Author Archives: Steve

Raspberry PI Micro Computer

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What is Raspberry Pi?

The Raspberry Pi is a palm sized computer that plugs into your TV with a keyboard and mouse. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the day to day tasks that your home PC would normally do – EXCEPT, it’s the price of a couple of cinema tickets. This little beauty can also play high-definition video!

Where did the idea come from?

The idea behind a computer so cheap and tiny came in 2006, when Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A-level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.

Raspberry PI image

Specifications

  • 512MB @ 700MHz
  • 2x USB Port
  • RCA Video
  • 3.5mm Audio
  • LAN Input
  • Audio Output

What do we think?

At around £25 the Raspberry PI is an excellent buy for many reasons:

  • It allows younger users to gain essential programming experience where they wouldn’t usually due to the high chance of “bricking” their more expensive computer systems
  • The Raspberry PI has a substantial level of performance and is capable of a HD output upto 1920x 1200 – all on a single board.
  • Its extremely cheap!

So that’s our input, what do you think about the Raspberry PI Micro Computer?
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Managed IT Support for Mac OS X has arrived!

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Thanks to the hard work of our friends at Centrastage, we are now pleased to be able to extend our Managed IT Support solution to cover Mac OS X.

Now our clients using Mac OS X can have the same level of reassurance and rapid support that our Windows and Linux users currently enjoy, including 24/7 monitoring, regular maintenance, patch management and remote assistance.

Support for OS X is currently limited to Intel-based Mac’s running OS X version 10.6.1 Snow Leopard or later.

Using a Block List in Exchange 2010

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Block lists provide a very useful means of limiting the amount of spam and junk mail passing through your Exchange server and landing in your users mailboxes. Block list providers maintain a list of IP addresses of  computers and/or networks from which have been linked to spamming activity, and best of all many of these services are free to use. If your exchange server has been configured to use a block list it will query the list in real time to filter out messages originating from these compromised systems.

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Where did Disk Cleanup go?

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Disk space is always an important factor on your server systems, especially the system drive. When the system drive is full, your services crash to a halt and eveything stops working. Disk Cleanup has always been a handy tool that allows you to clear space on your drives and restore your services. However we noticed that on Windows Server 2008 onwards, the Disk Cleanup tool appeared to have vanished! We searched in vain amongst the Disk tools, but it wasn’t there.

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AVG 2011 issue with ActiveSync affecting iPhones

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We have recently been rolling out the latest version of AVG anti-virus for a couple of clients and everything appeared to go smoothly. The upgrade experience was a good one with the new AVG Business Anti-Virus 2011 installing on the servers and desktops with minimal interaction and no crashes, which is always nice. A couple of days later though we started getting reports from users at both sites complaining about their Exchange email not being delivered to either their iPhones or iPads. Emails were only arriving at the mobile devices once they had been opened in Outlook or Web Access.

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Installing Anti-Spam features on a stand-alone Exchange 2010 server

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So you have your brand new Exchange 2010 server installed, your mailboxes have been migrated and your old server retired. However your users are now complaining about the volume of spam filling up their inboxes and junk-mail folders. Then when you go to set-up your anti-spam settings all you find is a manual allow and block list. What gives?

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