stuart test blog

Flickr unveiled a new feature recently that enables you to search through your address books in various email systems to find contacts that are also on Flickr. If you’ve used one of the many social networking sites, you’ll realise that this isn’t a new feature – most other social networking sites allow you to search […]

Microsoft have just announced that Windows Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing. I’m really looking forward to this product becoming publicly available and my own testing has been very positive so far. I have to correct one point made in Microsoft’s blog announcement, it was stated that Server Core doesn’t install a GUI which […]

For the second year in a row I’ve made a big effort to watch Bill Gates’s keynote speech at CES, and for the second year in a row I’ve been disappointed. Granted, the video about his last day at Microsoft showed the lighter side to him, but there were no other highlights. Surface computing is […]

I subscribe to lots of blogs written by Microsoft bloggers, and my favourites are from those who aren’t afraid to poke a little fun at themselves and their employer. Here’s a post from The Sean Blog making fun of the fact that when you right click a removable drive in Windows Vista, the kind “Safely […]

On the TV1 Breakfast show this morning, Paul Henry was interviewing Peter Griffin about security software for home computers. In my previous field engineer roles, and my current role as "IT guy" for my extended family, I’ve got a lot of experience setting up and securing home computers as well as small business computers (ones […]

Mauricio has just completed the upgrade of the Geekzone site and it is now running on Windows Server 2008 (RC0, I’m assuming.) This is a good showcase for Microsoft as Geekzone is in the top 15 NZ sites for unique visitors, according to Mauricio. Microsoft have already moved 75% of their servers on to Windows […]

This press release just popped up as I was about to sign off the for the night, but I just had to get a quick mention out: "Integrated IT Designed for Midsized Businesses" Microsoft have finally revealed some details about a new server bundle for "midsized" business called Windows Essential Business Server. This has been […]

The PowerShell team have just released the first publicly available CTP of PowerShell 2.0. This hasn’t even reached beta stage yet, so there is bound to be lots of bugs and no doubt the product will change  a lot prior to release. Lots of new features, but the stand-out ones for me are: Remote scripting […]

I’ve been persevering with Vista 64 bit over the last few weeks, but I’m failing to see any benefit in sticking with it. Very few applications are native 64 bit and some applications just do not run at all. Microsoft is probably the worst culprit – last year they released Exchange 2007 and forced all […]

I’ve been using a lot of evaluation software at home recently to build up a virtual lab that I’ll use for testing and demos. I needed to know when my eval copies of Windows Server 2003 were due to expire but couldn’t figure it out without having to trawl through Google Groups first. Turns out […]