About Jonathan

Windows Server infrastructure administrator at Newcastle University since 1999. Microsoft MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management (& previously for PowerShell). Member of the Microsoft Technical Community Council. Co-founder of the NEBytes user group. @jonoble on Twitter.

End of support approaching…

Posted on 23 March, 2010 by Jonathan

Over the next few months, Microsoft is removing support for the following versions of Windows and Windows Service Packs:

Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server will both go out of support on 13th July 2010.

Windows XP with Service Pack 2 will also go out of support on 13th July. If you wish to keep running Windows XP in a supported mode from that date, you must make sure that you have Service Pack 3 installed.

Windows Vista with no service packs installed will no longer be supported from 13th April. It’s time to install Service Pack 2.

For more information, check out the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Blog.

The Ultimate Steal and the Office 2010 Technology Guarantee

Posted on 17 March, 2010 by Jonathan

This month, Microsoft announced their Office 2010 Technology Guarantee, which says that if you purchase and activate Office 2007 between now and the end of September, you’ll get a free upgrade to Office 2010 when it is released.

The good news for students is that same guarantee applies to purchasing Office today via The Ultimate Steal offer for only Â£38.95

Personally, I’ve been happily using the Office 2010 Beta for a few months, so if you’re looking to install Office on your own computer, you may want to give that a try. Performance and stability wise, it feels like a finished product.

If you want a bit more information about Office 2010, you may want to check out my previous post for a free “First Look” ebook.

Time to move on from the Windows 7 Release Candidate

Posted on 4 February, 2010 by Jonathan

If you are still running Windows 7 RC (I’m sure a lot of people are because it was pretty darned stable), the time to move on is fast approaching.

From 15th February, warning messages will start, saying that from 1st March Windows 7 RC will shutdown every 2 hours. You really want to be off the RC by then because you will lose any unsaved work.

If you continue to use the RC through the bi-hourly shutdowns, on 1st June 2010 the RC will cease to meet “genuine” Windows criteria and will not be able to download anything that checks whether the copy of Windows is genuine. You’ll also lose your wallpaper, but by that point that’s the least of your worries! 😉

I’ve still got one machine running the RC – that will change this weekend!

Launch of the Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security

Posted on 29 January, 2010 by Jonathan

Tuesday 9th February is the EU’s Safer Internet Day, and the University’s recently formed Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security is getting involved by hosting a half day event to raise awareness in order to protect young children from dangers on the internet. This will take the form of interactive workshops for parents and children.

This will be followed on Wednesday 10th February by the official launch event of the CCCS with a group of presentations on a range of topics including Counterfeiting, Internet Grooming, Gambling Websites and Security.

Both events will be held at St.James Park.

For more details, head over to http://cccs.ncl.ac.uk

Introducing North East Bytes (NEBytes) a new Microsoft Usergroup for the North East of England

Posted on 7 January, 2010 by Jonathan

We are pleased to announce a new User Group in the North East of England, based around Microsoft technologies: North East Bytes (NEBytes). We have decided to start this group in order to help Developers and IT Pros in the community with the constant battle to learn, stay current and broaden their knowledge.

We run monthly meetings every third Wednesday of the month (except on the second Wednesday in December – to allow time for Christmas parties and shopping!) on the Newcastle University campus. Each meeting consists of two one hour presentations (one Developer topic and one IT Pro topic) and we have refreshments, food, giveaways and prizes.

Attendance at our meetings is completely FREE!! The venue is provided kindly by the University, our Speakers kindly provide their time for free, and the organisers provide their time for free to organise the events. We will provide refreshments and we also provide hot food, all we ask is if you would like to partake in the the hot food, please make a small donation towards the cost via the open contribution box at each meeting.

Our Launch Event is to be on Wednesday 20th January 2010 (from 6pm), we are delighted to have Mike Taulty visiting to cover Silverlight and James O’Neill to cover Hyper-V, and we’re teaming up with the SharePoint User Group UK to bring an overview of SharePoint 2010 too! We are really looking forward to this great event and hope to see lots there to help us celebrate our launch!

Head over to NEBytes.net for more details.

First Look at Office 2010

Posted on 15 December, 2009 by Jonathan

If you’re looking forward to the release of Office 2010 next summer (and let’s face it, who isn’t?!), then you probably already know about the availability of the public beta. If you’ve tried it, then it would be great if you could share your favourite features in the comments for others to share in your experience.

My personal favourite feature (so far – there are some things that I’m looking forward to trying in Outlook in conjunction with Exchange 2010, when we have that running) is the Backstage view in all the applications. This is the bit that you access via the “Office Button” in Office 2007, which is now accessed through a coloured “File” tab next to the ribbon’s default “Home” tab.

What I particularly like about Backstage is that they’ve brought the live-preview that was such a good addition in Office 2007 to the Print dialogue. You no longer have to look at print settings and print preview separately as they sit side by side. When you make a change to the setting, you see it reflected in the preview immediately. It makes formatting your printouts much more straight forward and will benefit pretty much everyone who uses Office.

I’ve been using Office 2010 since early on in the Technical Preview stage, before the Beta, but even so I haven’t come across all the tweaks in these new versions on the applications, so I was pleased to see that Microsoft Press have released a free ebook “First Look: Microsoft Office 2010”. At that price it’s a no-brainer to download it!

Free presentation, 25th November: Sysinternals Tools

Posted on 11 November, 2009 by Jonathan

Following on from his very well received presentation on Windows performance monitoring and analysis at the September VBUG meeting, Richard Diver returns to dive deeper into the range of Windows Sysinternals tools. These tools are extremely useful to both Windows system administrators, but also developers who are trying to make their software run with the best performance the system can offer. Richard will specifically cover Memory Concepts; how to make the most of Process Explorer; when to use Process Monitor; and how to debug Blue Screens and other crashes.

Richard Diver is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer with 10 years experience implementing and supporting a range of Microsoft technologies, specialising in Active Directory, Server Platform and Virtualisation.

Location: Room 118, Claremont Tower

Time: 18:45

Price: FREE

Please register for your place at the VBUG site so we can make sure we have enough space and refreshments. 🙂

Full range of Microsoft offers for UK students

Posted on 1 October, 2009 by Jonathan

As I posted previously, the special offer for students to purchanse Windows 7 upgrades for just Â£30 starts today. But that’s not the only offer that Microsoft has on the table for students…

The Ultimate Steal offer is back, which lets you buy Office 2007 Ultimate for Â£39.50. You get both of those offers by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/

If you’re interested in software/web development or design, DreamSpark gives access to a whole range of products free of charge. You can get:

Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2
Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional editions, and XNA Game Studio 3.1
SQL Server 2008 Developer or SQL Server Express
Expression Studio 3
…and more.

Those offers are all available to all students with a .ac.uk email address, but certain students may be able to get even more software for free via MSDN Academic Alliance. If you are eligible for that, your school or academic department should be able to provide details.

Students interested in coding and other general geekiness should also check out Channel 8.

Great Windows 7 offer for UK students

Posted on 18 September, 2009 by Jonathan

From October 1st, students in the UK (with a .ac.uk email address) will be able to get a copy of Windows 7 for just Â£30!

This will be a limited time offer and you must already have a copy of XP or Vista on your PC. It’s the best pricing that I’ve seen for Windows 7, so if you’re eligible you don’t want to miss out.

Full details will be available from October 1st at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/studentoffer/default.aspx

A hand-drawn look at Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

Posted on 9 September, 2009 by Jonathan

For those who have been struggling to find information about the new features of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (you likely don’t read this blog or mine!), or if you just like to see information presented in a creative way, you should check out the series of cleverly hyperlinked videos put together by my good friends Andrew and James from the TechNet UK IT Professional Technical Evangelist Team.

Since I can’t embed the launchpad video on this blog engine, head over to Andrew’s post to get started.

Infrastructure Systems Group Blog

Windows and Linux Infrastructure at Newcastle University

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