Tech Tied

This is my second review of the Dell XPS M1530 Laptop. Issue with HDMI Sound, I show the solution. I show and discuss displaying both Hulu and Netflix Online Movies using the HDMI out to a 32inch LCD display.

Lappy at work

Dell created the XPS M1530 because of the success of the XPS M1330.  The M1530 is basically the same as the M1330 except for the screen size, 15inch vs. 13inch.  I was very close to buying the M1330 because of its compact size and long batter life.  I eventually decided on the M1530 because I realized that a 13inch display at a resolution of 1280×720 was just unusable.  The laptop I am replacing is an Acer 9300 which has a 17inch display.  The M1530 is a way better size, way better battery life and is beautiful.  When I bought the laptop from the Dell store they were asking an unreal price for the 9 cell battery ($199 up sale).  I decided on sticking with the 6 cell battery and I bought a 9 cell battery from ebay for $72.  I thought I would be safe because the M1530 is so new that a used battery couldn’t be that bad, I was right it’s awesome.  On normal usage I get about 3 hours of life from the 9 cell.  When I say normal usage I mean the screen is on its brightest and I’m surfing the internet.  I got the 1680×1050 LG display.  You may wonder why I specified “LG” display.  Well I needed to because they are shipping this laptop with three different types of displays, the quality is different. 

This is the second M1530 laptop that I got from Dell, the first I sent back.  I sent it back for two reasons, because of the shitty display and because of the casing didn’t line up.  I could’ve lived with the casing not being perfect but I couldn’t live with the display.  If you want more information about the display problem just do a Google search for “M1530 grainy screen” you will find a lot of results.  The grainy screen that I am referring to is from the Samsung displays they are sending out with this laptop.  They SUCK, really SUCK.  It is dark and very fuzzy.  It pretty much feels like you bought a $300 laptop because the screen sucks so badly.  Now don’t think that Dell will help you with this issue, they are being told not to.  I had to speak with about 10 customer care reps and I had about 7 XPS chat sessions before I got them to agree to replace the screen.  The excuse they are using is that they won’t replace the screen because is not a mechanical issue, it’s what they send out.  The screen I have now is an LG.  It is clear, bright and beautiful.  I think if Dell didn’t replace the laptop I would have gone with an HP.

Aside from the screen issue I am very pleased with the laptop, the quality is top notch.  Brushed metal wrist rests, touch sensitive buttons, opens with a barrel hinge design, slot load DVD read/writer, finger print reader, HDMI port, unique firmware.  The touch sensitive buttons are excellent.  For the volume controls if you hold your finger on the button it will step up the volume level continually.  The barrel hinge is nice because it doesn’t require a latch to secure lid closure, it is held down with the use of the barrel force.  The HDMI port feeds an HDTV with crisp quality, no blur.  There is a quick launch button that you can use to start up your laptop into its firmware program Media Direct.  The Media Direct allows you to view documents, pictures, videos and DVD without having to boot your PC.

See the video I made reviewing the laptop for further details. (Please note I will have a second video on YouTube in about 2 days).

After some time… Alright a long time, I’m back.  The previous site http://clarktechie.wordpress.com is no more. TechTied.com is the new domain and site design. There is also a new forum, see the links section on the right side of the page.  I have lots to post about so keep tuned!

- Kevin C -

For sometime now the company I work for has been using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. It has it’s problems but as a whole it’s a very powerful application. We just recently installed Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2, it hasn’t disappointed us. The Machine Manager is a program that you install on individual machines. It is different from Virtual PC 2007 as it is like Virtual Server it shows the VM status (running, stopped etc). It is very user friendly, unlike Virtual Server which was not straight forward and very finicky.

The main motivator for why we moved from Virtual Server 2005 to Virtual Machine Manager 2007 was for its save points feature. Yes Virtual Server has save points I do realize, but with Machine Manager you can save multiple points and label them. When you want to go back in time you can choose a past point and go back as far as you need (reminds me of restore points in Windows XP).

Another major change in Machine Manager is the way that it makes disks and stores them. No more differencing disks! I hate differencing disks. My dislike for them was spawned from my inability to re-organize disk because of there reliance to there parent disk. With a differencing disk if the parent disk becomes corrupt or is deleted or moved all of the child disks will no longer function. The new Machine Manager makes a full copy of the parent disk and then stores both the disk and the machines config file in it’s own independent folder. You can move the folder anywhere you like and it will still work like it always has.

I highly recommend Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2007. It is still in beta but in a whole it hasn’t been too buggy. Here is the link to download the Beta 2 Evaluation version. I don’t know how much the full version will be when it is released but you can try it out for now. Tell me what your opinion of the program is, leave me a comment.

- Kevin C -

We found our answer to our Sharepoint License issue.  Stay with Sharepoint 2003 version, much cheaper!  We got a quote for the Sharepoint 2007 External Connector License for about $30,000.  Compare this to the 2003 license for $2,000!  Since we don’t need any of the new features that MOSS offers we will happily stay with the cheap alternative.  Here is a quote from a repable site about the license.

“External Connector License. An External Connector License allows an unlimited number of authenticated external users to access a server. If the number of user accounts will approach or exceed 20, the External Connector License is the most economic choice. Although there may not be 20 external users when the solution is initially implemented, consider planned usage of the technology over time before selecting the licensing type for your organization. The estimated retail price of the External Connector License is $1,999.”

Do not use the Report Server add-in for SharePoint. There is no need to use it, it has only given me a headache. All you need to do when you are running the Reporting Services Configuration Tool is to add the Reports and ReportServer Virtual Directories to the SharePoint site. I know, this seems too simple right, well it works. Please keep in mind that i am using SSL and i have not tried this otherwise. When I first started research this I came across the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint tutorial from here. It says to setup the Report Server on the default web site in IIS under a different port. Well this didn’t work for me so I read up and others told me to create a new sub site named something like reports. So I made reports.ourwebsite.com and SharePoint was on portal.ourwebsite.com. So now I install the add-in and I think everything is good. Then we moved our web server to a different box that was not a domain controller. Well this made problems because we had the site setup for windows authentication. While on the domain controller the website only asked for the username and password, now that IIS is on a separate box it asks for the domain\username and password. That won’t work because our customers will not know the domain name. So I moved us to Basic Authentication. The issue with this is the Report Server Add-In for SharePoint will not work with Basic Authentication. Now I am stuck having to put the Report Server back to Native mode and have our customers click a link from our portal to reports. The issue now is our customers now need to double authenticate, first to portal then to reports! Then I was recommended from a co-worker to try and just add the Report Server application pools to the SharePoint site. So I tried it even though all the documentation I’ve read seemed to completely veer away from that idea. It worked!! I added my link in the page viewer web part and it is flawless. I am able to use basic authentication and have the report integrated into my SharePoint webpage. I am kind of upset because the Microsoft website steered me on the wrong path. Anyway it all worked out and my boss is happy, so I am happy. If you look a couple of posts down you will see a picture of the integrated Report Server in SharePoint, my new setup looks exactly the same as this. If you have any questions at all please leave me a comment and I will defiantly try and help.

- Kevin C -

I now know how Microsoft makes there money. We just upgraded to SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and we are about to make our site public to our customers. We found that we needed to buy licences to allow our customers use SharePoint.   You can reference this Microsoft page for more information about this: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101655351033.aspx.

We found that it will cost about $90 for a standard use of SharePoint and about $70 extra to use the Enterprise Edition (new features from MOSS). That is about $160 per customer! There is one more option which is called an Internet Licence. This allows anyone to use your site, no separate CAL’s required. Sounds too good to be true? It costs $40,000! We have about 40 customers so I don’t think that it would be worth that. I love SharePoint but I am starting to see why open source got popular.

- Kevin C -

I’ve had a couple requests to see how the reporting service add-in for SharePoint looks like on my site. My purpose of merging the two is to allow our customers to view there current and past bug reports they had submitted to our company. I built a report to show the status of there ticket and all the notes that have been recorded on the ticket. The database that the report is quarrying is SQL and the bug tracking system we are using is TestTrack Pro. We had to convert the TestTrack Pro database to SQL from its Native database to allow for reporting. The reporting service add-in allows you to upload a report to any document library. The permissions for that report are managed by whatever permissions you define in SharePoint. Please note that the user must have sufficient permissions in the SQL database you are quarrying to allow for report viewing. The add-in also comes with a report web part which allows you to define perimeters. In my case i used the company name to allow the one report with all of our customers to be narrowed down to the specific company for report viewing on there site specific web page. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

- Kevin C -

So I ran into an issue the other day with deleting a SharePoint site. I needed to delete a site and re-create it because of our migration. To do this I went to Site Setting on the specific site and deleted it from the web browser. I have done this before with this site because I needed to practice the migration, no issues before. This time although the server was moving slow, and because of this it just continued to try and delete the site with no confirmation page that it was successful. The page was gone so I thought all was well. This was until I saw errors coming from the server logs relating to the page I had deleted! I looked in the Central Administration page to check the site list, the site was still there! I clicked to delete the site from the Central Administration page but it would not work, no option to delete. I then tried to delete the site with STSADM.EXE but I got this error with both stsadm.exe -o deletesite and stsadm.exe -o deleteweb: The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070003). I searched this error on the internet and found a solution which did finally work.

Go here for the Microsoft solution: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;918744

I did the following.

Step 1: I opened a Command Prompt and went to this directory: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

I typed in the following to list the orphaned sites:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName

I then typed the following to delete the orphaned sites:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName -deletecorruption

This didn’t harm anything but didn’t seem to do anything either. Since I did preform this step I cannot say it didn’t help and I can’t say it did, so i would do it just in case.

Step 2: This was the final step that did fix the issue. Remove and then reattach the content databases on the virtual server. I am quoting this from Microsoft:

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.

2. Under Virtual Server Configuration on the Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration page, click Configure virtual server settings.

3. Click the virtual server that you want to configure, and then click Manage content databases under Virtual Server Management on the Virtual Server Settings page.

4. On the Manage Content Databases page, click the content database that you want to remove.

5. On the Manage Content Database Settings page, note the following settings:
• The database server
• The database name
• The database capacity settings

6. Click to select the Remove content database check box, and then click OK. When you are prompted to confirm that you want to remove the content database, click OK.

7. Click OK.

8. On the Manage Content Databases page, click Add a content database.

9. On the Add a Content Database page, specify the database server, the database name, and the database capacity settings. Then, click OK.

I hope this helps. It worked for me. The sites were gone completely and I was able to create the new site with the old name.

- Kevin C -

So I have come to the conclusion that tech blogs are golden as far as tech references are concerned. I defiantly use technical articles from software companies but I rarely find my answers from the company’s themselves. I think that the tech community is an invaluable source. There are thousands of blogs from tech professions in the field sharing experiences, and I have to say THANK YOU to all of them, they have saved my butt more times then i can remember.