As web development gets more and more complex having the right tools to help you figure out what's going on is essential. I thought I'd do a quick post on the ones I find most useful. In no particular order, then, here they are. Virtual PC This one is a godsend, because as we all know, running multiple versions of …

I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that's worth posting about. It's also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction. The problem I'll post later about our …

Still no Windows Mobile 6 update for my Orange SPV M3100, but they did release an update to WM5 recently. Installing said update turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected. I don't know if anybody else has experienced the same problem, but a word to the wise - don't try the update on Windows Vista! The first …

Douglas Coupland's Jpod has been doing the rounds in the office of late. I enjoyed MicroSerfs, so approached Jpod with excitement. Frankly, I'm disappointed. It's not the writing - I 've enjoyed pretty much all of his books. It's not that the books are similar in approach and style (they are) but rather the contrast in …

I think I've mentioned before how I've been updating our IT infrastructure. Company growth has meant a need for expanded services. Add to that new versions of SharePoint and Exchange, mix in a need to run virtual servers for development and you have a need for more tin. Over the past six months I've expanded our domain …

In hindsight I should have thought of it, but even if I had, others got there first. You may remember my problems with IPMI on our X2100 servers from an earlier posting. Today I had cause to revisit the matter, as we're having terrible issues with the Nvidia RAID on one of our servers. The lack of a Windows version of …

On Saturday I got the email telling me that I'd been accepted onto the Home Server Beta 2. I'm excited about this product in a way that I haven't been about new software solutions for a while. I've taken part in beta programmes before. I've been around a while, and as an IT pro you get desensitised after a while. Vista …

I have yet to succeed in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Each time it runs through to the completing upgrade phase, gets about halfway through that bit whereupon I get stuck in a reboot cycle. I have tried this now on three separate machines and two different installed partitions on one of them. Two of the …

We're slowly migrating services onto our new servers here at Black Marble. This morning we had one of those moments where significant amounts of wall kicking and teeth gnashing ensue. Basically, we forgot that if you enable 32-bit .net support on IIS 6 it disables 64-bit support - you can't run 32 bit and 64 bit apps …