Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Support for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) ends on July 12 2011. As always this means Windows Vista SP1 will no longer receive software updates from Windows/Microsoft Update, including security updates.

If you’ve still got Vista devices deployed on your network we highly recommend that they are patched to SP2.

As always, if your devices are managed by a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server, you can enforce SP2 from there. If your WSUS server is running on Windows 2003 be aware that you may need to install another KB article in order for it to be picked up correctly. Full details over on Technet.

Posted by Karl in Desktops and Laptops, FAQ, Operating Systems, Software | No Comments »

For some time now my install of Outlook 2010 has been able to preview Word documents ok in the reading pane but the full file association has been set to Adobe Illustrator. If I save the file out to the file system and double click it, it works perfectly. So the issues is something inside Outlook only ?

A lot of digging around and finding everyone offering fixes was just doing the usual Windows file associations I found this.

Was rather concerned about running an exe from an unknown site but after some exhaustive scans I took the plunge. Fixed the problem first time on my Windows 7 x64 box. Big thank you to winhelponline.com, would love to know what it does though .

Posted by Chris in Desktops and Laptops, Software | No Comments »

We currently use Glo Remote to look at a users screen and diagnose a problem. This enables us to effectively cover a much larger area of the country than before (who is going to wait 6 hours for me to drive there!)  with response times in the minutes (average response last month was 3!).

HP Server’s have had something called Integrated Lights out  (iLO), IBM have Intergrated Management Module (IMM) they all do similar things they allow out of band (not running an OS) access to the Server, allowing for restarts, bios updates etc.  However, we haven’t in the past been able to look at a PC at these levels or that are not booting, have crashed, or are off.  All this is going to change in the near future, with new technology being brought in by Intel. It’s calledAMT and is available on Laptops and PC’s with core i5′s and i7′s (there are rumours of it working on lesser processors).

Requirements:

Processor with AMT support.

Intel PRO network card ( again it needs to support AMT)  installed to work with it. Be careful of this  as it won’t work with others!

We are starting to look at this great piece of tech, and once we have got our heads round it we will give you  more of an insight on how this works in the early new year.

Posted by JamesC in General, Laptop Hardware | No Comments »

Always trying to do our little bit to help the planet (as per our news article here) we’ve been running a little bit of software called Dynamic Energy Saver 2 on one of our test servers. It’s a (overly)graphical bit of software that effectively powers back all the major components in your PC / Server when they’re not needed. You don’t need to power it off or do anything to it when you want to use your PC in vengeance, it just lets everything run as fast as is needed. The interesting thing is that we didn’t expect it to do much at all however check the screen shot !

Yup that’s a 1Kw saving over a 50 day period on one box. Scale that up through your infrastructure and you could be looking at some serious savings. It’s effectively a piece of software that can save you money.

It only works on certain Gigabyte motherboards but is definitely worth a quick download and install.

Gigabyte’s page on the software can be found here.
And the software itself can be found half way down this page.

Posted by Chris in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops | 1 Comment »

A little while ago we posted a few OS X keyboard shortcuts here. Thought it might be worth popping one or two more on that we’ve been using daily.

To take a screen shot -
cmd – shift – 3 : takes a full screenshot and pops it on your desktop
cmd – shift – 4 : gives you a cross hair that you can draw around an object
cmd – shift – 4 then space : allows you to pick and application with a mouse click (best option in our opinion)

alt – 3 : for the # symbol
alt – 2 : for the €

More coming soon, unless you’d like to suggest some ?

Posted by Chris in Desktops and Laptops, Operating Systems | No Comments »