Tag: Windows Home Server

Enabling the Safe Mode Menu Under Windows 8

Silly me let updated nVidia drivers through Windows Update which caused my computer to encounter the blue screen of death upon every boot. As a rule of thumb, I don’t accept such driver updates for this very reason despite usually being able to get out of any resulting mess. Unfortunately, because I could not seem …

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NBN and the Private Cloud

These days we hear “cloud services” bandied around as the next big thing and there is no doubting their convenience in terms of accessibility and pricing (often free). However, there may not be much consideration given to the security of such services particularly if they are located in another country where you may have few …

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Windows Server 2012 Essentials – The New Windows Home Server?

This week, Microsoft pretty much announced the end of Windows Home Server as we know it after two versions. The first being the original Windows Home Server followed up by Windows Home Server 2011 based upon Windows Server 2008 R2. With the onset of Windows Server 2012 and its various flavours I can only think …

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Choose the Best Interface for the Job

Here’s another quick tip for tonight. These days, we have all sorts of interfaces in our computers: wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB, Firewire, eSATA, Bluetooth just to name a few. However, sometimes the most convenient interface won’t be the quickest. For instance, when I was transferring all the data from the old drives to the new …

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The Apple Double Format, Network Shares and uTorrent

This might be a bit of an edge case for most people but for those of us with heterogeneous networks with a mixture of Windows and Mac OS X computers you may come across hidden files starting with “._” (so something like “._humptydumpty.doc”) and may or may not correspond with a filename of the same …

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Windows Home Server Upgrade – Progress Report

Just wanted to share with you my “upgrade” experience going from the original Windows Home Server to Windows Home Server 2011. This morning I made some hardware upgrades, specifically: adding another 4GB RAM, replacing the existing four hard drives totaling 3TB of varying sizes with three 2TB hard drives. This part didn’t take so long …

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Boydo Test Drives Windows Phone 7

Just a quick update for tonight. From here on in I will be using the new Samsung Omnia 7 I picked up on the weekend as my primary phone. For me, there’s no better approach in becoming more familiar with a device than to jump in with both feet and work it out as you …

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Windows Home Server 2011 Features Time Machine Backups… Sort of…

Automated backups for Windows machines has been a staple of Windows Home Server since it was first released and in  Windows Home Server 2011 that core functionality has been preserved. Microsoft had planned to  support backups of Mac OS X computers through the Time Machine feature however Apple removed the ability to do so by …

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Drive Extender Alternatives for Windows Home Server 2011

Last year, I covered the shock announcement that Microsoft was dropping the Drive Extender (DE) technology from its second version of Windows Home Server (formerly codenamed “Vail” but now dubbed Windows Home Server 2011). In a nutshell, DE provided some critical functionality including: storage pooling (the ability to combine multiple drives into one large storage …

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Save Your Gadgets and Power Bill This Christmas

At this time of year many of us will be doing the rounds to see family, friends and relatives and, in some cases, this may involve a decent amount of travel (intrastate, interstate or international). If you are going to be away from home you might consider doing the following: Completely shutdown your computers (as …

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