Need Your Help

Hi, I’m trying to win a free pass to the Best Practices Conference in Washington, D.C. and I need your help. Please go here: http://bpc-passgiveaway.eventbrite.com/ and register to be on the email list for notices about the conference. If you put my email in as the referrer djxtreem@excite.com I would really appreciate the efffort. Thanks. You do not need to pay for anything just signup, it's free

MyPhone, Microsoft's newest service to backup your cell phone.

Microsoft currently has an online Smartphone backup service in it's beta stages, called myphone. The URL to it is myphone.microsoft.com. This service is great because you can backup everything or almost everything your smartphone, and have it available online via a web browser as well. Best of all right now, IT'S FREE

It's current limitations:

• Only available for windows mobile 6 and later
• Only backs up 200MB
• backs up your contact, calendar, tasks, test messages, music, photos, videos, and documents.
• Can backup data from your removable card (SD or microSD)
• If you receive corporate email via an exchange server, myphone will not sync the options that you have selected to sync with your company's exchange server, like your contacts, calendar and email.

If you never used it, click on the Try it out button. It will ask you to enter your cell #. Once you do that It will send a text message with a link to download an install file for your phone. You click on the link and it will ask you for the type of phone that you have, and then you can download and run the .cab file on your phone.

Once installed, you should see it under your programs directory. Run the program, answer accept to the agreement, log in with your LIVE ID, choose your sync schedule, whether automatic or manual, choose what you want to sync and that's it. It's really simple, and you can walk around with peace of mind that if you were to loose your cell phone or someone steal's it, you can get back all the information on it without a problem.

Try it out, let me know what you think.

Twitter from your Windows Mobile device

If you are into twitter and you have a windows mobile device check out Pocket Twit

http://code.google.com/p/pocketwit/

I have loaded on my samsung saga and it works great, it uses your forward and bakward buttons to display the different menus. It's just like being on twitter but without the PC. Check it out.

New Microsoft Labs "Thumbtack" service

Thumbtack is a new service from Microsoft Labs. It allows you to keep all the information you find on the web in a central place. It's kind of like your favorites, but this allows you to keep just the actual information from the site that you need.

I for example am always looking at technical information and other blog entries, documentation about a specific topic, say SQL or Exchange. I constantly keep bookmarks of the pages that I need to go back to and look at the info, but with thumbtack I can keep just the actual snippet of information from that page. So instead of filling my favorites with a ton of links that I need to go back and hunt down the exact piece of information that I need, I can now just keep it in my thumbtack collection. You can also share that collection with your friends or coworkers, it is a really neat service that I hope Microsoft Labs keeps around. A true hidden gem.

http://thumbtack.livelabs.com

Tablet PC software

So I received my new tablet pc this week. Nothing fancy, but I always wanted a tablet, and this one was pennies on the dollar, so it was a no brainer. It came with Vista Business and office 2007 pro with One Note. I have been hunting around for software that will make me more productive and I stumbled upon the following apps for Vista:

Microsoft Ink Desktop for Windows Vista - allows you to use your desktop as a kind of dry erase board. As your background you can use a template like a sticky note or a gridline. You can also just use the desktop as your own quick notetaking option. It's defenitly a cool addition

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e1a51f4a-9e58-45f7-985b-3c37b8eedb71&DisplayLang=en

Microsoft Experience Pack for Windows Vista - This has 4 different applications for fun and work like a crossword puzzle, equation writer, flash cards, etc..

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4861AAD3-1D67-4B02-BFD5-4ADD1879D3DC&displaylang=en

In Office 2007 you can also use the stylus to write in the different applications like Word and Excel.Go to the Review tab of the ribbon on each of the programs, and click on the Start Inking button. You should now be able to start writing in these applications like they were a piece of paper. You can choose between a Felt Tip Pen, Ballpoint Pen, and highliter with different colors.

Microsoft is really pushing the envelope with Windows 7 when it comes to touch surfaces which hopefully will make the experience for those of us with a tablet much better. Take a look at the Windows 7 blog entry for what they are doing with touch.
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/03/25/touching-windows-7.aspx

Installing Windows 2008 from a USB stick on a Dell Poweredge 2950 Server

So the other day I needed to get SQL 2008 installed on a new server. We choose to go with the 64 bit version of windows 2008 and I needed to get it installed. So to my surprise, when we purchased the box, we overlooked the fact that we needed a DVD drive and it came with a regular CDROM drive. I quickly scrambled to order one from Dell but I couldn't let this project backup just because I didn't have a DVD drive. I figured I could install it from a USB stick.

I tried to just copy and paste the files in the iso image from Microsoft but when I tried to run the install, it wouldn't run. Gave me an error about the partition being bad. After hunting around the internet I stumbled on

But first you must boot your Dell server from a USB stick and here is how:

>Enter System Setup during server startup
>In the Integrated Devices menu, select “User Accessible USB Ports” and set to “All Ports On“
>On the “Select Hard Disk Sequence” menu option, move the USB Flash drive to the top of the list
>If you have USB Flash drive connected to the server, under “USB Flash Drive Emulation Type” menu option, you must see USB drive set to “Auto“

All you have to do then is reboot the server.

First Post

Alright, I am going to take a shot at keeping a blog of IT happenings in my world. Hopefully it can help those IT guys just like me, the ones with too little time with too many things to get done. Hopefully I can share my experiences about issues that come up in my world and you guys can benefit out there in your own world.