There's an awful lot of noise about Windows 8 and RT around right now, and this of course includes the Surface RT. I have been trying to think of a more polarising Windows release, and although a few come close, I think it's out in front. It's not for me to say whether "polarising" is a good thing or not, but one could suspect that Microsoft has aimed for this as a desirable outcome – love it or hate it, almost everyone has an opinion. That can make or break a product – in the "break" department, I could mention Windows Vista. In the "make" side of the equation, perhaps the iPhone or iPad is appropriate – not that I intend to draw comparisons!

Opinions are an important part of selling products. Microsoft certainly want to catch your eye … but is it your initial opinion that matters? Perhaps not. For my money, they want to attract opinion - so people will talk about their products - and change your mind, if needed, by showing you what they can do.

Yesterday, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview to the general public - Microsoft's first public release of their new Windows operating system. We have seen hints of the new OS in screenshots leaked and posted on their blog, so naturally plenty of people jumped at the chance to grab a functional copy of the new Windows operating system. You can grab yours from here.

Lots has been made of Microsoft's new OS, including what it needs to do to stay competitive against Apple's OS's in both the desktop and mobile space. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will be the same platform across x86/64 desktop devices and ARM-based mobile devices - importantly, tablets and mobile phones, which Microsoft entered recently with the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

There's plenty to remember when reviewing any software that is essentially still in Alpha, or brand new Beta. Importantly, it's not complete software. Many people often review software at this stage as completed software, wh ...

It's been a good week of discovering cloud services for me. I just blogged about Cloudflare, but I also wanted to talk about a piece of software I recently discovered that makes my life incredibly easier - Gladinet.

 I have used cloud services for personal backup for a while - whether Dropbox for my Android phone (using a feature of Titanium backup) or Windows Live Mesh to sync my working documents across Windows machines, I've found cloud services incredibly helpful to ensure I'm backed up at all times. When I'm at home, SyncToy takes a secondary copy of my documents to my Windows Home Server - which I can then access via Microsoft's online WHS service - but the cloud gives me an essential offsite backup capability that gives me a great deal of peace of mind.

The problem with Dropbox and Live Mesh is that they're quite limited in space. Dropbox gives you 2Gb free, with the ability to expand slightly by inviting friends to the service, or to pay for more storage on a monthly basis. Liv ...

[Updated 9th February 2012 - please see comments for my answer re HP xw4400 and WHS 2011]

Windows Home Server is somewhat of a strange beast. It hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm, especially outside of the US in places like Australia, where – until relatively recently – it was available only as an OEM software license, and you had to build your own hardware. WHS is intended to be a pure OEM offering, as such – manufacturers like HP, Acer, et al, are meant to sell it to you within their own purpose built hardware, with value adds and nice little touches for good measure. HP, for example, delivered a range of extra add-ins in their bundle (no longer though – they abandoned the platform).

There still doesn’t seem to be a great penetration for WHS after some years. Microsoft haven’t really marketed it that heavily, and my experience is that not only have most consumers not heard of it, but neither have most computer retailers. Wh ...

Hello autechheads,

Continuing on from my post a while back about my initial experiences with SCSM SCSM Initial Experiences there have been a few developments.

Firstly, the Exchange Connector I referenced which allows connection to an Exchange mailbox for jobs, has been finalised. Hopefully it will appear in Microsoft Downloads soon...

SP1 was also released on 16th December (Technet Blog Click Here) which has a bunch of improvements, including SQL Server 2008 R2 official support. The install for me was incredibly easy and smooth, just running the update on each server/client without any issues or anything notable.

So, there's a few more reasons to consider migrating to SCSM. Some of the limitations I mentioned on my first post are still there, but there's a bit more support and maturity with the product already.

I have found myself in a situation now, where I need to move the databases from one SQL server to another. Sounds easy? Why am I asking you question ...

I've been using the Android Platform now for roughly 18 months. In that time I've owned three different Android devices - HTC Dream / G1, Motorolla Milestone, and currently  - Nexus One.

The latest release of Android dropped today - and Nexus One owners are the first to get official updates. At the moment the launch appears to be limited to devices in the US, with the rest of the population getting updates as they're progressively rolled out. 
It's also available for impatient non-USA Residents such as myself to manually install.

There's a fair number of new features in this release, here's my impression of what the newest iteration of Android is like.

Exchange Calendar + Exchange Global Address List Support

Exchange Calendar is something that I had been waiting for. I use Exchange at work, and keeping one consolidated calendar view for everything is very useful.
Having Exchange Global Address List support is ...