source – BBC

February 15th, 2008 by admin

Microsoft Windows Vista – Here today, gone 2009?

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With Vista barely a couple of months old, it seems that we won’t have to wait five years until Microsoft unveils the new OS’s replacement.
Ben Fathi, a corporate VP in Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division, said in a media interview that the software company is drawing up plans to usurp the software with a follow-up codenamed ‘Vienna’.

Fathi said that work on Vista was delayed as the company got to grips with sorting out a number of security flaws in XP that prompted it to release Service Pack 2 in August 2004.

This work led to a significant number of features in the new operating system being dropped, such as a new filing system called WinFS. It is hoped the first service pack touted for Vista will add features, such as HD-DVD playback and Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), formerly known as Palladium. The service pack will also include bug fixes already reported in the software.

Fathi said that Longhorn (Vista’s codename) was put on the ‘back burner for a while’ as developers fixed problems.

‘Then when we came back to it, we realised that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn’t deliver in one release.’

He said that Vista had been delivered two and a half years after XP Service Pack 2 and expected the new OS to be ready in the same time frame, around 2009.

He said that one of the new features that might show up in Vienna was “Hypervisors”, adding virtualisation code into the OS itself. He added that the next few months would reveal more about the nascent OS.

Source – PC Pro

  

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