Debugging Bluescreen Crashes

One of the most annoying things you can ever have happen with a PC is the dreaded blue screen STOP message (colloquially known as the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD). Most times on XP you don't actually see the blue screen itself because the system is automatically configured to reboot when it happens. Instead you will see the PC reboot itself.

I have had a lot of trouble with a cluster of PCs that had the latest BIOS and latest OS image loaded on them with all the latest drivers etc. The PCs typically go into low power mode after idling a while and then crash. I don't get many complaints about these PCs because they are in a suite and as long as they are continuously in use they don't get the chance to go into low power mode and crash. The hardware manufacturer suggested maybe I shouldn't flash the BIOS so I reflashed to the version that was on it originally. Still that didn't solve the problems. I had sort of run out of ideas when I found this article on an MSDN blog. Well, great! Why doesn't Microsoft give out this information?

The output of the debugger is highly technical but it gives useful information if you can put up with all the gobbledygook. In this case, it seems to be indicating a problem with a module called abcdrv.dll. I have a fair idea which piece of software is using that driver. It isn't a problem we saw with these PCs before when they were using this same piece of software but for some reason it is. We don't actually use that software now so hopefully just uninstalling it from these PCs will resolve the problem. Note that I only had minidump files to debug from; a full memory dump is probably better where the debugger is concerned.

Clean install off non-bootable (upgrade) Vista DVD

Some weeks ago I may have mentioned that the upgrade Vista Business DVD supplied to NZ schools is non-bootable. When I made enquiries, I found we could not get a bootable DVD from Microsoft on this program.

However, a bit of experimentation has led me to discover that I can do a clean install of Vista by booting the PC off a USB key drive running Windows PE, and then running the Setup program on the Vista DVD. Just don't try to activate it automatically at the first screen during setup configuration because if it can't get online, the setup will terminate.

This step has saved me several hours of unnecessary Windows XP installation with this PC that would have been necessary, apart from leaving files on the disk to be deleted later. The clean install was very fast and easy to set up. I removed the single drive partition and created a 30 GB boot partition for Vista on this brand new system. Everything so far is going very smoothly and I expect no major issues.

Running Ghost on modern PCs

Existing users of Ghost will be most familiar with the process of creating boot packages using the built in wizard tool. These packages load a version of MS-DOS and the 16 bit Ghost client. Typically they have to be customised for the specific type of network card in the host machine. On some modern PCs, such as Toshiba laptops, the 16 bit Ghost client hangs and cannot be used. I tried every which way to get Ghost to startup on a Satellite Pro S200 recently. I did CDROMs with Universal driver and NIC specific, I did USB key boot and I did PXE with our WDS/RIS server. None of these worked. Ghost would load and never get past the first screen. Eventually I decided it was time to try a 32 bit boot platform and the 32 bit version of Ghost.

One such platform is Windows PE. There may be others but I have not looked as yet. Barts PE is one of the available ways of getting PE capability and they do include a plugin for Ghost. However there were two big issues with BartPE when I set up the CD to boot from. It couldn't detect the Toshie's hard drive and it couldn't load its network card drivers. We have Vista so rather than try to fix up BartsPE I decided to install the Windows Automated Installation Kit and press ahead with Windows PE. That turned out to be a lot simpler to get going than I thought. Even though you have to use a whole lot of new tools, especially with the new WIM image files, getting my USB key set up to boot WinPE was dead easy, and it didn't need any special configuration to recognise the Satellite's HDD or NIC. Off we went with Ghost, and unicasting was not only straightforward, it was also very fast with gigabit NICs in both the PC and the server. Next issue is that Ghostwalker (32 bit) doesn't work on WinPE. So I had to sysprep my source machine before I imaged it. But that was fairly straightforward to do.

The real issue is the license for WinPE. I haven't looked too hard at it yet, but I suspect in reality we can only use it to deploy Vista, not XP. Sometime in the future we probably will be deploying Vista, but will we be using Ghost? My frustrating experience with the 16 bit Ghost has convinced me that Symantec should just forget about the ancient DOS technology and get on the WinPE or some equivalent 32 bit platform. They should get some sort of WinPE license with Ghost so that their customers can be assured of having access to something that works.

Low cost laptops for education

Ever heard of "One Laptop Per Child"? This is an international initiative to deliver affordable, rugged computers to developing nations for children to use. The XO1 laptop has just got into production. The product will naturally be of interest to schools and other educational institutions due to the reduced cost and the design of the product which makes it better able to stand up to wear and tear.

Not to be outdone, Asus Computer has developed and recently released the Eee, its own ultraportable PC with a stripped down hardware spec. This is of considerable interest to me because, for some time, I have wondered if any of the major home appliance manufacturers would move in a similar direction and engineer a simplified laptop as just another kind of appliance, getting its price down to something more affordable for families. Of course, to achieve this, some compromises have to be made. The ideal "appliance PC" (and the laptop is the only realistic form factor) will use USB to add on all the bits like a DVD drive instead of building them in. OLPC and the Eee go a little further than I expected in replacing the traditional HDD with a much smaller amount (typically 2 - 4 GB) of flash memory. Both of these are developing versions of Linux to keep the cost down.

However, most of us will want to see something that can run a commercial OS (such as Windows or the Mac OS), and for that market, Asus is extending the Eee and has obtained support from MS to offer Windows at a special price. The original Eee with Linux is already retailing in NZ at $599. I would hope with educational pricing to get at least the same price with OEM Windows XP, hopefully less. The concept of both the OLPC and Eee seem similar to the Apple eMate that was dropped from production back in 1998. It will be interesting to see if Apple revives the eMate concept in response to the development of the OLPC and Eee products.

For the school environment the easiest way to drop these things into our existing setup is to load Windows XP. Given the small amount of disk space and perhaps only 256 MB of RAM, I would expect to look at an older version of Office (such as XP). Some schools might wish to look into whether thin client (e.g. Terminal Services) is another way of leveraging the reduced capabilities of the Eee. The Eee is the first production implementation of Intel's Classmate PC spec. If other manufacturers follow this trend then school computing might never be the same.

Making Outlook 2007 work on Imap servers

Outlook 2007 has one big improvement above all others if your staff connect to an IMAP server, and that is built-in support for storing Sent messages on that server. This means your users have only one Sent folder that is the same for Outlook, and for any web mail system you may have, that can only access the server's folder rather than Outlook's own Sent Items folder on each desktop's HDD.

One issue that you may need to be aware of is that some Imap servers are configured to place additional folders (other than Inbox) (including Sent) inside the Inbox folder. This means that you need to configure Outlook to recognise that. We are using Courier Imap on Linux and that is how it is set up.

The Imap specific settings are stored in the Account settings for each account as follows (assuming your Sent messages folder is called Sent)

1. Click Tools
2. Click Account Settings
3. Select the account you want to change and press Change
4. Click More Settings...
5. To change the folders path, click on the Advanced tab
6. Under Root folders path fill in Inbox or whatever applies to your setup.
7. Click on OK
8. If you get a message about needing to refresh the folders list, let Outlook do its thing
9. You may then need to requery and subscribe to the Imap folders. To do this, open the folder tree for your Imap account, select the Inbox folder, then go to the Tools menu and click Imap Folders. Make sure you are subscribed to all the folders you need (ideally all of them) including the Sent folder that you need to access.
10. Open up that dialog again (steps 1 to 4)
11. To select the Sent folder, click on the Folders tab. Select the item Choose an existing folder... and browse in the folder tree to the Sent folder. 
12. Click OK.
13. To move the messages from the local folder (Sent Items in Personal Folders) to the server, go to the Sent Items folder in Personal Folders. Select a message in this folder and then press Ctrl+A to select all messages. Right click and choose Move to Folder, then browse to the Sent folder in your Imap folder tree and click OK.

Note: Windows Live Mail also includes Imap support to the same level. However it is not yet stable enough to deploy to end users. You should use Outlook Express 6 instead which is very stable with few problems on Imap systems.

Update on DnsApi 11163 / MrxSmb 50 Errors

These are issues I've spent only the minimum amount of time on lately, yet they demand resolution. The MrxSmb errors followed me when I took the PCI Gigabit card (DLink) out of my old PC and transferred it to my "new" one. After finding there was still a problem I switched to the onboard Intel 100Mbps NIC and everything is fine. Since we experienced this issue with a variety of NICs, some onboard and some external, I can only conclude that the (presumed) bugs in NIC drivers that lead to these problems are relatively common. An analogy from way back when that I recall, is when certain low-end 3D graphics cards, most notably those made by S3, typically had problems on Windows systems of the era when a large number of icons were displayed. What I've found overall from our experiences is that Intel hardware consistently has less problems than other manufacturers. One of our suppliers of PC hardware in the past consistently buys their boards from a prominent Asian manufacturer (one of the largest in the world) but which uses mainly AMD CPUs and third party chipsets. These tend to cause more problems long term. This particular PC was one of those and has proved very niggling to make work at times. Our present hardware supplier, Cyclone, has standardised on Intel boards and although their graphics chipsets may not be anything to write home about they are consistently solid performers. So my next act will be to get a PCIe gigabit Intel card for this machine, although they cost rather more than the Dlink did.

The DNSAPI errors are more perplexing. Last time this happened it was because the two DNS servers had different reverse lookup zone configs. This time as far as I can tell they are both the same. There has been an ongoing issue with stale reverse lookup records that I have not been able to solve to date, which seems to be related to this problem. However I haven't been able to find out anything about it so far from Microsoft.

NZ Time Zone Changes in Windows

Maybe if you're like me, you changed the time manually on your three servers a week ago when Daylight Saving started, and thought no more of it until you logged in this morning and discovered all the servers had reset themselves to an hour later than the current time, as well as your desktop...

This happened to us because, even though we use Windows Server Update Services,

1. We have only approved auto-installation of Critical Updates and Security Updates, and this update is an Update Rollup.
2. We have not approved auto-installation of updates for our Windows servers, and this update is therefore not yet installed on them.

We also have a Linux server that acts as the time server for many PCs and this has to have its own update done.

In addition you may have Windows clients in your network running Windows 2000 or older. Microsoft is not making updates available in the usual distribution channels for these operating systems because mainstream support is not available for them any more. However unofficial updates can be found for 2000, ME and 98 or you can apply a manual update.

The update for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is KB933360. It appeared on WSUS on 29th August.

Solution: I had to wait all day to get the patch installed on our servers because other updates were waiting to be installed first and they required the servers to be restarted. It took two installation and restart cycles for each server to get them up to date with this patch. Then the time had to be set on each server to the current time. Still, at least now my desktop is showing and keeping the correct time.

DNSAPI 11163 Errors [2], MrxSmb 50 Errors

Back in July I wrote about these errors and how they were happening because the DNS zones were not configured properly on one of our servers. Well, today I was reviewing the event log on a desktop PC and I just happened to notice a resurgence of the errors. After all being quiet for the past two and a half months, this PC just last week started to register the same errors all over again.

For this particular PC it is very aggravating because, in the holidays, I had planned to use it to check out a problem with another PC, which I'll mention below in a minute. Now, well I have to try to figure out this big problem first before I can get onto solving that other very important issue.

Regardless of the work I have done to try to have the network functioning smoothly we still have regular occurrences of reverse DNS lookups failing. An example is trying to do a remote login to a system. When you enter the name of the remote system Windows does a reverse lookup for the IP address. Then you can get the message that the remote system cannot be found, even though you know that is not true. You get the IP address of that machine and type that into MSTSC instead, and it works. You check the reverse lookup zone entry for that machine and it has the wrong IP address in there. So you know why the reverse lookup failed, but you don't know why DNS has not updated it.

The problem I'm having on another PC is a history of MrxSmb error events logged. These errors occur as a result of the PC dropping its network connection or dropping packets and result in a myriad of popup errors telling the user that data from an open file has been lost. As it happens, this PC is the computer technician's own work PC :) . The errors have come up continuously for all the time I can really remember having this PC. I don't recall seeing them on any other type of PC, but I do remember seeing them on another PC of the same type. I have tried the onboard network card as well as two PCI cards, all different brands, with no change in the outcomes. No other event logs (on other PCs) show this error. There has to be something screwy with the hardware in this non-Intel-CPU non-Intel-chipset system. This particular computer has logged over 150 of these errors in the past five weeks. The problem is that they are quite random. The actual number of days on which they occurred is only seven, and the last actual instance when this problem occurred was two weeks ago. So I would have to do at least a month's testing to be sure that it really was a hardware problem like that.

It turns out that my PC has also registered a DNSApi entry, but it was for error 11197 instead and happened three weeks ago. If there is a pattern happening, it is that many of these PCs that have given the error messages are ones that are not turned on every day.

WLW and WLM work with my Wordpress blog

I'm pleased to have discovered that Windows Live Writer can be used to compose messages in my newly established site support blog. I installed WordPress for this purpose and have managed to get it running properly after going through various new learning curves. These involved IIS6, MySQL and PHP as well as Wordpress. Often in the Windows community we find that open source software is not well supported for political reasons. As it turns out, both PHP and MySQL have been available for Windows for years and can be made to work well on it, although I found difficulty getting PHP 4 up and running, so I switched to 5. It's good to be able to get PHP working because there's lots of stuff out there that uses it. Wordpress took a little bit of effort and tweaking but now it's all working, and I will be able to use WLW to maintain it.

The first thing I looked at when an Intranet blog came up was Sharepoint, because WLW supports it, because we get the CALs bundled in free with our software deal, because it can do all these other wonderful things and because it can do a blog as well. But Sharepoint is vastly overblown for what we would use it for. You need specialised training to figure out how to set it up, let alone use it. After I tried installing it and failed, I figured it was just easy to remove it and look for a freeware blogging platform that I could install. Apart from Wordpress, there is an open source version of Moveable Type in development. Because it's not yet available I chose WP instead.

I've also found that Wordpress's RSS feed works with Windows Live Mail. Thus, I can pick up the articles in there. I may also look at setting up the RSS feeds on some staff PCs as well.

FIX for Windows Live Writer unable to connect to Wordpress 2.2 Blog

PROBLEM: When setting up a new account in WLW Beta 3 for a Wordpress 2.2 blog, the following error is returned:

Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlog method received from the weblog server was invalid. / Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server

CAUSE: A file loaded in xmlrpc.php is unable to be found because of invalid path information. Line 18 of this file contains the following statement:

include('./wp-config.php');

This will cause PHP to search its path for this file rather than loading it directly from the current directory.

RESOLUTION: Alter the above statement to read

include('wp-config.php');

Note that there are other possible causes for this error; the above is the one that has worked for me.

Installing WordPress on IIS [2]

Now for MySQL. After a lot of looking at documentation I installed MySQL Administrator, a GUI tool which is freely available from the main MySQL website. I had earlier installed the MySQL DBMS which I downloaded from their site last week. Working with PHP is not at all new to me, but both WordPress and MySQL are totally new challenges, especially as PHP and MySQL were not originally developed for the Windows/IIS platform.

The first difficulty is to be able to set up a connection between MySQL Administrator and the DBMS instance. During installation you should have created a username and password which you have to enter. The trickery is in what hostname to use. I figured this would be the Windows host or Windows DNS name but these didn't work. Eventually I tried 'localhost' and that does work, it seems you would have to use this when the Administrator and the DBMS are both running on the same server. Second thing is, there is no direct DB create tool provided in any of the GUIs. So I will still have to write a query to set up my DB for WordPress. But that is pretty easy to do and is covered in WordPress install instructions.

So firstly, set up a user account that WordPress can use to access its database. With the Administrator, this is very simple. Then, create the database. Using the Query Browser, this is a simple SQL statement and WordPress Help gives you the SQL to use. Finally, use Administrator to assign privileges on the new database to the new user account. The only real hiccup is that Administrator doesn't seem to have any way to refresh its schema view to pick up the newly created database, without quitting and running it again.

The next major task is to finish WordPress configuration. This is what will show if this whole grand scheme is really going to fly. This is where we find out whether PHP and MySQL are properly installed and configured, and whether WordPress can work properly with this setup (PHP 5 is supposed to be an unsupported configuration for this release of WP).

Firstly, edit wp_config.php and fill in the values specified. Next, run the install script in the wp-admin subdirectory. It is here I strike my first snag; the message tells me that I appear to be missing MySQL in my PHP installation. Running a phpinfo script to see what is configured, I find that MySQL is not loaded as a PHP module. So I make the change needed in php.ini and restart IIS. This causes mysql to appear in phpinfo output as a loaded module. And now install.php brings me up properly at the first part of the WordPress install page. After completing this page I am presented with a login page. Unfortunately, logging in with the details specified just gives me a blank web page. If I go to the index page instead, it fails to load, giving me a warning and a fatal error about not being able to open 'wp-blog-header.php'. As this file does exist, it looks more like a configuration problem, perhaps path info. It seems that perhaps the problem is that wp-blog-header.php is written by a script and it needs the proper permissions. However, the fix turned out to be very simple:

• Open index.php
• Change ./wp-blog-header.php to wp-blog-header.php in the require statement.

And that brought up the home page in all its glory.

So, we seem to have a working blog. However, it looks like I might have to customise a few more scripts in the same way as shown above, and I will have to work out how to change some of the blog's settings to get the page looking like I would like it to. Then, the next big thing is to see if I can get WLW to work with it. That's all for another day...

RIPREP chapter 3

Over the last few days I have been testing our third Riprep reference image. This one is mainly for our classroom PCs but I have found the HAL is the same one as the computer suite PCs use. So, in theory, the same image could work on both...maybe. The biggest hassle came with a .NET 2.0 reparse point (junction) which Riprep refused to copy. In theory it should be easy enough to have this automatically recreate itself using the cmdlines.txt file which is put into $OEM$\$1\Applications and the InstallFiles path pointed to it in riprep.sif (and OEMPreInstall set to Yes). However I have yet to be able to make this run the linkd command needed to recreate the reparse point automatically. There are a few other things I can try though (GuiRunOnce etc). So I had to run the command manually. Apart from that everything is working well.

When I tried it on our older suite PCs things were somewhat different. After Mini-Setup was finished and the system rebooted, it redetected the sound and graphics adaptors. This resulted in a series of onscreen messages and dialogs to be responded to, including that it wanted to copy older files over newer ones. Obviously this is going to be an issue with a change in hardware. When we used Ghost with Windows 98, we just used one 98 image for everything. As we had a few different types of PCs in use, Windows booting itself for the first time would display the messages that it was installing various drivers for the different hardware it had detected. This is the first time I have seen this happen on an XP machine and I was not prepared for these extra steps because I had assumed that somehow this would all happen automatically. The other problem is that as far as Windows is concerned, the graphics and sound drivers for this hardware are not digitally signed and so even at startup every user will be asked for permission to run the system tray and other various utilities that these devices use. Therefore it seems highly likely I would end up creating a special customisation of this image for this group of PCs to deal with these issues, and thus it's not so easy to have just one image for the lot. Vista handles this a lot better, thankfully.

Installing WordPress on IIS [1]

I have toyed with a few ideas for setting up a support site for intranet based staff use and did do a web page on one of our servers for a while. However the appeal of the blog and the mechanisms of it are such that I think this is by far the most preferred way of publishing the information in an easy to produce way that means it is more likely to work for everyone.

IIS is the web server we have already installed on our servers. It has an important advantage over other products out there and that is Integrated Windows Authentication (previously known as NTLM). What this means is I can restrict access to the site to staff without requiring them to enter a username and password into the browser (assuming they use Internet Explorer), as IE will transmit their Windows logon information back to the web server. Since IIS is running in our domain it can verify this against their domain logon details.

WordPress is a blogging platform that is the basis of the hosted WordPress blogging service. It is an open source and completely free platform. It requires PHP and MySQL, both of which are available in Windows versions. It is also supported by Windows Live Writer, which would be a major advantage when it comes to creating blog posts.

First task is to get PHP and MySQL up and running. The main issue is that WordPress is only certified for PHP4, but the latest version of PHP is 5.2 and support for 4 will end soon. In any case, PHP4 appears to be next to impossible to make work with IIS. Surely it's not rocket science but after a lot of fruitless effort trying to make 4.x work with IIS I gave up and tried 5.2.x which has so far worked flawlessly. The real test will be if WordPress can work with it without major issues, because of deprecations in 5.x. Next step: get MySQL up...

WDS part 2

This thread on Technet Forums details the steps needed to get WDS happening.

This is how far I have got down the WDS track. The boot.wim from the Vista DVD that we have self identifies as "Microsoft Windows Longhorn Setup (x86)" which I have left it as. While the image is being added I will turn on my reference PC and let it run the Mini-Setup wizard post RIPREP, the step that I did with it yesterday. After that's finished I will set it up to SysPrep instead for WDS instead of RIS.

WDS has added the image and a capture image has been created from it. That said, I can't actually view the capture image anywhere in WDS. The next step is the SysPrep of my reference PC. Sysprep.exe and setupcl.exe have to be obtained from the Deploy.cab files that come with XP. These are placed into C:\sysprep on the reference PC along with Sysprep.inf which is the same as for RIS. Sysprep is then run with the /reseal and /reboot options.

Once the PC reboots, it needs to be set up for PXE boot. The systems we are using have the Intel D101GGC board which is the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, the onboard NIC being a Realtek 8139. Although this type of NIC is well known, it is configured quite differently in the BIOS, perhaps this is a function of the ATI chipset as well. Whereas on the Intel chipset, or Compaqs that we also have, all you have to do is make the network card one of the boot devices (any one) and then press F12 during the POST, the D101GGC requires you to enable the boot ROM, and then at bootup you have to press Shift-F10 when the Realtek boot message comes up, in order to configure the boot manager. Tell it to use the Bios order for boot devices (Int19). The difference is with the Intels/Compaqs you just press F12 at POST to PXE and if you don't then it boots the HDD as usual. On the ATI/Realtek system you are having to configure either the BIOS or the boot manager settings and then it always boots to PXE until the option is turned off. There may be a way of configuring it differently but I haven't worked that out yet.

At this juncture I'm leaving WDS alone for a bit, as it's clear I need a lot more time to set it all up and test it out, whereas for this particular PC I need to get it back up and running quickly.

Getting started with WDS

Windows Deployment Services is Microsoft's replacement for RIS (Remote Install Services). WDS development has been driven by the advent of Windows Vista; however, it is also capable of deploying Windows XP to client PCs. WDS is available as an update to Windows Server 2003 (in Service Pack 2) and will also be deployed with Windows Server 2008.

This week I was creating a new image for Windows XP using RIS, but because of an issue that RIS threw up, I decided I would also start to look at WDS. There are several documents that pertain to WDS that are revelant:

• Windows Deployment Services Update Step-by-Step Guide for Windows Server 2003

• The help file for WDS on the server which you can get when WDS is installed.

At this time it might be just as easy to get RIS to make the image as usual and then convert it to WDS using the tools provided. The difficulty of the learning curve right now is in figuring out exactly how to create the image from the reference computer. From documentation I already have I know how to Sysprep (based on its similarities to Riprep). So far as I can tell the next step is to PXE boot the client, then you have to have a Capture image already set up. As far as I can tell you need a WinPE capture image created first, which does the capture back to WDS of what is called an Install Image. Right now, though, I don't have any capture images (or boot images) on my WDS server. So I'd have to get the right one there first.

The other option is to use the tools supplied to create an existing RIS image. WDS Management as deployed on the server provides this in the GUI or the WDSUTIL command line tool can be used to do it.

So the next step is to figure out where to get a capture image from. In the meantime I still have my RIS image that I created from my reference machine, and therefore the option of creating the WDS image directly from the RIS image.

Cable management on desktop cases and plain desks

In an ideal world every computer would be in a tower case and our computer suite desks would have proper tower bays with some form of integrated ducting. Unfortunately these objectives cannot always be met and so we have to adapt in order to achieve something that is functional, practical and above all, tidy.

The use of plain desks dictates a requirement of low profile desktop cases, ordinarily to be avoided due to bulk, limited expandability and poor ventilation. Some cases are not strong enough to carry CRT screens so LCD is mandated if at all possible. The latter would also allow the use of 600 mm depth desks if you can get a tower bay underneath. 800 mm of width per user would then be sufficient and allow plenty of room on top with the reduced profile of the LCD.

Cable management requires adaption in plain desks. Running cables internally is the best all-round solution but may not be practical without large-scale holesawing. If it is not possible to drill through desk tops you may need to run cables along the back of desks instead. Keyboard, mouse and VGA cables should be neatly bunched up at the back of desktop cases. Power and network cables need to be trunked across the desks and plugboxes could be mounted internally at one end. IEC mains leads can be purchased with tapon plugs, increased lengths up to 5 metres or 2-into-1 Y cords as required. Ducting may be able to be fitted along the backs of desks to carry the trunked cables.

These photos illustrate different objectives and how to solve common problems.

This picture shows a plugbox mounted inside a desk. Mains leads exit through a 60 mm holesaw hole at top left and run along the back of the desk to individual PCs.

Here we see how to hang a network switch on the end of a desk. Using the rack ears we can usually turn these through 90 degrees and screw them to the side of the desk.

Courtesy of the local polytech here is another way of mounting a plugbox. The main problem with this is that plugpacks will tend to fall out under their own weight. Mains and network cabling in this example is run inside the two white ducts. Various types of ducting is available to suit.

Here is a nice tidy way to bunch cables at the back of a desktop case. The bracket shown is supplied with these particular Foxconn cases for a security cable and not being required in our situation we used them to attach a large cable tie to loop and secure the excess length in VGA, keyboard and mouse leads. The bracket is attached to the case with a screw and this can easily be undone to detach the cable bunch from the case without undoing the cable tie.

And finally here are three PCs on a desk using a combination of the above techniques. Network and mains leads run in a channel along the outer back of the desks and are held into the channel using large cable ties. The mains leads run around the far end of the desk through a 60 mm hole to the plugbox. The excess lead length which has not yet been tied back can be seen here hanging down under the desk.

Changes to RM Integris in NZ

Most users of RM Integris Student Management System in NZ should be aware by now that RM Australia-Pacific has taken over support of the product from Renaissance Education Division, as per the terms of an agreement dated 1st April this year. RMAP believe that this will help to improve the overall service delivery and performance of Integris for all of the NZ customers.

I have been advised we are likely to see a further round of User Group meetings later this year and a roadmap for the development / release of future versions and enhancements to Integris is being developed.

The big news for the past couple of years has been the development cycle of Integris G2 and although it is likely to be 2009 or even later before it will become readily available to NZ schools, it is keenly anticipated in these parts. I understand an improved Billing system is also in the works.

New Windows Live Releases

What's different about this post? It has in it, a picture, and the text in it is also fully justified. These are two key improvements that have been added to the latest beta release of Windows Live Writer when working with Google's Blogger service. WLW Beta 3 also includes functionality for some blogging services to insert videos, publish XHTML markup, use additional languages, and various bugs have been fixed.

Windows Live Mail has also been updated to build 1365 with new features and functionality. I haven't as yet taken the opportunity to investigate these in detail; the changes to WLW are more significant at this stage. However as I am now using WLM at work I would expect to see impacts of the improvements that have been made in this product.

Microsoft has also created a single point install for these tools, which is a convenience for home users. Businesses and network administrators would, however, like to see full-file downloads, even MSI files in time, that they could streamline their administration with. I trust these will be available in the final releases of these products. Although there are other WL products available, these are the only two I am likely to use regularly, either at home or work.

Blogger users will find there is an additional step before you can upload pictures using WLW. You must go to the Google Picasaweb site and agree to their terms and conditions. WLW helpfully offers to open this website for you. Once you accept those conditions, you will see albums already created for any Blogger blogs that you have uploaded pictures to. You can then make full use of WLW's picture upload capability in Blogger posts.

Windows Live Mail successfully installs on Domain PCs

When I first tried out Windows Live Mail Desktop beta, I never could get it to install on any of our PCs at work. WLM beta install attempts were similarly unsuccessful. I speculate that the domain GPO for Windows Update conflicts with WLMd's attempts to set up Microsoft Update.

However, on machines that have not had WLMd installed before and are on a domain the install is successful and it has been completed now on two PCs. I am now able to use it at work and evaluate its usefulness here. One important reason why I would want to use it is because Outlook is such a prima donna when it comes to working with IMAP mail. Even with Outlook 2007 it constantly complains that it can't connect to the server and goes offline. Microsoft needs to bash the OE/WLM and Outlook teams' heads together. OL2007 has improved IMAP support but it's still a notch behind WLM in this respect. It seems Outlook is still too much geared towards corporate Exchange server and that functionality for other types of servers is an afterthought.

Anyway now that I have WLM working in our workplace I will be evaluating it very seriously for our use and if MS can fix some of the well known issues such as RSS feeds it should be a very good alternative for some of our users.

(Post errors fixed and text justified using the new beta build of Windows Live Writer. 6 Sept 07, 2:17 pm)

What is the best computer suite layout?

We only have one computer suite, and it has been in two different layouts from the time I was involved in it. The first one had all the computers around the walls of the room and people faced the walls when they worked. The teacher could see everyone's screens from the front of the room and everyone had to turn around to face the teacher and thus leave their keyboard alone when it was time to receive instruction.

Then the computer suite got moved from its small upstairs room to a larger downstairs room, and then for some reason, the tables were all lined in up in rows facing the front, just like a lecture theatre. The teacher at the front could see everyone's faces, but he/she couldn't see their computer screens. Or the teacher could sit at the back of the classroom and see all the screens, but they couldn't instruct effectively.

Then the computer suite moved back upstairs, only this time into the larger room right next to the small room that it used to be in, and so there was a fresh opportunity to change the layout. But we decided, and I was involved in this, to keep the front-facing-rows layout.

Now, we're looking at what other schools have done, and what the Polytech, where I'm doing MCSA papers, has done, and thinking about putting rows that are at right angles, so the teacher can easily see right down the rows what everyone has on their screens, and everyone has to turn to face the front of the classroom when the teacher is instructing. It turns out that by doing this, we might also make our use of space in the room more efficient and be able to use some of that space for something else. We might even be able to use a projector without taking over someone's desk, and use an existing wall as a screen.

Over the years at different sites including the Polytech I have seen all kinds of different layouts, but from what I can see the right angled rows layout is the most common/popular and probably the most practical for this type of situation where there are effective "dividers", in this case created by computer screens. The traditional layout works best in classrooms where the teacher can see all the desks regardless of how they are arranged. This principle has important application in all classroom design.

Non bootable Vista DVDs / MAKs, KMSs etc etc

After a lot of poring through the MS website I discovered indeed, the upgrade DVD you are supplied with by default will be non bootable. But you can get a bootable one on application to MS.

The more tricky thing is to work out what licensing key to use with the volume license. Vista requires that every PC is activated, including those on a volume license. To make life simpler for network administrators the Key Management Server was invented. Every PC on your network installed off the volume license files will automatically try to find a KMS first. The catch is that you have to have at least 25 PCs on your network looking for this KMS before it will accept activation requests.

So if you are like us and only have a few PCs that are running Vista at this stage then you have to get a MAK (Multiple Activation Key) onto each one of those PCs. Perhaps rashly I went ahead and installed Vista on a couple of PCs as soon as we got the DVD, assuming we would be able to get the keys within 30 days. That time is almost up, and the MS website that we registered with still isn't working properly. The MOE helpdesk (Datacom Services, also the LAR for Microsoft NZ Schools Agreement) has got us a KMS key so far, but all that does is activate our KMS server. It's totally useless in our situation.

Another plug for Windows Live Writer

Well, I had a go with WLW, and I had a go with ScribeFire, and I had lots of goes with Blogger's own composer.

And after all that, even though WLW can't do as much as Blogger, it can't justify and it can't post pictures, it is still the greatest because in other ways it works so much better.

You see, I'm about to change the shape of two of my existing blogs, and that means altering or deleting many articles. WLW will be able to help me achieve this task much faster than anything else because the offline client is so much easier and quicker to use than something that runs in a browser.

What was the other thing? As I went to push the Publish button to send this article to Blogger, I remembered it. I have several Google accounts, because I use different ones for home and work - I use one Gmail account for work related activities. This causes no end of problems at home when I can end up being logged into the wrong Google account, come to post a message and find I have to log out of one account and log in to the other. WLW doesn't require me to be logged in with the right Google account because it does that automatically.

REVIEW: Epson Perfection V100 Photo Scanner

It's not often I get to review something, but here's a look at a value for money option for scanning those photos, negatives and slides. Previously, if you wanted to scan slides, you were looking at something around $500 or more to get a reasonable result. At $299, the V100 is a lower cost way of getting this done, and it delivers good results too.

The package consists of the scanner, power adapter, quick start guide, software CD, USB cable and film holder. This is not just a photo scanner: it can also do general documents and OCR. Still, it is the film scanning capabilities that interest me enough to do this review. Installation was easy on a Windows XP Professional system. Install the software before connecting the USB cable, then connect up and away you go. Like most scanners, this one has buttons on the front to invoke software applications to do what you want.

When scanning film, you have to make sure it's inserted into the holder the right way up. Removing the platen cover inside the lid reveals the lamp which provides the light source for film scanning. Then place the film holder onto the document glass directly, making use of the icons moulded into the scanner base and film holder to get it the right way around. Insert the film or slides. Film goes in shiny side (face) down with the top edge facing left. The film holder takes strips of up to 6 negatives and can scan all of them in one pass. The film is easy to insert although the holder feels flimsy. Slides must be inserted and removed with the holder sitting on the glass as they are not supported underneath. You can scan up to four slides at a time. The whole process was simpler than I remember with HP scanners, which could only do two or three slides and maybe half a film strip and were fiddlier to set up with a separate lamp unit.

The V100 scan wizard features three modes: Full Auto, Home and Professional. Full Auto is the simplest but it only scans at 300 dpi. Provided the film is inserted correctly it automatically detects it and sets the options automatically. If you want a higher resolution, choose Home. It allows you more control over the settings, and should be quite satisfactory for most users. At 3200 dpi, negatives or slides can take three minutes each to scan. This reminds me of my old parallel port scanner, which could only get part of the scan done before it would have to empty its buffer, and then continue. But that was at 1200 dpi; the Epson is transmitting perhaps three times as much data. Still, it has to pause the scan every minute or two to flush data. Professional mode gives full control over all the settings. It can give you 48 bit colour, for example, but most users won't need it, and I wouldn't see myself using it most of the time. At 3200 dpi, a JPEG file will occupy about 2 MB at the default compression level. Bitmaps and TIFF files can also be created as well as PDFs. You can easily change the settings for each group of images, as you are asked to confirm them before each scan begins.

In my collection, due to the cost of processing, I used to have lots of films lying around that had been shot but not processed. You guessed it, I'm a digital man these days. Last year I finally got around to having those 25-odd rolls of unprocessed film developed, but not printed. (Most of them, some going back nearly 20 years, turned out alright except for a roll of Ilford XP1) The cost of printing and an ordinary scanner would be more than the cost of this unit, so this option is the better one by far.

For this review I did only basic scans at 1200 dpi. I haven't evaluated the options for more complex scans, corrections or fixes. However, my impression of the scanner's performance on these simple tasks is very favourable compared with an HP scanner that I used several years ago to scan most of my slide collection for the internet. Colours were rendered well; on the whole, colour correction from negatives seems to produce a satisfactory result. The price point and scan output of this unit should satisfy home users who have a large collection of slides or negatives that they want to scan to share on the internet. Recommended.

Are Vista upgrade DVDs not bootable?

Like all NZ schools that have joined the MS license agreement, we received a Vista Business Upgrade DVD recently. There's just one little problem: it's not bootable.

Here's a practical illustration of the situation. In the picture above, you see the extraction from IsoBuster showing what is on a bootable DVD ISO image obtained from Christchurch Polytechnic's Elms program. Notice we have selected the "Bootable CD" item on the left to display the BootCatalog.cat and Microsoft Corporation.img files on the right.

In the picture below, we see the same view of the NZ Ministry of Education DVD. It has the ISO and UDF data items, but it lacks the "Bootable CD" item and its files. And, you guessed it, the other DVD boots for installation and this one doesn't.

I have never actually heard before now of any Windows NT operating system that is not placed on a bootable CD or DVD. Even if it is an upgrade version, it's always been possible to start with a clean HDD with nothing on it, boot from the CD/DVD and install.

Modern MicroATX low profile PC

To bring the series about PC designs right up to the present day, here is a modern low profile desktop PC. This is a generic chassis, the Foxconn DH153, which like many chassis has been adapted to "Prescott" specification when Intel decided that a vent directly above the huge CPU cooler was needed. (From comparison with the other photos one can get an idea easily of how massive the heatsink and fan assembly are on these series of Celeron CPUs)

This board (Intel D101GGC) has two PCI slots, PCI Express x1 and x16. The chipset is ATI Radeon Xpress 200, which provides Radeon X300 onboard graphics. This is a better choice than Intel's own video chips because it can run Windows Vista Aero out of the box.

The DH153 is a low profile chassis and this illustrates the cleverness of the low profile backplane which enables the same motherboard to be used in either a full height or low profile case. All that has to be changed is the PCI cards (in some cases just the bracket on each card). There is no need for a separate motherboard design to fit into a low profile chassis as NLX required. Although there will probably never be a generic chassis as clever as the Compaqs seen earlier there are some good elements in this case. The drives are mounted in a removable sub-assembly; just disconnect all the cables and lift it out to add or remove devices. On the other hand, the power supply can't be taken out of this chassis without removing the motherboard, and the lid is almost certainly not strong enough to support

Ident Server on Vista Clients

Some proxy servers (generally non-Windows) require an Ident server running in each PC on the network so that the server can get the name of the user who is requesting Internet access. While there are limitations and security issues with the Ident protocol it is a simple easy to configure option for some applications.

With the advent of Windows Vista we found the old Identd service that we used to use on XP clients cannot install itself any more. I could find nothing suitable from Google, so I wrote a Windows application to perform this function.

I will look at how it could be made available if there is a demand for it. It doesn't install as a service, so it just has to be loaded at startup, and runs in the system tray.

From ATX / NLX to Micro ATX / Low Profile

The first form factor of the early PC clones was the AT style. This gave birth later to what became known as the "Baby AT" which was a common motherboard type for many years along with the AT type power supply. The original AT motherboard measured 305 x 350 mm. The BabyAT boards varied in size, maximum was 220 x 350 mm. In 1995, Intel introduced the ATX style to replace AT/Baby AT.

Earlier low profile PCs used a form called LPX or LPM. These had a riser card to put the peripheral slots on their side. There was no official standard for the design; many PCs in this formfactor were brandnames that used their own proprietary layouts. Occasionally you would see a double sided riser with as many as five slots, however single sided with three was more common. LPX/LPM designs were among the first to integrate many devices such as sound, video and network onto the board since there was rarely enough room in the case for many add-on cards, especially larger ones. NLX was designed by Intel to replace LPX/LPM and was introduced in 1997. However it has essentially disappeared to be replaced by proprietary designs or Low Profile ATX chassis based on micro ATX and other form factors.

Refer to the previous articles showing Compaq low profile desktops to see an example of a proprietary implementation, in this case using a riser card for the slots.

These days low profile clones and some brandnames are produced using MicroATX boards put into a case which has a low profile backplane. A brandname example is the IBM Netvista small form factor desktop PCs in the era of the Celeron 766. A clone case example is the Foxconn DH153 chassis. The case backplane is lower than the standard PCI card and only accepts low profile cards that are fitted with a bracket made in this size. Often, manufacturers produce cards in the low profile form factor and supply brackets for both backplane sizes with the card; however it is necessary to shop around to find them. The Compaq D5S low profile desktop shown in a recent article in this blog was a hybrid; it uses a low profile graphics card in an AGP slot as well as providing two full height PCI slots on a riser. However it's not clear whether the AGP card was a standard low profile design or a proprietary unit.

The picture below shows an ATX board and micro ATX alongside each other.

The layouts are generally similar. The ATX at left has onboard sound while the uATX at right has onboard graphics and network interface as well. The CPUs are a Pentium 166 MMX and Celeron 1000 (100 MHz memory bus) respectively. The chipsets are Intel 430TX and SiS 630 while the models are Asus TX-97X and Asus TUSI-M. The main reduction in size comes from cutting the number of peripheral slots; three is enough these days with onboard integration and USB etc. The other major difference between the boards is the elimination of bus and CPU clock speed and voltage jumpers on the later boards, the settings now being done in the BIOS.

NZ Schools 2007 Software Issues

• eTrust ITM services are not started after installation on Vista. The Realtime agent will report that it cannot access the Realtime service. InoRT, InoRPC and InoTask services are all stopped. Windows Security Center reports that eTrust ITM is out of date. The PC is very slow with a high level of disk activity.
  
• Resolution: From rebooting after installation the PC will be very slow and report these problems but eventually after some minutes the software will start running properly and the PC will be OK.
  

• eTrust Local console (browser based) will not run on a desktop PC. (Connection Refused from some proxies)

• eTrust ITM may not register its license at installation (XP or Vista).


• MOE Vista Business DVD does not boot for installation.
• Workaround: Install another operating system first, insert the DVD, choose Custom Install and configure it to delete the current operating system (for a clean install).
  

%username% with usernames over 20 characters

These days with the increasing tendency to use double-barrelled surnames resulting in a username that could exceed 20 characters in length, it pays to be careful when setting up accounts for such people.

Suppose we have our usernames in the form firstname.lastname and we have a user "abcdef.ghijkl-mnopqrs". This username is 21 characters long including the intermediate period. When we create the account, Windows says their pre-Windows 2000 name will be just the first 20 characters. We might then choose to edit the pre-Windows 2000 name to be "abcdef.ghijkl". But we don't change the long version of the name which becomes the UPN when added to the UPN suffix (i.e. abcdef.ghijkl-mnopqrs@mydomain.xyz). Windows creates an account in Active Directory. If we copied the account from an existing one, Windows might also automatically create a home directory in the same path as the original account which might be something like \\someserver\homes\abcdef.ghijkl

This is OK if you are creating one user at a time and copying them. However if you are creating these users from a script, or creating the home directories separately and setting permissions manually, you need to be aware that references to %username% do refer to the pre-Windows 2000 form of the name (the 20 character one). Folder redirection policy will fail if the policy uses the %username% variable to refer to a home folder whose name does not match the pre-Windows 2000 name.

Windows Live Mail hangs with some feeds; big improvements for IMAP users

I've been testing the Windows Live Mail beta for some weeks at home now. Finally, Microsoft have put an official download page on live.com for it. One of the areas in which I have seen persistent problems is with blog feeds. If the server providing the feed returns invalid or incomplete data, WLM simply hangs, whereas IE7, which acts as the feed agent for WLM, can tell us simply that the feed is invalid, incomplete or missing.

Apart from that issue WLM looks very useful and once the bugs are out of it I will be recommending it for staff use here. A major benefit is the way in which it handles IMAP mail accounts (we use IMAP on our mail server here). All Microsoft mail clients up to this point, including Outlook 2003, store the Sent Items in a local folder on the computer rather than in the Sent Items folder on the IMAP server. This means that the benefits of IMAP, which assume that all the mail remains on the mail server, are lost to a certain extent. WLM has settings to specify IMAP folder names for Sent Items, Junk Mail, Drafts and Deleted Items. The folders on the server will be used for all these if the option is enabled. I've found it works well with an IMAP account I am using.

Always reformat the HDD when replacing Vista with another OS

I have had a frustrating time trying to install Windows XP onto a PC that had previously had Vista installed on it (unactivated). I assumed that because the disk is recognised as NTFS and Windows can delete the existing installation, there would be no problem installing XP without reformatting the disk/partition.

However things are not that simple, and both when using a RIS image, and using a CD installation, I encountered various errors regarding files that could not be copied (which I skipped), then when the automated setup restarted in GUI mode, the setup was halted with a fatal Access Denied error.

Once I got wind of what might be happening and deleted the entire partitition, created a new partition and gave it a full format, RIS based XP setup proceeded normally without any further user input, the way it should normally work. I presume that the Vista setup had left ACLs and other settings on the disk that caused conflicts with XP Setup.

Compaq Personal Computers

In all the years I have been either studying or working in the computer industry, Compaq has been one of my favourite kinds of brand-name PC due to their innovative and imaginative design. Like most brand-names, Compaq don't use bland, boxy generic cases, they have often gone out of their way to create designs that are visually appealing and incorporate clever features that set them apart from the competition as well as making them easy to service and upgrade. Other manufacturers in recent years have begun adopting some of these clever features, but for a long time the generic cases were a long way behind in innovation.

The first four pictures are of a Compaq Evo D5, which is a Pentium IV/1.6 GHz with 256MB of PC-133 SDRAM and a 20GB HDD. The last two pictures are a Compaq Deskpro EN, a Pentium III/1000 with 256 MB of PC-133 SDRAM and a 10 GB HDD.

Compaq EVO D5 front panel view.

Under the hood. The drive bays hinge up to give access to the motherboard underneath. Sound and USB sockets and the power switch are all mounted directly to the board; no need for front panel cabling here. Another nice Compaq feature is that a supply of the cheese head screws needed to mount the drives in the bays is included inside each case. In this picture you can see four black screws sitting in their holes just right of the lower right corner of the CD writer. The drives can be taken right out of the bays without any tools at all.

With the drive bays hinged forward we can see the mainboard. The CPU has, as is commonly the case in brandname PCs, a custom arrangement of fan and ducting to ensure proper airflow for cooling; in this case exhausting through the front panel vents. In the past Compaq has used the power supply cooling fan to good effect as well. This Compaq has a low profile AGP card in its own slot just to the right of the power supply. Two full height PCI slots are in a riser at right rear.
Back panel view of the D5. Even in this day and age it still has two DB-9 serial ports.

The PCI slot riser in the Deskpro EN SFF. This one is for three PCI slots and the card edge plugs into what looks like another PCI slot on the mainboard itself. The riser also carries the case open switch which can be seen lower left.

Deskpro EN SFF power supply hinged up for easy access underneath. Immediately left you can see another clever Compaq feature in some models - the case lock switch. Rather than having something you lock with a padlock, you just make a setting in the Bios to engage this switch and lock the case closed.

Most of the Compaqs I have ever seen are designed to come apart with a minimum of tools. The drive bays use clips and special screws to enable the drives to be removed and exchanged very quickly. The riser comes out as a complete unit - never been that easy in other low profile PCs before. Another important point is that you can use full height cards rather than low profile PCI which most low profile cases require today. The Deskpro EN even had the mainboard mounted on a metal baseplate which could be dropped out of the case very easily. You could have the PC dismantled into its major pieces in about five minutes.

Another Compaq innovation was the convertible desktop/tower case. These are a full height desktop, as they have to be. The drive bay which took three 5 1/4" devices was designed in such a way that devices could be rotated through 90 degrees, making it possible to configure the same case as either a desktop or a tower - simply by removing the devices and reinserting them in the correct orientation.

Overall, Compaq has represented a trend of design innovation in PCs for years and it is hoped that HP will pick up the best aspects of Compaq design and continue that innovation in years to come.

ScribeFire Firefox blogging plugin available

This is my first tryout of ScribeFire, a blogging plugin available for the Firefox open source web browser. Some time ago I mentioned Windows Live Writer, another option for those of us who prefer a proper blogging client as opposed to the limitations of a browser based composition system. ScribeFire is a Firefox plugin but it doesn't require you to open a web page to use it; it is simply making use of the user interface of Firefox to run.

As I currently use Firefox as my default browser both at home and work, due to capabilities for advanced control of those annoying adverts, images and media, ScribeFire would be very convenient and therefore I will be trying it out as much as possible to see what it can do.

One significant improvement over WLW is the ability to justify text. Unfortunately it is still not possible to upload pictures in a Blogspot blog using this plugin so this limits its usefulness to my text-only blogs at present. There are a few little glitches in ScribeFire, one is that changing between it and Blogger's web based composer often causes problems with justification of text.

Champion WD front loading washer/dryer

The last of a long line, this is the comparatively rare Champion WD front loading washer/dryer. Basically this is about all the Champions you can find in public. I know very little about the company operations except that they were called "Radiation Ltd" and were in Dunedin. Champion did a range of everyday ordinary machines, mostly top loaders, dryers and ranges. In the washing department, they ranged through manual, semiautomatic and fully automatic machines. I believe some of the earlier machines were branded "Thor" and may have been license assembled from the UK or US production of that brand (which still trades today in its own right).

The WD front loader was a rare departure for Champion. Once again without access to company information I am unable to state whether this was an indigenous effort or something licensed from overseas. It was also rare for NZ at the time due to the overwhelming dominance of top loading washers, as is the case still today. I know very little about this model except that it was Champion's swansong. They were not very reliable, but some have survived as you still see them for sale from time to time. It was about this time that Sanyo NZ bought out Radiation and after their main business went into liquidation in the mid 1980s, Sanyo sold the remains to Fisher and Paykel.

Eiki SL1 16 mm film projector

In the days before video players, the great multimedia educational resource around the world was, of course, 16 mm sound film. Just about every school in New Zealand had a projector of their own, often installed in a specially fitted out classroom with blackout curtains and a screen. These pictures are of an Eiki projector, which was probably the most common brand in NZ schools although there were others like Bell & Howell etc. When I started at High school, having gone through primary and intermediate watching films in the class, the school decided that we were responsible enough to become student projectionists, and so, with a handful of others, I got a projectionists' certification for Eikis.

The school had three of these as I recall, the oldest required a complete manual threading. The newer models at that time were automatically threaded, push a lever, turn the motor on, feed the film in and it would thread itself. This particular one you see in the pictures is "slot load" meaning the film is just slipped into the slot, then when the knob is turned on the sprockets drop into place and engage the film. You can't manually thread one of these at all whereas an auto threader can always be manually threaded.

Here's a view of the main controls. The big knob top right focuses the lens. The main control knob lower right turns on the motor and lamp. At lower left you have volume and tone controls. The small socket is for a microphone which allowed these units to be used as a small single channel PA with the external speakers, and I did occasionally see one used like this. The small toggle switch appears to be a local modification to select between the built in and external speakers. This particular projector has been fitted with XLR jacks for the speakers rather than the standard 1/4" jack which used switch contacts to cut out the internal speaker when plugged in,

This picture shows the front of the unit with the lamp housing cover removed. The projection lamp is inside the metal cover that says "Caution Hot". Below that can be seen various rollers, the black one to the left is the trailing sprocket. There is a leading sprocket near where the film enters the projector. In this picture also you can see the sound lamp. 16 mm film generally uses an optical soundtrack (although occasionally a magnetic strip is used) which works by shining light through the film onto a photoelectric detector.

At the right you can see the gate. The film moves in the gate by a claw which uses a shutter to block the light off before the film is moved one frame at a time. This conflicts with the continual rotation of the sprockets so the film's movement is buffered by the upper and lower loops which are respectively above and below the gate. It is imperative for the correct operation of the projector to maintain the size of these loops. One of the fun things of the projector was that if tbe bottom loop got too small there was a little arm that was tripped and would rotate one revolution to pull the film through the gate so as to make the lower loop the right size again. This invariably resulted in a jumping picture on the screen.

Inside the guts of the projector with the cover taken off.

A reel of film. Reels were generally five sizes, each being a successive multiple of 400 feet of film. The sizes were A, B, C, D and E - the last was not common. 400 feet of film will last about 12 minutes so the sizes ranged up to 1 hour. Sometimes a film would be on more than one reel. This reel seen here is a C and will hold up to 1200 feet when full.

Films were shipped out from the National Film Library's Christchurch office to schools around the city once a week. At high school they came in on a Tuesday afternoon. We had two projection rooms with their own projectors and in the senior school a third projector was used as needed or as a spare. The projection rooms each had a little room off the back where the projector was and where the projectionists sat and kept an eye on the machine. Once the film was finished it had to be rewound, turning a lever reversed the direction and made it go faster than it would go through the projector. Generally we got extra time out of class to get there a little ahead and thread the projector, then rewind the reels afterwards and lock up the room.

We also learned how to splice film together, which involved cutting the ends off square, scraping off the emulsion, applying a special cement to one end, overlapping the ends and pressing them together in a special tool, although you could get by without it just by lining up the sprocket holes. Films of course went around the country and got damaged. Torn sprocket holes were an example, these would cause the film to jump as the lower loop would usually shrink and trip the reset arm to pull the loop back to size. If this happened too much you had to stop the projector and rethread by pulling more film through from the top to reset the loops back to size. If the film snapped or tore it would have to be spliced which invariably meant cutting out the damaged part, a few frames at least.

Video did not take over until a few years after I left high school. The VCRs then available were very expensive and few titles were available on them. Most high schools would have had perhaps only one or two VCRs in specially equipped rooms due to the cost of them (four figures was common). A far cry from today when there might be one in almost every classroom. But once video did take over then film fell out of vogue, along with the need for the special theaterettes which were in most cases co

Fisher and Paykel 300/400 Series Autowashers

These machines were a licensed UK design. The back panel of most has a plate affixed saying it is an AEI-Gala design. In later years, similar machines were sold in Britain under the Hotpoint brand (possible model numbers are 9600, 9604, 9605). In NZ, the last series of these machines were the 370, 380 and 400 models. The 370 was the budget series model which had, I think, no option switches at all. The 380 was the middle range model with adjustable wash and rinse temperature, water level, spin speed and number of rinses. The 400 was the high end model with the addition of a heating element over the 380. I believe this last series of models were produced from the late 1970s for about five-six years. Our family owned a 380 model for about 10 years, approx 1980-1990. The following photos give some idea of the appearance and layout.

General view of the machine. At left of the control panel is the timer with the option switches in the middle.
Closeup of the control panel, the timer and option switches.

Inside view of the machine with the detergent dispenser/lint filter on top of the agitator. During the wash cycle, water circulates through the machine and is pumped through the water spout seen just below the lid, passing through the "Filter Clean Dispenser" back into the bowl.

The machines had a fairly conventional (for its day) mechanical layout with just one motor driving the pump and gearbox off a V-belt. The pump always turned, circulating the water during wash and rinse cycles, and pumping water out during the spin cycle. When it came time to spin, the bowl was held stationary on the brakes while a slip clutch allowed the motor to turn the pump and drain the water, then the brakes were released and the spin speed gradually built up to 1000 rpm, which for its day was a very high figure compared to other brands. If the slow spin was selected the spin was only allowed to run for the last 30 seconds of the cycle time. The resulting wear in the clutch could become an annual repair item depending on how often the machine was used in this mode.

Apart from normal wear and tear the machines were very reliable. They were also very solid and heavy (88 kg), as with other dynamically balanced designs of the period, a concrete block balanced the motor weight in the chassis. They were sold under the Whiteway, Savaday, Kelvinator and possibly Frigidaire brands, the latter two being licensed by F&P in NZ at the time. So far as I recall the Frigidaire(?) variant of the 380 or 400 model differed in having an additional Gentle Agitate option. On models fitted with the heating element the machine would heat the wash water to 60 degrees C and then start the wash automatically when this was reached. In the warm wash mode the hot inlet valve was opened continuously during the fill while the cold water valve opened and closed cyclically using a simmerstat. The cycle was controlled by setting a knob rather than by actual water temperature.

Although it is now more than 20 years since these machines were built new in NZ, their reliability and longevity has resulted in there being a thriving refurbishment and servicing industry operating around the country and they can still be bought and sold quite commonly. I purchased the machine shown in these pictures approximately three years ago. It is used for about two loads a week and has been very reliable.

NZ Automatic Washer History

Prior to 1984 NZ had import restrictions which meant that washing machines were built in factories around the country. These were often overseas brands assembled locally for domestic demand. There seem to have been three main brands produced:

Norge - locally assembled production of the US brand range. A range of models including twin tubs and top loading automatics. A friend of our family had one of the top loaders, very expensive and rare to see in the early 1970s. As I recall, Norge machines were not particularly innovative or reliable.

Champion - NZ company, their production appears to have included license assembled Thor models from either the UK or US. My grandfather had an older model semi automatic Champion top loader. Most of these throughout a series of models were of a unique suds-saving design that had some sort of internal tank to store the wash water for reuse after the spin cycle. Basically you would wash the load as normal for the wash cycle, then at the end the water would be pumped out, the machine would spin and stop at the end of the cycle. You then would remove the unrinsed washing and store it, then operate the controls to return the sudsy wash water for another load. Then once you had finished doing all the washing you would rinse all the loads one at a time followed by final spin. The storage of water internally meant that the capacity of these machines was less than other machines of similar dimensions.

Champion machines were otherwise unremarkable and of average reliability. In the mid 1980s, Champion's operations were bought out by Sanyo NZ. This was about the time that Champion brought out its front loading design, a combination washer and dryer. They were very unreliable and only in production a year or two, but you still see them around in the second hand places occasionally. That was the end of the road for Champion; Sanyo sold their operations to Fisher and Paykel.

Fisher and Paykel - Started selling a local version of a British designed automatic washing machine (licensed from AEI-Gala as the back panel says). These machines must have been in production from the 1960s I should think. In 1985 the first electronic machine the ECS was released. A few years later this was updated to the Smartdrive design using much the same basic layout except that a direct drive motor is now used. (There are going to be several articles on F&P autowashers which will cover these in more detail)

Other brands - there were various Australian automatic brands as well as a few NZ ones. You do see the odd Bendix frontloader around the place as well as Hoovers, Simpsons etc. Many of the Australian machines of the 7os and 80s had suds-save capabilities providing that the water could be stored outside the machine (in the tub for example) and pumped back in as required. Hoovermatic twintubs were quite popular in NZ. There were endless models of wringer machines produced in NZ - the F&P Whiteway brand was just one, Beatty, Pallo, Airco are others that come to mind off the top of my head. Atlas was a brand of automatic machine that was only in production a short time so I would think they are fairly rare.

Maxtor 2F020 HDD

This is another interesting HDD (20 GB), early 2000s. It's branded a "Fireball" and thus, possibly, is a relabelled Quantum design. What is interesting about this one is that it has only one head. This is very rare in HDDs because normally you can use both sides of the platter to increase your capacity. The head in this case sits right under the platter which has no head on top. When the platter is put in, the head is hidden underneath.

PC History: Quantum Bigfoot HDD

The Bigfoot was a rare example of a modern IDE drive produced in the 5 1/4" form factor. These were a budget drive often found in low end PCs of the time. The capacity started at 1.2 GB and went all the way up to 19.2 GB. This example is 4.3 GB and was installed in my first PC which I bought in 1997. Bigfoot drives were generally slower than comparable models of the era, in part due to the slow 3600 rpm spin speed - 4500 or 5400 rpm drives were commonly available at the time. No other manufacturer since has been interested in producing drives of this form factor. So the Bigfoot occupies its own little niche of PC history.

Other Technical Topics

As things have been a bit slow lately and as I can't be bothered setting up yet another blog, from time to time this blog will divert onto technical but non-computer topics of interest. You may also see technical articles on design aspects of certain types of computer hardware. Both of these areas are different from the main function that this blog was originally set up for - the day to day operations of a school computing environment.

So, the first articles will appear shortly

Using Loopback GPOs

This is one subject I never did quite get the hang of when I studied GPOs in MOC 2274/2279. The MS documentation for loopback policy is a little confusing.

The normal way that GPOs are applied is that the computer configuration part of the GPO is applied to computer accounts, and the user configuration part of the GPO is applied to user accounts. Say the computer is called ABC and the user is called xyz. At first startup, the computer configuration GPO is applied to ABC. When user xyz logs on to ABC, the user configuration GPO is applied for that user account.

Loopback is different in that it permits a user GPO to be applied to a specific computer depending on the OU in which that computer appears. Normally, the only GPO you can specify for a computer account is the computer configuration. The user config GPO is determined by the OU that the user account is stored in. When loopback is enabled, the user config GPO is determined by the computer account OU instead. This enables the normal user settings that would apply for that particular computer or group of computers to be overridden.

An example in our network is that for pupil users, we have their user GPO set up to redirect their Start Menu to the All Users Desktop. This gives them a great big start menu with all the shortcuts in one long list, no subfolders. First thing I tried to make a nicer start menu was to put the start menu into the mandatory profile. The problem was that on a couple of PCs this didn't work out for some reason. Maybe I missed something. Anyhow, the next idea for this group of PCs is to redirect the user's start menu to the All Users start menu. This worked. However this is a different configuration from other pupils machines. So, I created a new OU, linked a new GPO to it, set Loopback Policy to Enabled (Merge) and set just one setting: redirect the Start menu to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu. After configuring the Start Menu, it was all go. Only the PCs that are in this OU will have this configuration applied, because only they have the reconfigured All Users start menu.

The drawback of loopback policy like this is that every user who logs onto a PC gets the same user settings. In this case everyone gets the limited Start menu, even if they are an administrator. Only the local administrator account can get full access to the PC. In this case, I'll only use loopback until such time as every pupil PC in the school is configured with the new start menu settings, and then apply them to pupil users globally.

Why, incidentally, would it be necessary to redirect the start menu? We need to restrict what appears on the Start menu for pupils. Partly this is for security, limiting the ability to tamper with settings, and partly meeting the AUP. Windows XP has changed from previous versions of Windows in terms of the policy settings that control access to the start menu. The options were reduced somewhat. MS seems to want to discourage limiting the Start menu, but I doubt that many sysadmins would agree with them.

MOE creates SMS user groups

The Ministry of Education recently set up a number of egroups for the different SMSs (Student Management Systems) that they accredited for use in NZ. In addition there is another egroup for the data sharing approval framework. MOE has also announced there are not going to be any more accreditation rounds for SMSs. Instead there will be an annual process based on data sharing approval for producing an annual checkup of SMS vendors.

Data Sharing in general is an initiative that includes the possibility of schools being able to transfer SMS data rather than paper records when pupils move between schools. To get the full benefit of such a system, the SMS should be used to record as much data as possible, including all assessment results. Other possible applications for data sharing might include exchanging data between an SMS and a library system, or a Learning Management System.

Over time, the use of an LMS could replace the need for paper reporting. The LMS would give parents the ability to log in and obtain assessment results at any time. Since the SMS could store data from all assessment results rather than just a summary, a more detailed picture of assessment progress can be obtained. When the pupil changes to a new school, these more detailed records can be transferred fully giving the school a good picture of the new entrant as well.

Another advantage an LMS has is where assessment data comes from more than one school. Suppose that a pupil is enrolled at School A but takes several classes a week at School B which are not available at School A. In this case School B can also enter assessment data into the LMS which is available immediately rather than School A having to gather that data from School B and enter it themselves, saving on time and resources.

In the case of RM Integris, I understand an LMS is being promoted with the G2 web based product currently in development. It is unclear when NZ Integris users are likely to see the G2 product become available for use.