I was on Dell’s website today (and yesterday in fact) looking at an Inspiron 560s. Dell’s website has 4 different “systems” with various options, bells, whistles, etc.
After going online to try and “Personalize” a system I noticed the website intentionally steering me to a model with a higher base price just to get the video card I wanted (it was $100 dollars more). According to the “Tech Specs” all those systems are basically the SAME! The case and the motherboard in all Inspiron 560s systems are the exact same, they then layer various types of processors, memory and hard drives on top of the foundation. Nothing new right?
Here’s the old bait and switch:
What I’ve discovered is Dell tricking the unknowing consumer to pay more than they need to by NOT offering the same options for a “lesser” model thus, to get the add on video card (NVIDIA GeForce® G310 512MB DDR3) you are forced to buy the more expensive model. You DON’T need to buy the more expensive model because the NVIDIA card will in fact go into the less expensive model but who’d know that if you’re just some non-nerd shopping for a computer?
As a side note, Dell has begun saying “This quote is only good for today” and they’re no longer honoring the typical 30 day quote time. This too is a typical high pressure sales tactic used to pressure consumers into pulling the trigger early. It’s subtle but effective!
Dell – your bait and switch practices are shameful! So are your subtle high pressure sales tactics! Are you owned by ABC Warehouse another infamous bait and switching company with high pressure sales tactics (Read more here –> Link)?
NTP stands for “Network Time Protocol“, it’s a method for computer time synchronization. If your computer is a member of a Windows Domain your computer automatically synchronizes to the PDC or Primary Domain Controller. The problem is, where does the PDC synchronize to? I found the domain clock off by 5 minutes today (and it wasn’t the first time), which I suppose isn’t that big of a deal unless you use the computer clock for things like appointments or meetings. Better late than never right? :)
I found a cool website called ntp.org that will allow you to leverage their extremely accurate time servers. If you have a windows server try these commands! This is a combination of commands found here and here:
Network time is controlled by this method: net time /setsntp:pool.ntp.org
You can “refresh” a server or workstation with this command: net stop w32time && net start w32time
* I failed to mention this and I’m editing this old post.
Server command: net time /setsntp:pool.ntp.org
Workstation command: net time /setsntp:yourserver.com
This way all your network hosts are staying on your internal network and you’re not killing poor ntp.org with all the requests :)
* Note: gswin32c.exe is found in the BIN folder wherever you install GhostScript and the “1st.pdf, etc” section above are the PDF’s you want to merge, the 1st being the first in the file and so on…
* Note: You can also use a full path for your PDF like this …-sOutputFile=YourMerged.pdf “c:\temp\1st.pdf”, etc, etc…
GhostFriend:
GhostFriend needs a few files to work (I copied 4 but I’m not sure it needs all of them). I copied this list of files from the GhostScript BIN folder to the folder with GhostFriend in it. GhostFriend doesn’t install – it’s just and executable which is nice because if you’re not an administrator or power user on your PC you can use it without the blessing of your IT Staff :)
File List to copy into the GhostFriend directory:
gswin32c.exe
gswin32.exe
gsdll32.lib
gsdll32.dll
Once you do that simply double click “GhostFriend.exe” and you have a BRILLIANT gui to help you merge your PDF’s via GhostScript.
I think it’s a real shame that people (especially those in local governments) don’t see Google’s ploy for what it is and that people aren’t speaking out to take a more rational approach to the Google Gigabit Fiber announcement. It’s a marketing campaign, typically people / companies have to pay for a marketing campaign but not Google because of their marketing brilliance! I can’t believe how “excited” people are at the opportunity for “Gigabit fiber” to their houses. Would any other business making promises they may or may not fulfill get in trouble for this type of hype? Can we please look at this Google hype logically and sensibly?
1 – Google’s doing what a Walmart might do at the checkout when they’re looking to place a new store: “Can I have your zip code”. This is an attempt at Google to see where they can get the most bang for the buck, where the MOST customers might be. The old model was to build it and they will come. I suppose Google is smart about this approach, I bet one of their PHD’s came up with the idea!
2 – Customers, Google is not doing a service to the community, make no mistake about it. They’re looking to jump into the Cable TV business, the phone business (in part they already have), and anything else they can serve over Internet Protocol. You know, to take advantage of ANY connectivity you need a device, do poor and under served people have the devices to access digital data Google provides? I would suggest they don’t and they’ll always lag behind so no matter what Google says unless they have Section 8 computers and cell phones it won’t really help that class of population!
3 – Google would love to have their own network, that way they don’t have to be beholden to their competitors beefs, currently Google relies on external networks which are fastly becoming DIRECT COMPETITORS, ATT, NBC, ABC, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Charter, etc, etc, etc (some are direct already!). It’s only in Google’s best interest, NOT the community, for Google to get a fast and furious foot hold – to gain and take market share away from entrenched vendors. Is this bad? Probably not, competition is good but I think we need to know the real reasons for Googles Gigabit Hype, it’s mostly good for them not you even though you might see benefit in the end!
4 – Google’s marketing campaign, isn’t it a shame how we act like sheep? All Google has to do is drop an idea and right away millions of us are ready to fill out a survey and submit applications but for what? So you can get fast Internet to your house? So you can get viruses, spyware, filter through junk email and waste even more time updating your Google Buzz status? So you can download Avatar in 5 minutes instead of 55 minutes? How will this actually help anyone? It seems like more hype the more I think about it.
5 – Economic impact, I wonder how much real economic impact this will make on a community? Certainly you should already be seeing shifts in your local community because of companies like NetFlix. I bet there’s a local video store that’s recently closed in your local neighborhood because of slumping sales thanks to NetFlix or Block Buster online! It’s not that Google would be creating jobs, they’d merely be shifting them or they might in fact be importing them because the local community doesn’t have the skill or talent to support Google’s technology. I’m sure there are many communities who’ve experienced that, their talent pool isn’t Google qualified!
6 – Why would you want to be part of an experimental network? I can imagine anything that’s experimental would be buggy, it’s EXPERIMENTAL. They’ll be using you as the guinea pig or a lab rat. I wonder if users who suffer outages or poor performance will see their excitement wane? Maybe users will switch back to the more reliable providers they once vilified?
7 – If I think of anymore I’ll update the post!
What’s utterly shameful in my opinion (and not surprising) how most have give in to the herd mentality, we’re sheep, everyone jumping on the Google Gigabit bandwagon. Can someone with a voice louder than mine start bringing sense into the Google Gigabit conversation, it’s maddening how the public can’t see what’s truly happening! You’re being manipulated at Gigabit speeds!
Rafael Wolf
Director for The Center of My Own Opinion
Create an “alphabet.txt” file containing all the letters in the alphabet beginning with d.
d
e
f
g
,etc, etc, etc
for /f %%i in (alphabet.txt) do if exist %%i:\USMT\*.* xcopy %%i:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
I picked this up from a Windows 7 document M$ posted about the “User State Migration Tool”. In the document found > here < they give an example for you to run the USMT from a pen drive. They had this command set.
If exist D:\USMT\*.* xcopy D:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist E:\USMT\*.* xcopy E:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist F:\USMT\*.* xcopy F:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist G:\USMT\*.* xcopy G:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist H:\USMT\*.* xcopy H:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist I:\USMT\*.* xcopy I:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist J:\USMT\*.* xcopy J:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
If exist K:\USMT\*.* xcopy K:\USMT\*.* /e /v /y C:\Windows\USMT\
This is pretty trivial (I know) but it certainly cleans up the batch file should I decide to add more information in it or if I add this to a larger set of tools, maybe a utility menu where this is merely just an option for other technitians to use. Should I need to add more than just a “copy data from my pen drive to my hard drive” in the future I could easily do so and it’s a great reference for people looking for for loop examples. For more for loop examples click > here <
Most of the stuff I post here are technical notes turned blogs so we can all bennefit!
Have you encountered this error with Windows Vista or 7 when you use roaming profiles?
Description:
Windows cannot locate the server copy of your roaming profile and is attempting to log you on with your local profile. Changes to the profile will not be copied to the server when you log off. This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.
DETAIL – Access is denied.
What fixed this issue for me was a combination of things:
Create a new folder called \\server\profileshare\enduserfolder.v2, an example would be like this, my server name is “IM”, the profile share folder on server IM is called “TheMan” and my end user’s login account is “Fool” so I’d have to create a folder “Fool.v2”, it would look like this: “IM\TheMan\Fool.v2” :)
Apply permissions, don’t inhereit, delete “authenticated users”, add your end user permissions up to “modify”…full if you really want to but there is no need.
Log on
In that document on roaming data it discusses how Windows 2000 and XP have the same profile stucture but if you’ve used Windows Vista and 7 for even a brief amount of time you know that the profile structure has dramatically changed. To deal with this Vista and 7 with respect to roaming profiles looks for a .v2 extension on the folder. If you precreate your folders for users who will be migrating and you’ve set the permissions appropriately you should have no problems migrating your end losers to the new OS.
Over the past 3 years I’ve come into contact with Sage Software products. I’m curious if anyone else has had problems with this company? By the way, I don’t discriminate! Anyone have problems with Microsoft, Intuit, or others? Please feel free to share, I’d LOVE to know. I asked on more than one occasion for a contact to other companies who’ve installed their products and who “LOVED” it. The managers I spoke with said sure, let us contact those companies and we’ll have them give you a call but I’m still waiting, I’ll update this post should that change!
I have several big beefs with Sage that I’ve finally been able to speak with someone about at Sage although who really knows if it has fallen on deaf ears? Maybe they’ll do something about it? Until then I’ll post to my hearts content!!!
Here’s my list:
Pre-Sales technical questions aren’t answered:
I had pre-sales technical questions when evaluating their products against their competitors products but couldn’t find anyone who could answer them. By the way, Microsoft was worse, I was rooting for their product but I couldn’t get through the front door and they NEVER called me back once. You’d think they’d want to sell some software! I just found out the other day why Sage still supports Windows 2000! It took me 3 years to get that answer! Windows 2000 went into “extended support” in 2005 which, from most in the IT community is considered unsupported because outside of security patches you have to pay for support. Apparently Sage supports one year past anything in extended support. I told them to market that as the “Sage +1” plan, who knows, I think it’s kind of silly for them to support all those OS’s, certainly it’ll kill your developers and your support staff. I wonder how many people still use Server 2000 with Sage products anyway?
Shoddy Documentation:
Most of the documentation makes claims like MAS 90 can only support 10 networked clients before it experiences file locking problems and their documentation encourages you to upgrade to MAS 200. Besides the fact MAS 200 has some build in Terminal Client there is no difference between 90 / 200, their documentation actually said that. If you want MAS 200 pay less for 90 and put it on a Terminal Server, you’ll save 50% of the cost! That kind of shows me their entire model isn’t well thought out among other things.
Their documentation doesn’t have any metric information, per client bandwidth utilization, disk I/O on transactions, no min’s no max’s, etc. They don’t even make estimations. I spoke with some folks at MAS just the other day and they said it was impossible to know. I find that impossible to believe! They said it depends on how you use it. Isn’t that true for any software? I’ve got a client with 20 or more clients all using the MAS 90 fat client on a gigabit network without incident. We’ve only recently had a lock file issue because of a NIC driver problem but I’ll keep tabs on what’s going on. CPU utilization, disk I/O, etc is nill I’M ACTUALLY IMPRESSED by their product from that regard. It lives past their low expectations, it’s almost like MAS 90 is Sage’s red headed step child :).
Customer Support:
Their customer support might be good if you can get to the right person but that’s difficult. I’d rather pay more for support if they were able to help faster, redirect your question to the right person, they’re only open till 8 PM, that is, if they’re not in training so if you run 3 shift’s you’re out of luck or you have to pay for extra support. I’m not sure what that costs?
Customer Relations:
Another point I thought odd was an email reply to a complaint I had. It included the President and COO of the company I do IT support for on the reply. This was uncalled for and I made them know that in my reply which didn’t include the COO’s address on it. Later, another support manager was insisting to not only cc the COO but the CFO in an introduction letter. Of course that angered me further and I emphasized in 3 responses that is not acceptable. The justification was that this “introduction letter” wasn’t of a technical matter so he could essentially go over my head, furthermore since I was a consultant and didn’t work at the company he could do this. He later said he wouldn’t contact the COO and CFO because I verbally requested it (how many times do I need to ask again?). I think it’s a tacky ploy by the management team to include people in communications that aren’t supposed to be included, clearly it was trying to be used as a leveraging tool to tamper down my complaints. It was certainly not appreciated. What software company calls the COO and CFO or emails them? They have much bigger things to handle than a low level quarrel between their IT person and a software company. I can’t stress enough how ridiculous this was, truly laughable!
Business Model:
Sage and it’s partners live on a high horse, they think everyone that’s not a reseller, Sage Certified, Migration Specialists, or whatever hokey title isn’t capable of managing their product. If they just had the documentation available even a cave man could do it! Most of their partners seem to be less than intelligent even about the products they support anyway and I’ve dealt with three of them. There is an attitude at Sage I just don’t like, same goes for the resellers. I spoke with several people over there about the “do it yourselfer”, I used that on purpose and they bit hook line and sinker. They said their product isn’t for the “do it yourselfer”. I wanted to confirm their thinking, that unless you pay them, their “partners”, etc for support then you won’t be able to manage their product because you’re not intelligent enough, skilled enough, technical enough or you don’t know how ERP / MRP software works. That’s frankly not the caseSage because you can if they provided the documentation, but they don’t! They protect their resellers and partners by keeping users IGNORANT. Isn’t that why customers pay 1500 / year for support? To get the documentation to support their product and for that ability to pick up the phone and call? That should apply on all aspects of the software not just the use of it but installation, migration, or general administration of the product. Reseller protectionism hurts their product more than they know – in my opinion. I’m sure I wouldn’t hate it as much if I had the tools to properly support it, instead I have to reboot the server or reverse engineer the thing.
Why I wrote this:
There were a few links prompting me to write this along with recent personal conversations I’ve had with some customer service personnel and I thought I’d ask the Internet Community at large if Sage Sucks or is it the greatest thing since sliced bread?
I am currently in the “Sage Sucks” group even though management has seemingly made efforts to appease my complaints, I do appreciate that. It’ll take more than a few conversation to get me into the neutral or positive category though.
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My Gift To Sage:
I just sent a kind gift to the folks at sage, it’s a book called “Why Software Sucks“. I think they earned it, I went all out for the folks on the management team, 13 copies, all gift wrapped with Amazon gift wrapping paper and a nice card that said this:
“Dear Jeff, A gift for you and your wonderful management team.
It’s no joke, I sincerely think your team would do well to read this
wonderfully humorous and oh so true book about your industry.
Please distribute to your team.Best wishes”
It’s 240 characters EXACTLY, all the room they gave me on the note! The gift which I’ll write off on my taxes ha ha cost me $262.61, including tax, shipping and the gift wrapping – well worth it if something gets done around there! :)
My gift to Sage MAS90 / 200 Support Services Management
Cheers, I hope you guys and gals enjoy the book!
Rafael Wolf
Director for The Center of My Own Opinion
I have a client who I recommended upgrading to a reliable and inexpensive managed switch. We took 3 D-Link gigabit switches and consolidated to one 48 port TrendNET TEG-448WS Gigabit Switch. I must admit, I was a bit nervous putting all our eggs into one basket.
We bought the switch from NewEgg and it only had one review. The reviewer said the switch was slow on large data transfers and they didn’t speak highly of it. We took a small calculated risk and boy did it pay off.
Switch has been up for 376 days and counting with not one xfer error!
Have you ever WISHED you could capture a stream of your favorite audio program on the net? What about capturing your favorite NPR program? I know I know, they usually make them available for download but some sites don’t, all they do is stream it once and it’s gone forever especially some less popular websites or genres of music.
I found a program on the net call “MPlayer“. It’s AWESOME!
Once you download it you have to figure out where it installed, if you have Windows XP like me it’s in your program files (C:\Program Files\SMPlayer\MPlayer). If you open a command prompt and cd there like this…
cd\
cd “Program Files\SMPlayer\MPlayer”
You’re there!
Now you can issue a few commands like this. These are some streams I helped a buddy hook onto but they’re great examples.
You could do a lot of different things with this tool. One serious challenge is to find the source for your stream. If WMUK didn’t post their direct link on their help URL I would have struggled to figure it out (but I would have gotten it eventually!). I might post some methods to find your stream source or just let me know if you need some help!
I learned this command from a colleague at my present job and over the past two weeks have learned to LOVE it. The “AT Command” which schedules a task on either local or remote PC’s. I only use it on XP PC’s so I’m not sure if it’s available on other OS’s like Vista, Windows 7 or legacy OS’s.
There’s also another command which Microsoft says is “more powerful” – schtasks. This command replaces the “at” command and is probably more relevant to the newer OS’s like Vista and Windows 7.
In the end I think the syntax is similar so using either is your choice!
If you want to schedule a command locally use a command like this:
at 00:00 “\\yourserver\yourshare\batchfile.bat”
This simply schedules the task “at” midnight on your local computer calling “batchfile.bat”, within “batchfile.bat” you can have your script which does something. Maybe it installs software, deletes files, sets security permissions, etc, etc? Possibilities are a plenty!
Here are some more examples of an at job:
:: Schedules a job at midnight on a remote PC
at \\networkcomputer 00:00 “\\yourserver\yourshare\batchfile.bat”
:: Schedules a job next tuesday on a remote PC
at \\networkcomputer 00:00 /next:Tuesday “\\yourserver\yourshare\batchfile.bat”
:: View a scheduled task on a remote computer
at \\networkcomputer
:: Delete a scheduled task on a remote computer, job number 1, if it’s job 15 you’d replace the 1 with 15
at \\networkcomputer 1 /delete
at \\network computer 15 /delete
:: Schedule a job at midnight every Tuesday
at \\networkcomputer 00:00 /every:Tuesday “\\yourserver\yourshare\batchfile.bat”
:: Here’s a for loop to schedule a job on a list of PC’s at 11 PM:
for /f %i in (c:\pclist.txt) do at \\%i 23:00 “\\yourserver\yourshare\batchfile.bat”
:: Here’s a for loop to delete the scheduled job on a list of PC’s at 10 PM just in case you want to delete the job!
for /f %i in (c:\pclist.txt) do at \\%i 1 /delete
I hope this helps anyone looking for AT command help!
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