Posts by ian_m

UK.gov confirms it's binned extended Windows XP support

We still have quite a few XP machines left in our engineering manufacturing company.

They are on things like a specialist label printer, an EPROM/FLASH programmer, sign cutter and freight company weighing machine. None have Internet access, most don't have any form of web browser. Most will be stuck at XP for ever as either need ISA bus for a controller card, old XP only SCSI card and software that just doesn't work under Vista/Win7/8.

Most just work fine, type in numbers & letters into label printer software, press go...out come nice printed labels to label products. Under Win7 the software fails to allow open/save/file actions, so fail there. Later software version is available at £xxx works with Win7 but doesn't support a parallel port printer so would involve purchase later version of printer at £xxxx. Why change it still just works,

Want freight label, place box on scales, press button, nice freight label printed. Done.

So this is why so many companies are still using XP in all types of places as it just works and has worked for years.

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Its poo.

Far far far far far far far, did I say far too much unoccupied white spice on screen for those of use viewing on decent sized wide screen monitors. Its like going back to using a 4:3 CRT TV...

Reg reader fires up Pi-powered anti-cat garden sprinkler system

Got one of these, much easier, plug in hose away you go (from amazon uk).

Absolutely brilliant waiting for neighbours cats to come and attempt for cr*p in or dig up my garden and such fun to watch them race back home soaking wet.

Absolutely no sign of cat activity in the garden at all.

https://www.contech-inc.com/products/home-and-garden-products/animal-repellents/scarecrow-motion-activated-animal-deterrent

I want to play with VMs

I've been evaluating VM's on second hand servers from Ebay. We got a HP ML110 G5, dual core Xeon 2.3GHx, 8GB RAM, 4 off 250GB disks and two network ports all for £110, bargain. Processor supports VM's, but not SLAT, so not the nippiest and 8GB RAM is limiting, but £110....

Been using Server 2012 R2 running Hyper-V evaluating virtualising our real servers and work loads at work.

In fact worked out really handy, as one of our real servers died (motherboard !!) and it happened to be a HP ML110 G5, so lost my test server, but company SQL database was up and running in under an hour. Ordered another two from Ebay £140 and £180, one had only 4GB RAM and not so many disks. Also an Adaptec 3405 RAID card (£55) to put OS on. Been using the two servers to test live migration of VM's and fall over.

Server 2012 R2 for 180day trial is available for download.

In fact the VM bit was not the most interesting bit of Server 2012 R2, the VM bit it just worked, the most interesting is data deduplication. Let it loose on our 5TB of files stored on our NAS (loads and loads of Windows images) and it came back with 60% saving storing in 2TB. Considering these are expensive SAS disks, that is a considerable money saving out of the box.