Tag Archives: vista

Driving the techies up the wall

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My work laptop has been de-vistaified and now has XP on it. Unfortunately, because this is a cheap laptop made for dribbling goons, the only drivers we can download are for Vista. This isn’t so helpful when it needs to run XP Pro to talk to our Windows Domain and Exchange Server; things Vista Home won’t do, thankyou Microsoft.

SYMPTOMS

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If a computer is running Windows Vista Home Premium, you cannot join the computer to a domain.

CAUSE

loadTOCNode(1, ’cause’);

This behavior occurs because Windows Vista Home Premium does not support a scenario where you join a computer to a domain. Windows Vista Home Premium is designed as the foundation for a home entertainment system.

STATUS

loadTOCNode(1, ‘status’);

This behavior is by design.

I’m now having an enjoyable afternoon printing out student work while trying to find said drivers. I have found many that don’t work, but nothing that my laptop actually wants to use. I will look on the CDs it came with when I get home. If that doesn’t work it’ll have to be upgraded to the version of Vista this place uses.

Let's do the timewarp

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My Macbook comes with a wonderful invention called Time Machine which is a clever incremental backup system. If an external HDD is connected to the Mac, Time Machine will ask if you want to use this as a backup drive. Saying yes then starts the backup running. It’s all automatic and keeps hourly backups for a day, daily backups for a month and then monthly backups until your external HDD fills up. And since this is a Mac, the backup is bootable without having to do anything special.

The only problem I have is that this is a Macbook, not a desktop machine. I don’t want to plug an external disk into it just to run automated backups, I have a perfectly good Linux server that I store backups on.

Unfortunately Time Machine doesn’t support network shares. Well, actually it does, it’s just an undocumented feature, and like it says on this blog you have to type the following into a terminal

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then you go to Finder – Go – Connect To Server, connect to a network share and it’ll appear in the Time Machine list of volumes. The clever part is that a disk image is created on your network share, the disk image is then mounted on your Mac, and Time Machine does its thing. Apple like disk images :)

I’m currently on 13GB of 21. This is on a freshly bought MacBook that I’ve only installed OpenOffice and Firefox onto. There must be a way of stripping this down and removing some junk.

I gave my new work laptop to the technicians at work. They were in the process of scrubbing Vista off and replacing it with XP last I saw. Vista Home won’t connect to Windows Domains so it had to go.