One of the benefits of Windows Home Server is the ease at which disk space can be expanded. There’s no need to set up partitions, just pop the drives in and add them to the storage pool. The HP EX475 makes it easy to add disk on the hardware side of things by using hot swappable drive bays. (The HP EX470 is the same server hardware with one less hard drive.) I decided to max-out the internal drive bays by adding two Western Digital Caviar 500GB SATA drives. HP describes [...] Read the rest »
iPhoto 7.1.3 Released
Apple has released iPhoto 7.1.3. It’s a 16.9MB download through software update on my Intel Macs and a 16.9MB standalone download. This update: …addresses issues with wire-bound books and cards. No apparent problems installing it on my iMac or MacBook although don’t use books or cards. No reboot was required. Read the rest »
Leopard Can Time Travel
Leopard may have a backup solution called Time Machine due to its ability to go back in time, but as the screenshot below shows it can also go into the future. According to the time stamps it was modified 19 hours before it existed. Actually, the file (a VMware VM) was created at 10PM the day before this screenshot was taken. It was shut down at 1am the morning this was taken. Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #25: WHS Edition
It was a week of Windows and Windows Home Server. I set up the UPS on the WHS. Then I did a factory reset due to some problems I was experiencing. After the factory reset things improved. No more sever power-offs and access from my Macs was problem free. So I then took the potentially warranty voiding step of upgrading the memory to 2GB. With the WHS sorted out I was ready to start using it. I’ve been ripping some DVDs and saving them up to the server. I’m using [...] Read the rest »
HP EX475 Windows Home Server Memory Upgrade
HP & Microsoft say that the 512MB of RAM delivered with HP server is enough to deliver 5 media streams at one time. It’s been streaming and copying files fine for me, although there’s rarely even 2 active connections and never more so I can’t say if the 5 streams is reasonable. But when I remote into the WHS and check memory usage I see it’s using 603MB, so it’s already swapping to disk. The only Add-ins I currently use are Jungle Disk and the Windows Home Server Toolkit. Neither [...] Read the rest »
Windows Home Server Recovery
I’ve been having sporadic problems with my Windows Home Server for the last week or so. The WHS was powering itself off for no reason and according to the logs it wasn’t a clean shutdown. It’s been sporadic, but happened twice on Saturday. I was also having connectivity problems from my Macs. These were also sporadic and I suspected they were due to the recent OS X 10.5.2 upgrade rather than the Windows Home Server. I figured no matter what, if I called tech support the first thing they’d want [...] Read the rest »
Windows Vista Home Premium
While Vista isn’t new on the Quest I did add a new flavor, Windows Vista Home Premium. At $100 less than Vista Ultimate it seems to be the version to get. There are only a things Ultimate provides over Home Premium including Windows Complete Backup & Restore, Windows Fax and Scan, and Bitlocker disk encryption. I don’t care about any of those but there is one thing that Windows Vista Home Premium won’t give me, and that’s Remote Access through Windows Home Server. I’m installing this in a virtual machine [...] Read the rest »
iTunes 7.6.1 Released
Apple has released iTunes 7.6.1 which: …includes several bug fixes and improves compatibility with Apple TV software version 2.0. It seems to only be available through Software Update at this time. It was a 44MB download on my Intel Macs and did not require a restart. Read the rest »
List of Software Broken by Vista SP1
Microsoft has published a list of software that has problems with Windows Vista SP1. AntiVirus and security software makes up a big portion of the list. Most of the apps already have a solution of simply (hopefully simple that is) updating to the the latest version. While it doesn’t help Vista’s reputation to have more incompatibilities the list is currently rather small and seems to contain software that puts it’s hooks into the OS. I have to say, makes running Windows in a VM even more attractive, just create a [...] Read the rest »
Apple Updates: Keyboard Firmware and Old Pro Apps
I received Apple MacBook/MacBook Pro keyboard firmware update today, on my MacBook. The bulletin describes the update as: This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues. Once the update is download you’ll see the following dialog box: Clicking update kicks off the update which took less than a minute on my MacBook. I also received the Pro Applications 2007-01 and Pro Applications 2007-02 updates again. I suspect [...] Read the rest »
