Month: May 2009

Now that Windows Vista is a mature product I believe the compulsory education sector needs to get up to speed on the process of upgrading to it, as Windows XP support is soon to be phased out by Microsoft. Windows 7 is due to be released in about three months’ time, and I’ve taken the…

Last year, Google updated the Picasa software to version 3. At the time, I tried it, but was very unhappy with a few things. Principally, these were the forced automated update from 2.7 (it downloads the update without asking you and then installs it behind your back), and the way it interfered with my scanner…

Canon Powershot S1 IS: 9496 images, 47 months (202/mth). May 2005 – April 2009, display circuitry failed. Canon Powershot A400: 5960 images, 21 months (283/mth). June 2005 – March 2007, sold. Canon Powershot A450: 3265 images, 10 months (326/mth). March 2007 – January 2008, dust entered lens. Canon Powershot A460: 4512 images, 16 months (282/mth).…

OK, I now have the top off the camera so let’s see what is revealed, starting with the top panel itself. At top left you can see a sliding switch that is moved by the rotating zoom controller to zoom the lens in or out. Below it is some shiny metal holding the power switch…

Technorati Tags: Canon Powershot S1 The first digital camera that I owned was a Canon Powershot S1 IS. It’s an ultrazoom camera with a 10x lens, and takes photos at up to 3.2 megapixels. The Powershot S1 IS was the first of the Powershot S IS series cameras which ended with the Powershot S5 IS…

I was talking to one of our software vendors about application compatibility, and they said that not many of their customers had asked about Vista. I guess there is nothing new in this. Not everyone will go to the latest and greatest. Not every school will have the ability to re image lots of computers…

This article describes a fix to IIS7 configuration that will allow PHP 5.x to run on a Windows domain controller. The problem was first described in this article here. The fix also affects the operation of Windows Server Update Services, if you have it in operation on the same server. The issue for PHP is…

Today I spent a lot of time working on and testing Group Policy Objects. It was rewarding for the following achievements: We had a situation where our staff users, who had no policy for MMP snap-ins applied, still could not open those snap-ins while they were logged in as a local administrator of their own…

From this point forward this blog will be about computing and technology only. Most of the other subjects previously posted here will appear on my new blog instead.

Here’s our Teach-IT 2C141 up in our building. We installed it yesterday and I’ve spent part of today doing a little tweaking. The reason we picked this is the ceiling you can see above – how high it is, and its slope. It would have almost have needed scaffolding to get to the ceiling, and…