Month: July 2010

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) Anti-virus program has received a lot of good press since it was released in Sept 2009. I have been gradually moving my residential customers, friends and family over to it. One small problem I have noticed: at times the MSE engine will hog up quite a bit of cpu cycles. I recently found a blog post that said that adding the MSE folders to the list of files/folders in MSE to be excluded from scannng will help reduce the high CPU usage. To add exclusions, click on Settings > Excluded files & locations, then click the Add button to add an … Continue reading Microsoft Security Essentials Exclusion List

iPhone users: from Network World this morning is an article addressing reported syncing issues to Exchange with the new Apple IOS 4.0 for the iPhones. The article points to a current workaround that is posted on Apple’s site, and indicates a more “complete” solution is required or forthcoming. The article goes on as to suggest that there is a further issue that is causing high network/usage spikes, and that this may force some companies to stop allowing iphones to retrieve emails! Update: the Microsoft Exchange Team has addressed this issue from their perspective at their Team Blog Site.

I have been a huge fan of Windows Home Server (WHS) ever since it was announced back in January 2007. This past April (2010) Microsoft released a public beta version of the next version of the Windows Home Server product, code name VAIL. The big change (behind the scenes) is that VAIL operates in a 64-bit environment, and is based on the Windows 2008 R2 platform. For a more in depth list of features with VAIL, check out this post: http://homeservershow.com/the-windows-home-server-vail-feature-list.html There are several hardware vendors (e.g. HP, Acer) that sell headless WHS systems (HP DataVault X310/X510, Acer Aspire EasyStore H340) . I have had great … Continue reading Windows Home Server (V2) VAIL