The World According to Mitch

I can hardly believe that it has been four years since a brash and outspoken yet passionate young man volunteered to help build a user group for IT Pros in Montreal.  After two years at the helm of the Montreal IT Professionals Community (affectionately known as MITPro) I left partly to make way for new…

You never know who you are going to meet at a user group meeting. Last Tuesday evening the IT Professionals Community of Greater Toronto hosted its monthly event at the University of Toronto.  It was great to see so many new faces at the meeting, and I was happy to meet most of them.  I…

This is an oldie but a goodie… thanks to my man in Dallas Larry Lentz for reminding me of it! Tech Support: "Sir, something has burned within your power supply." Customer: "I bet that there is some command that I can put into the AUTOEXEC.BAT that will take care of this." Tech Support: "There is…

Over the past few weeks I have been in front of a number of audiences discussing Essential Business Server.  As promised, here are the scripts I discussed to create your WindowsPE to deploy the OS portion of the EBS servers over the network:   call copype.cmd amd64 C:winpe imagex /mountrw C:winpewinpe.wim 1 C:winpemount peimg /inf=C:driversnicamd64*.inf…

In September I gave a lecture at the Toronto IT Professionals Community on different deployment technologies available to small and medium business – specifically Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 4.1, Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK), and Windows Deployment Services (Windows DS).  Essentially I was showing them how easy it is to create and maintain a…

Theresa and I bought a new car recently.  It's Green.  To be specific, it is actually a colour called Aloe Green Metallic, which to me sounds like a pretentious way of saying it's green. The car was actually available in one of seven colours, but it did not really matter, because no matter what colour…

So now that I have a day or two to play (and need it up already!), I decided to start installing my Essential Business Server environment today.  This is not my first kick at this can (I have installed eight or nine previous iterations in either beta or RTM Escrow) so I know there are…

In January last year I was introduced to a new product: Codename Q Server, or what would eventually become Windows Home Server. I joined the beta program, discussed it with other MVPs, but never got around to installing it. Well last week I did, and I am kicking myself for not having done so earlier.…

I encountered a problem this week-end that baffled me for a while… Here is the infrastructure, the problem, and the solution. This network diagram is a rough sketch of the relevant portions of the network.  At present I have a server (HP DL585 G2) working as my virtualization parent, with my Windows Small Business Server…

I am sitting in William's Coffee Pub in Oakville (my home town, outside of Toronto) watching the leaves blow the last of the leaves from the trees.  It is barely above the freezing point, and I am beginning to wonder (as I tend to do this time of year) what quirk of fate brought my…

Formatting a computer is so easy that anyone can do it.  Maintaining a secure, well-managed infrastructure is not; it requires not only someone who understands computers, but a good deal of common sense.  The goal of SWMI.CA is to educate people on the best ways to do this, whether they use a single computer with…

I owe a great debt to Microsoft Canada (Damir!) and Hewlett Packard Canada (Laurie!) who came through to supply me with a server for my last two projects.  If you happen to find yourself in the market for a server for a small to mid-sized company I cannot think of a better product than the…

For more information about the Windows Springboard Series visit http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8418918. In a previous post (http://mitchgarvis.com/blogs/mitch/archive/2008/05/05/windows-vista-comments-from-a-converted-enthusiast.aspx) I told you about the manager of the local Starbucks, a computer enthusiast whom I helped get going on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office.  This afternoon I got an e-mail from him that I wanted to share with you.  Not…

The original e-mail arrived in French… not entirely normal to begin with, although not unheard of.  The original text is attached below.  The title translated to 'FW: Free Computer (Verified)!  At first I figured someone was forwarding a Craig's List post to me… people are giving away Pentium machines all the time.  Not so… A…

<Because the original e-mail on which this article is based was in French I decided to write a rudimentary translation for my French readers and friends.> Je ne reçois pas souvent des courriels en français, mais des fois, alors je l'ai regardé prudemment.  Le titre parlé d'un ordi gratuit, et le texte lisait: « Bonjour…