my world of IT

As anyone who reads my blog knows I am a strong advocate for VDI techonlogies particulary Citrix VDI-in-a-Box which has the key advantage of being able to use local storage (which is great for SSDs!). As part of this I’m now happy to report that Citrix has used my old workplace (a medium secondary school in Oxfordshire) as a case… Read more

For a while now Skype have offered a MSI, a ADM template and a nifty little guide on Enterprise Deployment considerations but so far I haven’t found a decent guide which shows how to bring all of these components together to get Skype out there on your client PCs. In this guide I will be looking to, deploy Skype 6.3… Read more

For a few days I’ve found that printers that have been published in Active Directory (from our 2008 R2 printer server) were not appearing in the directory or find printers tabs (see above). With about 120 printers deployed and only 5 showing up there had to be something wrong. As it turns out the Printer Service was starting before the… Read more

A little while back I moved to Office 2013 (from 2010) however in the past few days I noticed that Windows Update wanted to install 2 updates – both of which would fail with error code 80024002D. As it turns out this was a lingering update from Office 2010 that was trying to install, naturally as 2010 was now long… Read more

Even in this modern world of HTML5 there is still a very strong case for Flash Video playback (after all its still the option of choice on YouTube), the only problem is when you play flash video inside a Virtual Desktop session (VDI) the servers CPU can quickly be chewed up and so ruin the experience for everyone. The simple… Read more

For the past few days Microsoft has been slowly rolling out the shiny new Windows Phone 7.8 update to all the happy people out there with Windows Phone on 7.5. Nokia phones were reportedly the first to get the update however other users with phones like the HD7 have also reported that the update has started to appear on their phones. Some… Read more

I’m currently in the process of setting up the latest version of Citrix VDI-in-a-Box on Server 2012 Hyper-V and have come across an interesting error while the installer attempts to install .NET Framework 3.5.1. .NET Framework 3.5.1 is not installed and the installer was unable to install it automatically. Please install the .net framework 3.5.1 and run the installer again…. Read more

I’ve recently been testing our disaster recovery abilities particularly in restoring servers from the bare metal recovery feature of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012. When restoring one of our servers (that is a virtual machine) I was getting the error message below just before the drive data starts to copy over. The system image restore failed. Error details: Element… Read more

Little bit of an interesting issue that I came across today that I thought I would share… One of our staff was having issues working with PowerPoint 2007 which we deploy through App-V 4.6 – basically the mouse would stop working normally acting as if something else was clicking on part of display. When running PowerPoint the entire PC would… Read more

A little while back in response to a poorly researched article on a tech website I decided I would list out the parts I would use of building a basic gaming PC for less than £350. With Windows 8 and AMDs latest FM2 socket processors now out it seemed to make sense to update that article. So for a mere… Read more