Ant Drewery

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the changes to daylight savings time in the USA. The changes have come about due to the 2005 Energy Policy Act. In previous years, DST in most of the USA ran from the first Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October. From 2007 DST will be from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. I’m based in the UK so these changes do not affect me directly but I work for a global company with a global Windows/Exchange environment so there is an impact to address.

Microsoft has had a patch available to address the issue since late November 2006. This has recently been updated to include DST changes in other time zones around the world. My recommendation is to deploy this patch to ALL Windows machines in your environment. The patch can be distributed via WSUS if you have this facility available.

Once the patch has been deployed you may need to correct entries in the Outlook calendar. Microsoft have provided two tools to do this. The first (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667/) is a tool that needs to be run individually for the affected users. The tool requires user interaction so you may want to distribute a link to a file share along with detailed instructions on how to run it and it’s potential impact. You should also give examples of why the tool is necessary so that the users have a good understanding.

The second tool is for Microsoft Exchange (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930879) and will allow you to update the calendars centrally. If you are going to take this approach you need to carefully consider the risks of a blanket update. KB930879 lists the pros and cons of this method.

You can find more information from Microsoft about the DST changes here: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

UPDATE:

There are now patches for Blackberry (http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007/index.shtml) and Windows Mobile (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/daylightsaving/default.mspx).

I often work with dual monitors and recently needed to compare two Excel spreadsheets side by side. I found that although they showed as separate instances on the Windows Taskbar I couldn’t have them displayed on separate screens. After some investigation I found that to do what I wanted I had to force Excel to open each document as a separate instance of the application. To do this try the following:

In Explorer go to Tools > Folder Options.

Choose the File Types tab then find XLS under Extensions. Highlight it and click the Advanced button.

Select Open then the Edit button.

Now in the Application used to perform action field go to the end and add a space followed by "%1". Be sure to include the quotes. You also need to unselect Use DDE. OK all of your changes. Now when you open multiple Excel spreadsheets each will be a separate instance of the application so you can move them to separate monitors. The downside is that you’ll use more of your PC resources.

This issue has been addressed in Excel 2007 beta 2.

Technorati Tags: Excel

I have an MSI RX480M2-IL motherboard in my home PC which supports serial ATA RAID. I had a single 160GB SATA drive with the SATA controller running in IDE mode and would backup my important files to an external drive whenever I remembered.

With the growing number of photos, videos and important documents on my PC, and plunging hardware prices I thought it was time I made use of a mirrored RAID set. I purchased a pair of 250GB SATA drives and got cracking.

The motherboard came with an SATA RAID driver but there was a catch - it was on floppy disk and needed to be installed during the XP installation process. I don’t have a floppy drive and I certainly didn’t want to re-install my PC so I thought through a different approach. I’d heard that XP SP2 recognises most SATA controllers so this is what I did:

First I used Ghost to image my 160GB disk to one of the 250GB disks. This way if I completely messed things up I could just plug the 160GB disk back in.

Next I changed the SATA controller settings in the BIOS to RAID and booted with both 250GB disks connected.

I was given an option during the POST to configure RAID so I created a mirror pair with my two disks. It let me choose the primary (the one I had imaged my XP installation to) and a secondary. I was given the option of doing the rebuild online or offline so I chose online.

Windows took about 10 minutes to boot but once it was up performance seemed ok. However, I noticed that both disks were showing Disk Manager and Explorer so I decided to reboot and do the rebuild offline.

With the rebuild complete Windows still took 10 minutes to startup. Both drives were still visible and contained similar data. However, I added a file to the primary and it wasn’t created on the secondary. I decided I needed the MSI SATA driver.

After downloading the driver from the MSI site I needed to find somewhere to install it. I couldn’t see any hard drive controllers in Device Manager so I chose the option to show hidden devices. Sure enough there was now a section for drive controllers and under it two entries for IDE/SATA Controllers. I updated these with the MSI driver and rebooted. The reboot only took a minute and once loaded Windows XP only saw the mirrored set as a single drive.

I need to give the PC a thorough test but the boot time is quick and performance seems good. Although I’ll still periodically backup to DVD or external drive I don’t have to worry about a single drive failure taking my data with it.

Technorati Tags: SATA, RAID, Windows, XP