I have a huge amount of friends on the East Coast, and I love talking with them, but one comment on Facebook caught my eye this morning. “Snowpocalypse 2010″ made a great headline for her comments, then it turned into “Shovelpalooza” when she got outside.

I try to keep personal stuff off Protocol16, but to anyone on the East Coast, I feel your pain. I suffered through the Blizzard of ‘96 in PA and remember digging out a Pathfinder after an airport-sized snow blower blew 8 feet of snow on top of it… I just hope that all of you are keeping warm inside, and sane, while cabin fever tries to take over.

Niki – you can still make me laugh!
Justin

Normally, I don’t talk about sports, but today, I found some really cool technology during the half time show of the Super Bowl.

If you saw it, you would have seen the UFO looking stage that The Who played on. It had some really cool LED effects going on with programmable arrows, “glitter” effects, different colors, and a all kinds of neat stuff.

My hat’s off to the guys and girls that put that show together. That took a lot of technical work to get all that to function like it did. I’ll post some picturs later if you didn’t see it.

Yes, I know, it’s not computer repair related, but it was pretty neat stuff.
Justin

PS: We’re STILL open…

Barely 13 hours into the Windows 7 bonanza, Protocol16 ran into it’s first Windows 7 upgrade problem.

Our customer had Vista Home Premium, 32-Bit and they were attempting to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate, 32-bit. Windows 7 would appear to install then the computer would restart normally. Windows 7 would appear to load and then…restart. As it restarted, the Vista screen came back (this is called a Rollback). Our customer was a more experienced individual and was stumped.

The only “error” that would pop-up for the customer was that the installation had failed and the computer had been rolled back – with an OK button.

In the logs, the upgrade installation complained about Symantec Endpoint Protection and Network Access Control being installed. We also noticed setup log complaints of a SoundMax driver on the computer (the Driver is the software that allows Windows to talk to the hardware). We removed the sound card driver and the Symantec software and restarted the install of Windows. Windows 7 magically came to life with no complaints.

Windows 7 will complain about most Antivirus software packages because they place locks, checks & balances and other “features” on the operating system. This can cause your antivirus to literally think that it’s being attacked while Windows is upgrading.

On another note: BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE ATTEMPTING AN UPGRADE! On one of our test computers, we ran through the upgrade process a few weeks ago and, while it “upgraded”, Windows 7 no longer kept a record of the installed programs, the network settings, etc…

We always recommend following the guidelines the installer sets for you. Unfortunately, there are times where other issues unrelated to the actual install due to how other software acts on the computer… For those times, we’re here for you.
Justin

Hello everyone out there in Portland!

I recently had the pleasure of spending my entire weekend practicing with my Small Business Server. I literally “burned it down” and “stood it back up”. In the industry, this is also known as a “nuke and pave”, but that term is more for workstations and general computers.

Basically, I decided that I was going to practice my skills and take down my server (with backups, of course), and completely reload it. This allows me to work with the hardware, the software and install everything from scratch. This is basically how a machine would show up to be configured and installed brand new.

The nice part is, I haven’t lost my touch. From throwing the disk into the server to the point where Exchange was checking email and the SharePoint site was up and running, it was 2 hours, 95% of that was waiting for the computer to run through setup, configuration and installation. Add another few hours for Windows Updates and a few other odds and ends and things are rockin’! I ended up only restoring my data since things went so well, why spend all that extra time to restore things when things are working…

To this day, I still recommend that Small Business Servers should be setup and maintained by someone with a good deal of server and administrative knowledge. Technically speaking, these machines are more complicated (in some ways) than other servers due to the software installed on them. One wrong move in one of the applications and someone can send that nice server back to the stone age very quickly. A good administrator can show any business owner the basics of setting up a new user account for an employee or resetting a password on these machines.

As always, be careful who you choose to do your work, even if it’s not us. If you have any questions, please let us know and we’ll be more than happy to answer them.
Justin