Canon Powershot S5 IS & Speedlite 430EX II: First Impressions

Well, I have had these two and so far I have taken about 66 pictures. That isn’t going to set the world on fire, but next week I’ll have a big event at work and be able to take a couple of hundred in my official role as recorder. One of the cameras I’m comparing it to, mentally, is the Sony F717 which was really the thing to have a couple of years before I bought my S1. Obviously the 717 outperformed the S1 in certain ways but it was not a huge difference from my perspective. One of the features the 717 did have was a hot shoe, as did its successor, the F828, but oddly enough this feature has been dropped in the latest high end Sony compact, the H50, which leaves the S5 and its higher-end stablemate the Powershot G9 pretty much on their own as hot-shoe prosumer compacts.

So far my impressions of the combination can be summarised as follows:

1. The flash performance is out of this world. The Speedlite 430EX is a very powerful unit with a guide number of 43 metres. I have taken most of the pictures in rooms with reasonably low ceilings meaning I can use the head angling capability to bounce the flash off the ceiling, the result of course being no red-eye. The ability of course to take lots of photos close together without waiting for recycle is also fantastic
2. Like the S1 and successors, the S5 features a rotary zoom controller around the shutter release. This is a two speed arrangement with the slow speed being obtained by turning the rocker partway in either direction and the fast speed by pushing it all the way round. To date I keep seeming to engage the fast speed all the time, or else the slower speed is just too fast. Every time I try to zoom I end up overshooting and have to pull back, yet I can’t get it right without blipping the controller instead of letting it run continually.
3. The shutter release likewise is a two step arrangement so beloved of most digital cameras with a half step which causes the camera to focus and set the exposure reading, once these have locked the camera lets you know that you can press the shutter the rest of the way to take the picture. In my experiences to date, it is very hard to find this halfway point. It seems to be a very light pressure at the point where this half step engages and easy to overshoot, or more likely, the release feels more like it has three stages instead of two. Since this is my fifth Canon digital, it can be inferred that I never noticed this problem before with the other four cameras.

In comparing my experience to date with the first ten review links I found in Google, including points not mentioned above:

• I did not find the battery door hard to fasten (DPreview) – it’s much improved over the S1 in terms of the pressure required to close it.
• DCResource had a similar experience of difficulty with the speed of zooming on the “slow” setting. Since another review described the speed as “glacial” I am really confused at the moment :)
• Photography Blog contradicted my views on the shutter release.

One thing all the blogs have in common is slating the lack of increase in the zoom range (still 12x as seen in the S3) and certain issues of picture quality such as colour fringing and noise at higher ISO settings. For me, those things aren’t major issues, but I think Canon should try to fix them in this year’s model.

In rechecking with the camera at work the next day, the zoom problem is definitely with the slower speed which really is much faster than the S1, and the shutter release has unnecessary slack in it which effectively creates a three stage operation instead of two. Both these points need to be addressed in future Canon cameras of this type.

Windows Vista and Microsoft Access

When I got my work PC with Windows Vista on it, I installed it alongside my existing XP PC and kept both running. In fact I still use the XP PC occasionally, but obviously as time went on I switched as many things as possible to Vista. At the time I had one major MS Access database that I ran in XP over a network drive, and several attempts with both Access 2003 and Access 2007 to get this running on the Vista box were unsuccessful, as each time the database file would become corrupted and have to be restored from backup. (The error message typically being “Not a valid bookmark” followed by “Unrecognised database format” or similar)

I have now got the database to work satisfactorily on the Vista box by changing it over to the C drive of that PC (C:\Users\…\Documents). It has not become corrupted since that time and being able to do this marks a major milestone in my transition to a fully functional Vista system. We can only speculate as to the cause of the corruption problems over the network connection. Long experience has taught me that some manufacturers put out buggy network card drivers; in this case I’m using an Intel NIC as those of this brand have been very reliable in the past. Another problem in the past has been network redirectors in Windows with numerous patches issued, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that turned out to be a factor, though I have yet to see any fixes from MS in these areas.

UPDATE: Microsoft announced this is fixed in SP1 of Vista. The folder-redirection is to blame for this problem.

Powershot S5 / Speedlite 430

I have now received these and had a play with them. The main changes in the S5 that I noticed immediately over the S1 are the larger LCD screen, of course the hot shoe on top, and small incremental differences. In features and functionality it is very much like the S1 I have grown to enjoy. The flash shoe is the main reason for me to buy this camera, with a flash that costs almost as much, but which is highly desirable due to limitations caused by the low performance of the internal flash. The S5 also comes up to date with some of the feature set of my A460 such as the super macro which in theory could focus on a fly walking across the lens. I’m looking forward to the improved capabilities of this camera which is largely used for work related occasions where up to several hundred photos are taken each day.

Ghost vs RIS/WDS/Software Install Policy

Today I installed Ghost Console on my PC for the first time in years, and it brought back a lot of memories. We bought a suite of new PCs back three years ago, and got Ghost licenses with them all, which entitled me to receive the Ghost Solution Suite 1.0 CDs and manuals. At that time I installed and used the Console extensively and had the client installed on all the PCs. A year later another 34 PCs came along with 50 licenses and GSS 1.1, then 2.0. In those days we had only two Linux Samba servers, and that was one of the main reasons I used Ghost a lot. But then at the start of 2006 we got our first Windows server. That didn’t immediately change things, and I still used Ghost a lot. But at the end of that year we made that server into a DC, replaced one of the Linux servers with a dedicated mail/firewall/filtering solution, and turned the other Linux server into the second Windows DC. Then after that I got into GPOs, RIS and stuff like that and didn’t bother much with Ghost or the console.

Fast forward to 2008 and dust off that old Ghost console again… why? Well, Ghost still has the capabilities I need and I have the existing experience to build on. With the console I can remotely image and load machines, which I can’t do at the moment with WS. True, Ghost costs money over and above WS, but Windows doesn’t actually provide the useful functionality that Symantec have wrapped into the console. So I expect to get back into the Console in full force pretty soon.

Ten PCs waiting to begin a multicast session. They were all locally booted off the RIS server via PXE and loaded the UNDI boot image to start up Ghost, then loaded this sysprepped image in about two hours. 29 of the 30 PCs in the suite have now been reimaged in the past few days with no user reported problems.

TELA Laptops: HP vs Toshiba

Many schools in NZ are taking advantage of the Ministry of Education’s TELA laptop leasing program which pays about two thirds of the costs of the lease and also provides mobility insurance and pickup or onsite service. Our school has been using these laptops for several years since the program was extended to include primary schools, and now is onto our second round of leases for both teachers and the principal (the latter being on the Leadspace program). There have always been three brands available: HP/Compaq, Toshiba and Apple. As a PC site we use the first two only. In our first round of leases, we predominated with Toshiba but experimentally tried two Compaq NX5000s. Although the hardware quality was comparable, the service arrangements were less satisfactory falling below the standard provided by the Toshiba agent. In the new round of leases that we signed up for in 2008, HP offers the Compaq 6710b laptop (and the 8510p in the Leadspace program) with an onsite service warranty, which is the first time this has been available to my knowledge for any TELA laptops. Basically the previous return system used by both Toshiba and HP is to require you to either deliver the laptop yourself to the service centre or have it collected by a courier. This requires the school to have additional resources to make a backup of user files, and perhaps another laptop to loan to the affected teacher while their laptop is away for repair. This could easily take a week or more, and the time required by the school IT staff to copy the user’s files back and forth, packing up the laptop and finding a convenient time to exchange it is a major consideration.

So it was with considerable interest that I noted that HP has now started to offer on-site service of their laptops starting late in 2007 or possibly earlier. We took out a lease at the end of 2007 for one Compaq 6710b laptop as this model at the time was considerably cheaper to lease than the Toshiba S200 model. As it now turns out, Toshiba has also reduced their prices, but doesn’t differentiate on the question of the level of warranty service from before. The 6710b was the earlier GX785PC submodel, and overall I found its performance compared well with the Toshibas. Based on satisfactory experience of this Compaq laptop, we placed an order recently for eleven more of the same type, although they are now the KM361PC submodel. We have had occasion to call on the service of HP for site visits twice, which has proved convenient both times. However, I would be a little concerned about having two laptops out of 11 having faults from new. The Toshiba S200 is broadly similar to other Toshiba models in the past; the main enhancement that the user notices is when switching displays with an external display connected. The laptop now displays a popup menu when Fn and F5 are pressed, and this includes the very convenient option of enabling extended desktop. The Compaq doesn’t have the exact same functionality when using its Fn and F4 key combination, but it does have a special Presenter button which gives the same options. This button along with others for information, wireless mode and sound levels, is placed on a strip of convenient touch sensitive buttons above the keyboard. The 6710b also has a better placement of the sound jacks on the side rather than the front.

Overall I would say these two models are much of a muchness, but HP’s onsite warranty service is much more convenient as long as the fault can be repaired at the school. One of the laptop repairs we had done involved taking the whole laptop apart and completely replacing the system board, which was completed in about half an hour or so, so I suspect it would be a rare fault that would require the laptop to go back to base. With the laptops being so new we haven’t had any indemnity repairs yet, so I don’t know if the process for these is different. I also haven’t yet encountered a situation where the repair couldn’t be diagnosed on the basis of the initial support query, i.e. where the serviceperson would need to perform additional testing at a service centre to determine the fault. Those types of situations might result in the laptop needing to be sent to the service centre and resulting inconvenience for the school. So my comments about onsite service really only apply to the situations we have seen so far in our case. One interesting technical difference between these model laptops and older ones is that the earth pin of the power supply cord is connected to external metal surfaces on the laptop itself. The older generation of laptops (Toshiba anyway) had 2 core mains leads so obviously the mains earth could not be connected in this way. I’m not sure why these laptops are electrically connected that way but it means they are now a Class 1 appliance instead of Class 2. It may be this is necessary for adequate RF noise shielding, always a problem with plastic cased devices.

More on Automating Windows Installations with Ghost and Sysprep

Overnight from Friday and during Saturday I multicasted two groups of PCs in our computer suite. This can be quite a tedious process getting all 8 or 11 (in this case) clients up and running and then the multicast itself can take up to several hours depending on how fast the slowest client is going. In this case the work took practically all Saturday to complete due to various problems. It can get very annoying when you discover a small omission in your image that means you have to load it to a PC, fix the problem and then make a new image on the server. Three of the group of 11 didn’t have the right disk partitioning and I tried running Diskpart from the XP recovery console, but the problem was that while this created the partition, it did not make it bootable – I don’t know how I would have done that, as normally Ghost doesn’t seem to have this issue. So when I chose to only load a partition on those 11 PCs, these three only got the partition contents and not its bootable status; lacking in the knowledge to fix that, I changed the Ghostcast server over to a full disk image and left them running overnight Saturday (and Sunday) on another multicast disk load.

As I chronicled in my previous article, I started this kind of thing initially on Ghost, way back in our Windows 98 days (I started working in my present job on 26 July 2003, and first used Ghost when we set up our original 30 PC suite at the start of 2004) and then experimented with RIS for a while; then we got Ghost Solutions Suite 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, but I fell a bit behind with my knowledge of what Ghost can do. All my experience of imaging is based on what we used to do with Windows 98 PCs. We would run the Ghost Multicast Server (as it was then called) on one PC, and go around all of the other PCs with boot floppy disks starting the Ghost client which would then hook them onto the multicast session. When you had all the number, and it could be the whole thirty if you wanted it to, which had hooked onto the multicast server session, the multicast started and in perhaps a couple of hours all of those PCs would have the new image loaded onto them. Since we got XP I didn’t use Ghost much except for loading the console client onto all our new PCs and trying out what it could do, but this didn’t include any imaging; all the new PCs were loaded by the factory when they used Ghost themselves. When I did start to look at imaging again, I tried out RIS.

What changed it for me was RIS being updated to WDS, RIS not being capable of doing .NET installs, and the wider use of laptops when it became advantageous to use Ghost to image them in a batch. But most of that imaging was done one PC at a time using conventional techniques. When I found that the 16 bit DOS client would not boot on some laptops, I created a Windows PE boot CD from our Vista license installation and used that to boot the laptop then start up Ghost32. Hurrah for the end of the NIC hardware specific DOS boot floppy or CD! It is only as we have got into the second half of 2008 that I have made a conscious decision to continue building on my existing Ghost knowledge and leverage that to continue imaging and updating our PCs into the future. In so doing I have learned that it is possible to image a machine without physically visiting its location using the Ghost console. This is a capability that will further enhance our use of this technology to maintain our PCs, much as Microsoft has moved to embrace concepts such as these with their Zero Touch install technology.

In another previous article I wrote about the need to undo the PushPrinterConnections printer deployment when moving from the use of printer deployment to printer preferences in Group Policy. This is actually the only way it can be done so far, attempting to automate this using Sysprep.inf GuiRunOnce section has not worked as expected. Basically there are several steps:

1. While the PC is being imaged, move its account into an OU that runs PushPrinterConnections.exe with no deployed printers to remove all previously deployed printers
2. After the PC is restarted, finishes Sysprep stages and comes up to the Windows logon for the first time, move the account to the preference based GPO
3. Log in, run gpupdate /force /boot to force the new GPO to be implemented. This will restart the PC.
4. The PC should now have implemented the preference based printer settings.

The important note about preference based settings is that the user can choose to remove them and they will not be reinstated the next time the user logs on. Preferences are a one time thing that run only when the GPO is created or updated. So, for pupil user accounts where preference based printer settings are used, you should disable the account’s ability to delete printers.

Canon Powershot S5 IS and Speedlite 430EXII

After three years of using my trusty Powershot S1 IS, I will be upgrading very shortly to a Powershot S5 and accessory Canon Speedlite 430EXII flash. The S1 was almost end of line when I purchased it, and the S5 is also end of line and has been discounted in some parts of the world or dropped from product stock by some retailers. Canon, however, is yet to announce the replacement “S6” model and the speculation is that it might be different enough from its predecessor for me to not want to wait as I have these past few months (new S series models have typically been announced in the first or second quarter). My experience in getting the S1 was interesting in itself. I originally was looking at one of the Fuji Finepix models in similar spec range, and the Canon was a very late change of option that stretched my budget enough that for the first month I used only alkalines to run it. But it has turned out a much better choice, from the high quality video through the USM lens motor, the articulating screen and lots of other nice features that it has, apart from Canon’s well deserved reputation. One of the reasons I was willing to wait around for an S6 is that the lens spec of the S1 is one thing that hasn’t changed much since, going from zoom of 10x to only 12x in the S5. There’s rumours of a gain in the S6, maybe 15x – 18x. But then I don’t use my S1 and wouldn’t use it for many shots where extra telephoto would really matter anyway, and with the high resolution CCDs these days you just blow up the picture which is almost as good.

Pushing printer settings to client PCs

When I first started working with a network, we just set up each staff PC with locally installed printers, even though all the printers were TCP/IP devices. Pupils PCs got their printers mapped as shared network printers using login scripts. We just figured it was easier to set staff up that way in case there was a problem with one of the servers meaning they couldn’t print.

Then along came Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (R2) and one of the nice little technologies that comes with it is the ability to deploy printers in Group Policy. You need to use the DC that has R2 installed to create the GPO, and run PushPrinterConnections.exe in your login or startup script. Still, I found I couldn’t set per user printers, only per machine. This was nevertheless, good enough to allow me to deploy everyone’s printers, even staff.

The latest thing out is with the Vista version of Group Policy Management Console and that is GP Preferences. These let us set the printers for a user yet another way. You can also set a default printer this way.

When going from deployed printers to preferences, the machine account needs to be moved from its existing location in ADUC, to a special OU with a group policy that runs pushprinterconnections.exe with no deployed printers in the GPO. This cleans out all pushed printers from the computer. Then move the account to your OU that has the GPO that makes use of user set Preferences and the right list of printers will come up, running gpupdate /force /boot on the client after each move in ADUC.

Since we have two sites and only one computer suite, the pupils’ computers are now being put into OUs with loopback GPOs that set the printer list and default printer for that user based on the OU of the computer account. This provides a very effective means of providing the correct printers depending on the physical location of the PC.

Automating Windows Installations with Ghost and Sysprep

As this blog has detailed, I have gone through a process of various automation systems for imaging PCs using Windows XP.  When I started working at the school, We had few XP workstations at that time, as most of our PCs were too old to do XP and Windows 98 using Ghost was the thing. You needed multiple images for 98 but they didn’t need SID changes so it was easy enough to do.

Then in May 2005 the school took delivery of its first cluster of PCs, 30 altogether, which would have XP Professional installed from scratch. Still there was no real issue. We prepared a reference machine at site and the manufacturer cloned it exactly (without using Sysprep). I had to hand prepare every one of those PCs unjoining them from the domain and running Ghost Walker to rename and generate new SIDs for them.

Still, there wasn’t a great need for loading images up to that point. In 2006 I learned how to automate a vanilla XP installation for the first time, taking information from MSFN on how to create an unattended XP setup CD. That was a great start in the automated installation learning curve. We changed to a Windows domain in 2007 and I started to learn about RIS. Here it seemed was a system that would replace Ghost and not require extra license costs. The vanilla RIS does have certain advantages like prestaging machine accounts and booting directly off the network with almost no user interaction. This was the point at which we first began testing the deployment of entire machine images in XP. I got a few set up, but that came to an end because of two factors:

• Microsoft brought out Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 and replaced RIS with WDS
• Office 2007 with its use of .NET introduced reparse points into the image, which RIS can’t handle.

It became clear I would have to start all over again with WDS and the new imaging technology which Vista includes. While this on the face of it is all great technology, I have to start learning again from scratch, and that is just too much work. I have looked into and played with the technologies such as ImageX, but there is a whole lot of new stuff I would have to learn. It is simply a fact that our network is not really big enough to justify that kind of resourcing at this time.

So where to now? Well, back to the tried and true, Ghost augmented with XP Sysprep. The System Preparation Tool is the same kind of system that RIS uses to prepare a PC (RIPREP), but it uses Ghost to create the image instead. This gives a few more choices on how to deploy images, including using a USB hard drive, as well as the familiar network deployment approach. We first started this approach with new laptops from the Ministry. Using Sysprep means you can automate SID regeneration (no more Ghostwalker) and also automate the inputting of certain parameters like the volume license key, regional settings, administrator password, joining the domain and so on. You set up your reference PC, run Sysprep on it, boot to an alternative OS and run Ghost to image it, then load the image and then Sysprep will automate the steps where information has to be put into Windows at startup. And then you can deploy.

Running Ghost is the fiddly part which I wanted to do away with when I went over to RIS. My remembrance was of having to create endless floppy disks that could boot in PC DOS. When we got Toshiba laptops, they simply refused to run PC DOS to start Ghost this way. But there are, as it turns out, a few elegant solutions to this. The first, available to licensed Vista users, is to make a bootable CD or USB flash drive using Windows PE and put the 32 bit version of Ghost on it. That works on those Toshies. The second is to use some means to deploy the Ghost UNDI image which has a network driver that works out of the box with all kinds of network cards. In this case I found I could actually use RIS to deploy the UNDI image, so on some of our PCs this is the way to go.

Creating the Sysprep.inf file for is easy enough, use the Setupmgr.exe application from the Deploy.cab files provided with Windows XP. I have tweaked mine a little and finally got it to work the way I want it to, just asking me for a computer name and the username and password to join it to the domain. This is less information than is asked for if you don’t use the inf file, and you can keep that in your head, so I don’t need to carry around pieces of paper with the license key written on them. We are just about to deploy a new image across that same 30-PC suite. Actually, there will be two images. I expect now that Ghost supports Vista, I will continue to use it for the foreseeable future even though there is a license cost for each PC, when I last checked it was about $30 for OEM PCs.

Using Mini Setup also gets around a nasty little problem where MSOOBE will crash when your reference PC has Windows Media Player 11 installed on it. You can run Sysprep with all the relevant command line settings as follows:

sysprep –reseal –mini –reboot –quiet

This automatically starts Sysprep in Reseal, Mini setup, and reboots for you to start imaging immediately once it has completed its reseal tasks.

HP Laptops with “Removable” Built-In Broadcom Gigabit Network Interface

The HP Compaq 6710b and 8510p laptops supplied under the NZ Ministry of Education TELA and Leadspace programmes have a very strange hardware configuration of an onboard Broadcom Gigabit Network Card that is configured as a removable device, and will appear as such in the “Safely Remove Hardware” list of removable devices that is accessed from the task tray of the laptop.

If a user inadvertently stops or “removes” the network card then they will not be able to connect to the network until such time as the laptop is rebooted. I have never seen this configuration before on any computer, laptop or not. It is an issue of the way the hardware is configured in these laptops and is not resolved by installing new drivers. I raised the matter with HP through the TELA support service, but the explanation they gave was unsatisfactory, since it is likely your site will be faced with extra costs supporting users who have accidentally stopped or “removed” the card from their laptops. There is no logical or commonsense reason why this is the case, but HP is unwilling to make what would appear to be a simple configuration change in their laptops.