Microsoft and IT consulting company Unisys are offering a free demo of Exchange Server 2007. This is well worth it to evaluate the big changes and some improvements in this new version of Exchange and Outlook Web Access (OWA).

The trial is only 5 days long, but all that’s required to create a trial account is a name and a valid email address. The trial accounts create an account populated with sample messages, calendar items, and voice mail; you’re allowed to send and receive mail, schedule meetings, and adjust your own account’s settings while connecting via Outlook, OWA, or any Exchange Active-Sync app.

Article tagged: Microsoft, Exchange, 2007, Exchange+2007, server, exchange+server, free, trial, demo, account, OWA, Outlook

For years HP has been adding expiration dates to some inkjet printer cartridges so they can’t be indefinitely refilled. There was even a lawsuit contending every HP inkjet printer since 2001 was affected by the expiration. The problem generally only affects printer users who refill their cartridges, but I’ve run into it a few times in dealing with clients who stockpiled print cartridges on much older models. In those cases, after several years on the shelf, the cartridges are still new when inserted into the printer but aren’t recognized and can never be used.

So far there seem to be three types of solutions to solving the expiring cartridge problem. The fourth “fix” is 100% guaranteed to work: find an HP model that doesn’t use chipped cartridges:

• Use Microsoft printer drivers instead of HP drivers: The Microsoft-written printer drivers that are included with Windows XP and Vista don’t check for the expiration date like HP-written drivers do. This isn’t a fix for newer printer models, which only have HP-written drivers on the market.
• Edit the HP driver’s .INI file to NOT check for the expiration date: I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re not already comfortable editting the registry or writing windows scripts. This is more relevant to newer printers and cartridges, as they don’t have an expiration date until they’re first used. Older printers with very old cartridges that have a built-in expiration date set at the factory can’t be helped by this fix. (And, remember to make a backup of the .INI file before editting it.)
  

  Start with a new cartridge. Do not install the cartridge until you do the following.

  There is an *.ini file (hpSomethingOrOther.ini) stored in the system directory (WINNT in NT and 2000) that has a name probably associated with the driver version.

  Search for hp*.ini and edit the ones with the latest dates. If you configure the printer driver first, see below, the file date should read today.

  There are two files, one will list the one you need to change, change the other one, I think it is the smaller one.

  In it there is a parameter something like pencheck. It is set to 0100. I think this is a boolean because I tried other values without effect. Set it to 0000 in the file and save the file and REBOOT.

  You can check the value in the driver configuration dialog box (found through the Help for the HP tool box, open the last entry, I think, and click on configure).

  If the grayed out box for ink check or cartridge check or something like that is unchecked, you are in business. Cancel this dialog. Do NOT click on default or the expiration check will be reinstated and when you print with your new cartridge you will get an expiration date burned into it.

  I wouldn’t trust making any changes to this dialog box without rechecking that the parameter stays unchecked. After making sure this value is unchecked, install your new virgin cartridge(s) and the expiration date(s) will read “UNKNOWN”.

  Link to full .INI-editting article.

• Remove the printer’s internal battery to reset the memory chip in the cartridges: Removing the battery with the ink cartridge installed erases the expiration date stored on cartridges not set at the factory. Battery location and ease-of-access varies greatly by printer model. Here’s a descriptin of the problem and instructions for the d125xi printer and a Fixyourownprinter.com forum thread with details on many models of printers.

[Photo credit: liewcf]

I’ve always wondered if most hosting companies even care about supporting their customers when traffic surges hit. A recently Dugg article “How Not To Deal With A Digg” makes it worth revisting those thoughts and putting up a bit of math to support that shared hosting companies are concealing a lot behind the bandwidth they offer in their packages.

Just like most gyms sell memberships to more people than could fit into the workout area if all those members showed up once per day, many hosting companies price their packages at levels that are only profittable if traffic stays very low. In the Seminal’s article, referenced above, they started with a shared web hosting package from iPowerWeb. That package offers 2,000 GB of bandwidth for $8/month - and I’m going to stay focused on that number because bandwidth is the number one place where shared web hosting companies fail to deliver on their promises (plus an 800mhz Pentium 3 with 1 GB RAM webserver that I run at work delivers 10-15 GB/day of web traffic for an application we only use internally, so the meagre specs on that hardware work fine for 275 GB/month [conservatively, 12.5 GB/day for 22 work days each month] over 100 mbps & 1 gbps network connections). A good price for bandwidth, for a hosting company leasing multiple OCx-class connections, is about $0.06/GB. That means that 2,000 GB of bandwidth works out to $120/month. In fact, your $8/month is only enough to pay for about 133 GB of bandwidth before the hosting company starts dropping into the red.

Yikes! The truth is there’s no way those lower-end hosting companies can make money from basic web hosting packages if even a small percentage of their clients are using a good chunk of the allotted bandwidth. It’s true that the numbers presented in the hosting package descriptions are typically loss-leaders, but the packages and services offered by any hosting company should be capable of reaching what they’re rated to. And, if the high bandwidth usage is a problem thsn companies should either ask users causing them a loss to leave (which sure would get those companies a lot of attention on Slashdot and Digg) or they should also institute and disclose a rate-cap of how much bandwidth/second can be used (for example: 2,000 GB/month over 2,592,000 seconds for a max rate of ~768 KBps).

In my experience of content sites’ daily traffic patterns, most non-rich media websites see averaged daily traffic rates that are only 5-15% of their peak daily rate. Let’s assume that a front page link from Digg will only triple your normal peak rate of visits (unlikely) and then work backward from 768 KBps to see what a realistic monthly usage would be from one of those shared hosting packages. One third of 768 KBps is 256 KBps, which represents our peak daily traffic rate when not featured on a big, linking site. Take 10% of that and get 25.6 KBps, or 26 KBps if we round to keep things clean. 26 KBps times the 2,592,000 seconds in a 30 day month is 67,392,000 KB of data, or ~67.4 GB/month when we’re talking in the same terms as those hosting plan providers. That seems more reasonable at a rate of $0.06/GB for an $8/month web hosting plan. Now only about $4/month goes to pay for bandwidth and the rest can pay for the hosting providers servers and staff.

Before we forget the whole point of this, 768 KBps means that an average content site with a 250 KB front page, JS, CSS, and images will take about 1/3rd of a second to transfer. Add another half second of latency, I know average latency isn’t that high but the server and browser take a little while to deal with each individual HTML, CSS, JS, and image to be transferred, and the total page load time is about 5/6ths of a second. Now grab this Browser statistics Firefox extenstion and check your own shared host website. This site has a 156 KB page load, is happily hosted on a 1and1 shared server, and has a 4.5 sec. average page load time and 1.8 sec. minimum page load time according to Google’s webmaseter tools and the large number of page loads their spider does of this site. Odds are you’re looking at a download time a lot higher than 5/6ths of a second. If that’s the case then how can your shared webserver ever stand up to the traffic experienced when being Dugg or Slashdotted?

Plain and simple, that shared web server won’t cut it when you’re Dugg or Slashdotted. The artificial statistics I’m using above, of 768 KBps peak and 26 KBps sustained, make it clear that shared host webservers aren’t capable of profittably delivering the 1,000+ GB/month that most of them advertise. Real world page load times indicate that most shared hosting companies can’t realistically sustain a 768 KBps peak rate or 67 GB/month of traffic to your site. All the caching and HTML/CSS-tweaking in the world won’t save a website when it still has to get squeezed through a skinny pipe.

Sadly, many shared hosting companies are generally happy save money offering poor service and then by allowing higher bandwidth users (costing them $0.06/GB) to move elsewhere. I really hope this practice goes the way of selling CRT monitors based on the tube size instead of the viewable size. Since I’m not a fan of government regulation, I hope some of the bigger or higher-quality shared hosting companies start offering throughput guarantees to compete with the cheap shared hosting packages that can’t deliver.

Mrtweak.com is being moved to a new server this weekend (Jan 27th & 28th). Please excuse any downtime as the new DNS destination propagates.

The Recovery Console is an incredibly powerful tool at times when a Windows system boots straight into a blue screen (of death) error or viruses/spyware have even made the system unusable in safe mode. Unfortuantely it’s hard to use for several reasons. Firstky, Microsoft doesn’t, to my knowledge, provide complete documentation for the Recovery Console anywhere. Also, the Recovery Console is a command-line-only interface that’s unfamiliar to most Windows users and even many non-Linux IT staff. Finally, the commands available in this environment are fewer and slightly different from those in a typical Windows shell environment.

This site, Command Windows, provides a complete list of the available commands with a description of each. Also included is documentation on some preventative measures (as usual, registry edits) that can be taken before Windows crashes to remove some of the restrictions on the Recovery Console later on. The restrictions that can be removed include disallowing Recovery Console from writing to a floppy disk, blocked access to some system folders, and not being able to use wildcards on the command line.

Anyone who’s a Windows Vista beta tester probably knows it already, but Windows Vista probably isn’t going to ship “on time”.

Everyone knows why (bugs, bugs, bugs), but Robert McLaws makes some great observations in “Vista Needs More Time” and compares the buggy Vista Bets 2 with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. One of them was basically production-ready with Beta 2, the other still has issues with the 3D interface that seems to be the main selling point in a lot of “get users excited ads”. Whether the interface, or anything else, is working right I think Microsoft should ship the Vista RTM version to software developers, OEMs and corporate customers regardless.

Robert is right, Vista isn’t ready to launch in retail, but he justifies the possible slipped ship date with the same-old argument about “shipping a great product”. Inveterate Windows commentator Ed Bott even wants Microsoft to push Vista’s ship date back to March.

Despite the very sorry state of Beta 2, it would be a great thing to get a Vista RTM out the door with a LOT fewer features and then release a service pack, or even a feature pack, a month later. After all, whether customers are actually buying the operating system or not, Vista will probably need to be out a good 6-9 months before most IT shops really start to get on the upgrade path.

This shiny, new OS is a hardware hog and is going to force many companies, including the majority of the companies I deal with and have friends at, to either speed their upgrade cycle or wait through at least one, if not two, budget cycles. Of course, one good way to force operating system or office-suite upgrades is to give software developers plenty of time to test and patch around it - which gets IT departments testing it and pushing it out to higher-end machines sooner - which puts it on the CFOs desk - which gets a budget decision made sooner.

Then again, with MSFT sunk for 2007 already and a $30 billion stock-buyback planned - maybe Microsoft should knock the date back to next summer and save themselves some of that money.

Article tagged: Windows, Vista, operating, system, Beta, 2, RTM, final, ship, date, slip, slipped, miss, Robert, McLaws, budget, upgrade, 2007

I’ve started doing a lot of development lately and been shopping for an MSDN subscription. I happened to run across an academic copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional with an MSDN Pro subscription, for just $1. While I may not be able to take advantage of the deal, maybe someone out there can save a few dollars on the Visual Studio suite.

No, I’m not an affiliate of this website and I won’t earn anything if you click through, buy, don’t buy, etc.

Update: Looks like the price was updated (now $1,150), sorry to anyone who was hoping to pick Visual Studio up cheaply. Link removed.