Computers - What have you tweaked today?

I am running it on state of the art hardware and the memory issues I refer to are blue screens rather than performance related. They are improving, but given it's simply Win8 with a start menu I expected better stability.

As for the looks, I really don't like the crazy colours with metro, or the boring flat interface which resemble Win 3.11, or burying thing like Windows Updates behind a nice looking but unnecessary extra step like Settings for example. Most people have decent graphics cards which are under utilised...
 
Blue screens aren't memory issues (unless you have faulty ram). Point stands though - a Technical Preview in very early build status isn't going to be as stable as a released OS. If it were finished, we'd have shipped it already!
 
Seahorse said:
I am running it on state of the art hardware and the memory issues I refer to are blue screens rather than performance related. They are improving, but given it's simply Win8 with a start menu I expected better stability.

As for the looks, I really don't like the crazy colours with metro, or the boring flat interface which resemble Win 3.11, or burying thing like Windows Updates behind a nice looking but unnecessary extra step like Settings for example. Most people have decent graphics cards which are under utilised...
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It's windows.... you'll be able to customise it with a massive array of third party bits and pieces... just like I can with Win8 now.
 
Writing my first C# in anger today. A widget to automatically enable extra monitors and set them to their native resolution on the Windows Server 2008 workstations. From Windows 7 onwards there is a nice command line utility to do it, but Server 2k8 is takes after Vista so that means using a native C library and a small plethora of unmanaged objects.

Still, it hopefully means no more late nights/weekends when we re-image the fleet of developer PCs
 
afasoas said:
Still, it hopefully means no more late nights/weekends when we re-image the fleet of developer PCs
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Do you not just let your developers sort out their own computers? I realise an IT department has to support everyone, but in general us developer types are better able to look after their own computer than someone in marketing or HR (or indeed someone in IT, judging by some of the support conversations I've had with a few of my customers' IT departments :( ).

I'd be massively miffed if an IT department bod started fiddling around with my computer rather that letting me configure it how I want it!
 
The developers ultimately own the development environment, but it's important that it's consistent across all the workstations and consistent with the production environment so we don't end up in a situation where the software works on a developer workstation but not in the production environment.

In a way it's even more beneficial to them as they can try new tools with impunity and always relatively easily restore their machine into a known state. If they then want to adopt a new tool, I deploy it for them via group policy. It's an agile organisation so changes are generally applied quite quickly. If a change means tweaking the base image, I usually have it done within a couple of hours of receiving the request and then it's effective the next time the machines are re-imaged. The image is tested with a stream and then when proven rolled out to the remained of the team.

Some of the configuration is also maintained in source control, so they only have to commit a change and it will be rolled out to the other workstations, either on their next update from source control or next workstation reboot. The workstations are all rebooted on a two week cycle to gradually propagate changes.

The developers always work in pairs. As they rotate through different pairs and move from machine to machine, the environment they are working in is always the same. If this didn't work for them, then we would probably change it as they are a self-managing team.

I've worked as a developer in the dim and distant past in environments where I've had no control over my workstation and in developments where I've been given a bare machine. I can see why this is the best of both worlds.
 
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I can understand why you do it that way, given the environment your developers work in and the way teams are structured and the fact you have people moving around. Ours is rather different (a lot smaller company, to start with) and let's say that presents its own challenges - small number of developers, each working on different products or combinations of products requiring (very) different tools.

I can see the appeal of deployment of a base image and group policy to push new software, but for half a dozen employees / developers with (different) static roles on different products and different requirements, it wouldn't really work.
 
Luxury. I can see this policy being a problem when the IT support does not offer such a good service.
 
onomatopoeia said:
Do you not just let your developers sort out their own computers? I realise an IT department has to support everyone, but in general us developer types are better able to look after their own computer than someone in marketing or HR (or indeed someone in IT, judging by some of the support conversations I've had with a few of my customers' IT departments :( ).

I'd be massively miffed if an IT department bod started fiddling around with my computer rather that letting me configure it how I want it!
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Ahem. It's not your computer though, is it? ;-)
 
onomatopoeia said:
Do you not just let your developers sort out their own computers? I realise an IT department has to support everyone, but in general us developer types are better able to look after their own computer than someone in marketing or HR (or indeed someone in IT, judging by some of the support conversations I've had with a few of my customers' IT departments :( ).

I'd be massively miffed if an IT department bod started fiddling around with my computer rather that letting me configure it how I want it!
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Developers are expensive. Their time should be spent developing, not doing administrative IT work.
 
pwhysall said:
Developers are expensive. Their time should be spent developing, not doing administrative IT work.
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Yep, this.
If a dev's machine breaks I'd want to have it swapped out or reimaged so they're back working within an hour or so...standardisation and auto builds FTW
 
The new Ubuntu version is out today. The upgrade notification popped up in Kubuntu. I clicked the Upgrade button and 22 mins later I'm there. How nerdy was that?

Now to find out what new goodies we've got.
 
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I installed 9926 last week or the week before, just to make sure nothing we do had broken on it since I last tried it (it hadn't).

Too many other things to do to spend my life downloading and installing endless new builds of future Windows versions :(
 
Build 10114! Significant perf boost post 9xxx builds by the way, I think they removed a lot of telemetry code.
 
Busy weekend this weekend. My home office is finally decorated, carpeted etc....So full data-center relation from the garage, shutdown all servers, remove cabling, clear out 19" rack, hover, clean.....get some 1200 series Devolo homeplugs installed....Move it all and power it up....I'm also readjusting local servers with a move of DNS and DHCP servers, create a guest VLAN and share some local printers....

Hmm I think I deserve my roast dinner today....
 
Stuck some more RAM in the work laptop, its a shame it won't go past 8Gb though as running more than one lab VM is a struggle.
We have a lab environment at work but I would like to be able to run some VM's at home, perhaps its time to build an ESXi host.
 
Naturally depends on how much resources your vm require. I happily run three or four within 8GB on my machine.

For a value for money option the HP Microserver performs better than I thought. Although to be honest provisioning more than one at the same time does highlight that I/O is the bottle neck. But once they are settled down it is pretty good. Running esxi 5.5 on mine with six virtual machine active most of the time.
 
dejongj said:
Naturally depends on how much resources your vm require. I happily run three or four within 8GB on my machine.

For a value for money option the HP Microserver performs better than I thought. Although to be honest provisioning more than one at the same time does highlight that I/O is the bottle neck. But once they are settled down it is pretty good. Running esxi 5.5 on mine with six virtual machine active most of the time.
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I need to run some VM's which need 2-3Gb of RAM each so 8Gb is just not enough.
Think I will build an i5 machine with 16Gb of RAM and stick ESXi on it, just use it as a Lab Server.

I work as a Network and Voice Engineer so need to build VM's in the Lab fairly often.
 
My precision M4800 has 24Gb of ram, however I now use Azure for most of my lab work, and leave the voice VM's for my cluster of R710's. Cloud is better when free lol ;)
 
How do you get azure free with so much ram and what kind of storage? I wouldn't mind using that instead but find the cost prohibitive.
 
Get free access (100 dollars of credit) per month as part of MSDN which we get due to our gold competency with MS. The prices have dropped considerably in the last 6-12 months
 
Oh good shout. Totally forgot about my msdn subscription and competencies.

I have credits as well, not to be used for production but great for others. I'll have a look.
 
Neilc28 said:
My precision M4800 has 24Gb of ram, however I now use Azure for most of my lab work, and leave the voice VM's for my cluster of R710's. Cloud is better when free lol ;)
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Sounds good, my current company don't have anything like that unfortunately but I will be starting a new job in London in August so am hoping they will!

I seem to get Routing and Switching easily but even with lots of practice, I find Voice a struggle.
 
noneforit said:
I need to run some VM's which need 2-3Gb of RAM each so 8Gb is just not enough.
Think I will build an i5 machine with 16Gb of RAM and stick ESXi on it, just use it as a Lab Server.
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Or get something like a second hand Dell T5400 with a couple of Xeons, or an R710 if you're feeling flush (these are somewhat big and unwieldy, but don't actually need a rack to live in. I <3 mine. edit: apart from the "flock of woodpeckers" noise the SAS RAID array makes) .
 
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Picked up a TP-Link access point from a boot sale for a fiver. I thought it worth a punt in terms of extending network coverage around the home.
I don't really have a good place for a second access point without drilling some holes and running some lengths of cat 5, but I figured as this access point has detachable antennas, I could try swapping them out for some higher gain antennae. That and I'm keen to keep energy consumption down so a single AP is prefereable.

Anyway, I plugged it in and checked with Wi-Fi analyzer for signal strength. Didn't notice any new APs appear.
Factory reset.
Bingo, TP-Link AP appeared with a approx 20% better signal strength than the existing AP.

Set it up - bit fiddly at first, but after a quick bit of poking around the phone automatically connects to it.
Then I did a bit of further reading and found out that hidden in the UI are options for multi-SSID and VLAN.

An hour later*, I've got a guest wireless network providing internet access and a second 'private' wireless network providing internet and internal network access. And that's with a dumb switch between the AP and the smart switch.

And that's good news, because at least if someone does get the wireless key for the guest network [care of M$ WiFi Sense], they can't access anything on the 'private' network. I'm just contemplating pushing the guest wi-fi network over the outbound VPN connection in the event someone does use it for anything illicit.

*Most of that was spent coming to the slow realisation that the guest network didn't have internet access because I'd forgotten to add outbound NAT rules to the firewall.
 
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