help4IT Top 10 Free Microsoft Windows PC Applications and Programs
Get more from your Microsoft Windows PC with our top 10 list of the best free Microsoft Windows PC Applications and programs.

This week’s blog is continuing the theme from last week’s posts of free applications, but this week (drum roll please) for the Microsoft Windows PC.

There really is a plethora of alternative pc applications and programs for the pc available without sacrificing functionality and usefulness. Free windows apps have been available for as long as the operating system, with capable programmers working hard to provide useful programs for windows users.

help4IT Top 10 of the best free Google Android Applications
Get more from your Apple iPhone with our top 10 list of the best free Google Android Applications.

Google Android is the newest kid on the block but has certainly made a big impact. The open source mobile operating system has already built up a strong and loyal fan base in the short time it has been available. There are some great applications out at the moment and the future is certainly looking bright for the mobile fledgling.

The majority of Google Android applications are available from the Google Android marketplace that you can easily connect to and download from your mobile device.

help4IT Top 10 of the best free Apple iPhone Applications
Get more from your Apple iPhone with our top 10 list of the best free Apple iPhone Applications.

The Apple iPhone has quickly become one the most popular handsets around, with its stunning user interface and a massive market place of paid and free applications growing at exponential rates every day it is one the most desirable handsets amongst mobile phone users. The phone unit itself is a testament to Apples design skills (only the operating system has changed since its release).

The majority of Apple iPhone applications are available from the Apple itunes store that you can easily connect and download from your mobile device.

help4IT Top 10 of the best free Blackberry Applications
Get more from your Blackberry with our top 10 list of the best free Blackberry Applications.

The Blackberry or Crackberry as it has been dubbed has a strong user base especially amongst the business community. Featuring a simple user interface and built in qwerty keyboard on some of the models, it can make an excellent tool for mobile productivity when you don’t want to use or carry a laptop.

The majority of Blackberry applications are available from the Appworld Blackberry Webstore that you can easily connect and download from your mobile device.

help4IT Top 10 of the best free Windows Mobile Applications
Get more from your windows mobile with our top 10 list of the best Windows Mobile Applications.

Windows Mobile has often been over looked what with all the publicity and uproar surrounding the iPhone and Android fanfare. What is often forgotten is that Windows Mobile has been around longer than both the aforementioned and has a great back catalogue of both free and paid for applications.

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E3821449-3C6B-42F1-9FD9-0041345B3385

Well what can we say, no blog postings since November but hopefully we be able to address this with some great postings over the next few months now that Christmas and Easter are out of the way.

To kick off the new year we thought of giving you all a very late present with 4 articles with some of the best free mobile applications available for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile.

After performing a physical to virtual conversion one of the tasks you have to do is to set the IP address of the new virtual NIC. When you do this you then get a warning message saying the IP is already assigned to the physical NIC, Windows 2008 is better than 2003 as it at leasts removes it from the old NIC for you.

All the same this seems a bit illogical, that physical NIC is no longer connected to the server so why should it keep the details? Also it can cause confusion for some services as the details are still stored in the registry even though the NIC isn't active. Should you have a dig around there's no trace of it in the Device Manager though, and hacking bits out of the registry isn't a great idea.

The process for removing the old NICs is actually quite simple and I found a good explanation of how to do it here:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=419

I've been migrating a client to vSphere 4 this weekend and have encountered this problem with all their servers, and its not the first time either so I thought I should share the solution.

This is most common with Dell servers and their so called "OEM" licensing, and its another one of their sly cost-saving measures that you dont notice until they really cause you a hassle. To elaborate a bit more, you  may or may not be aware that OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer, and such a license is supposed to only be used once on the hardware it is supplied with. HP are more honest about their licensing and offer two types of OEM license, Standard and "BIOS Locked", which sometimes appears as "Restricted OEM" if you run a system information tool such as Belarc. The difference is quite major, standard OEM will require re-activation after a significant hardware change whilst BIOS Locked will not re-activate after a change. You can guess which version is cheaper, hence why Dell use it, but its hard to tell beforehand as they do not tag it any differently.


Its always a good idea to use a tool such as Belarc to get a full system report before you start a conversion, here's part of my one:


Dastardly Dell fail to mention that this is actually an OEM-Restricted license....


Since converting a server to a virtual machine represents a significant change of hardware it will initiate the re-activation process, with standard OEM you will just get the popup reminder after you have logged in. BIOS locked OEM however will not let you get past the logon prompt, even in Safe Mode, you have to complete the re-activation process or shut the system down. Seems simple enough until you go through the process, probably having to use the "Telephone" option as you can't configure the network properties beforehand, and after typing all the numbers you will end up with a Microsoft operator telling you to contact Dell (or the original hardware supplier).

You've probably already spent all the time on the phone to Microsoft and Dell getting nowhere, but if you haven't yet then don't bother. The only way you will get it to activate at this stage is to obtain a new OEM product key and I haven't found a way to convince them yet. There is a not too painful solution though, but it might cost you a new license:

You need to obtain a license key for the version of Windows that you are running that you know will activate and the media to go with it. It doesnt matter if your VM is Windows 2003 R1 and you can only get an R2 license and media, this process will still work and you'll get an R2 update as a bonus. Try and make sure that the media is the same service pack level as the VM though otherwise you may get a lot of errors until you can reapply the service packs later.

Boot your VM off the Windows CD you have obtained, if you are using ESX then you will probably have to go into the virtual BIOS and change the boot order first, and the install process will start. Select the option to install Windows and it will run a scan for existing installations on the hard disks, if at this point it says it can't find any hard disks then you need to check what the virtual SCSI controller is. This is only likely to occur with ESX as HyperV and Xen both use IDE, if the controller is "BusLogic" then try changing it to "LSI Logic Parallel" and you should find the installer recognises it next time. 

The Windows Setup routine should find your existing installation so select the option to repair it, then let it run through the re-install process. About halfway through it will prompt you for a product key, enter the new one you have obtained and it should accept it, if not then you haven't got the right media to match the key type - OEM keys need OEM media, Volume License needs VL media and retail needs full retail media. 

There is another issue which sometimes pops up if your server has .Net 2 installed, you may be prompted for the CD2 media as it wants an "install.exe" file, but this isn't anywhere on the Windows Server media. To get round it you have to download the dotnet2 redistributable and use a program such as 7zip to unpack it (you'll see the install.exe in there!) and then another program such as ISOrecorder to turn it into an ISO. Mount your new ISO on the VM and the installer will happily continue, I've also heard the same thing can occur with IE 7 or 8.

Once the installer has completed the server will reboot and this time you should be able to login without any problems. Before you do  anything else though I advise running Windows Update as the repair process will have effectively uninstalled every update released after the media date.

Below are instructions that might help you to resolve outlook reminder pop up problems.

As Microsoft already defined a normal procedure to resolve this issue but in some situations this solution doesn’t work so probably follow Procedure two which I am going to define in this article.

Please first check the basic configuration of the Outlook.

We've just acquired a pair of HP DL380 G6s for our vSphere 4 test lab, they have the new Intel Nehalem Xeon CPUs and chipset with all the latest virtualisation features. Plenty more to come on all that but first of all here's something you won't find in the documentation. Having just installed the ESXi 4.0 hypervisor on the servers the classic question came up from one of the junior technicians - "what's the difference between ESX and ESXi?". Someone else then answered that ESXi doesn't have local console access like ESX does, so all management has to be done from the vSphere client. Although this answer would probably score you points in the VMware exam its not exactly true, as I was able to prove.... This is the same procedure which worked in ESXi 3.5, it still works in 4.0 too. Although VMware do provide a remote CLI appliance that gives you much of the scripting support you'd get with ESX sometimes its much easier to use the console, so once you've got your ESXi4 server up and running at the yellow and black screen do this:
1) Press Alt-F1 2) Type "unsupported" - note you wont see this echoed on the screen, but after you press return you will be prompted for the root password. 3) Enter the password 4) Marvel at "tech support mode"

Whilst you're in there why not give yourself remote SSH access too:
1) type "vi /etc/inetd.conf" 2) remove the # before the SSH line, save and close 3) enter "services.sh restart"
The VI text editor is a good example of how ESXi has been stripped down, its the old school *nix text editor and you will probably have to Google the instructions for it if you haven't used it for a while, but forget about something fancier like Nano. Like its says on the warning page though, this is "unsupported mode", so if you break it don't expect to get any support, you'll just have to re-install. ESX Server was has always been in effect a glorified Linux server, with all the admin and configuration options you would expect from a Linux server. The problem VMware had was that it was getting rather bloated, a standard ESX 3.0 install would use near enough 2GB of disk space and took a good few minutes to boot. In response to this VMware developed ESXi, a lean, mean hypervisor with minimal disk and memory footprint which could then be "embedded" on a server. This fitted in with VMware's vision of the future of virtualisation, where server boxes just become plug and play vSphere resources. It also happened to reduce the functionality enough to not annoy all those people who had paid for ESX when they started to give ESXi away for free :) Reading the VMware documentation you get the impression they rebuilt the ESXi hypervisor from scratch as a dedicated virtualisation OS. In fact it looks more like they went through their last Linux build and simply removed all the stuff which wasn't essential. As a result there is still a Linux based OS under there, and a console you can access, but a lot of the packages you might expect as standard won't be available.