SchoolTechTools.com

I’ve been asked to write a product review of the new Toshiba Portege R700 laptop. I’ve seen quite a few laptops over the last several years with our 1:1 laptop program, but this thing is amazing! It sports a 13.3″ screen, 8 hours of battery life, a DVD drive, and weighs in around 3 pounds. When you pop the battery out, it literally cuts the weight in half. First impressions are very promising!

Every summer since we started our laptop program, my department spends a week or two (or has summer help) re-imaging the returning student computers. We have done this because the Windows machines have been so junked up and needed to be cleaned up. We simply don’t have that problem with the MacBooks. We will need to run software updates, and maybe install a couple applications, but we can use ARF for that.

That being said, we still may re-image them simply because we are making some changes to our master image. The point is, we don’t NEED to re-image them.

I recently had built a new server with a 32 GB OS volume, and the system had a considerable amount of RAM. I noticed that I was rather low on disk space but couldn’t find the culprit due to Windows UAC. In doing some digging, I found that hiberfil.sys was consuming over 12GB of disk space. Deleting the file is not as easy as you would think. There is a command that you need to run to disable the hibernation system:

powercfg -h off

This also should make my backups a little faster as well. I hope this helps!

One of the coolest presents I received this past Christmas is the PowerMat. It’s a must have for geeks with gadgets. All geeks have gadgets, and typically we have quite a few of them. In our household we have 2 Nintendo DSs, 3 or 4 iPods, cell phones, and several other devices that will charge over USB.
The really cool thing with the PowerMat is that you can get rid of ALL these extra charging cords, and only use 1 plug from now on. The device uses magnetic induction technology to charge the devices by placing them on a magnetic mat. This doesn’t happen all by itself however, you need to have their adapters. The device comes with 1 universal adapter that includes 8 different charging tips. They make specialized charging modules for iPhones, Blackberries, Nintendo DS devices, and others. If you purchase these add-ons, you can simply place the device on the charging mat and not hookup any cables. It’s worth a look if you are tired of the tangled mess of cables, and are looking for an easier way to manage all those charging adapters.

On Friday I picked up the new Motorola Droid phone. I’ve only had the iPhone for a few months, but I have learned to hate AT&T’s network. The iPhone itself is great but believe it or not, being able to make calls is an important feature. The last straw was when my daughter had to go home early from school because of the flu. I didn’t receive the phone call, and worse yet I didn’t get the voice mail for several hours. My visual voicemail worked only when it felt like it, and the coverage area wasn’t consistent. So, I decided to take a look at the Motorola Droid that the Verizon hype machine was promoting. After 3 days, I have found that I can do just as much, if not more than with my iPhone. Perhaps I could have taken the phone to Cincinnati Bell or T-Mobile, but their coverage isn’t great where I live. I will post more details about the phone as I use it.

Anybody want to buy a very slightly used iPhone 3GS?

Before we started imaging machines with Windows 7, I thought I better get this KMS stuff figured out. For those of you who skipped Vista like we did, KMS is Key Management Service. It’s an interesting way of activating volume license keys on a network, and is a result of software piracy. Regardless of whether we like it or not, it’s here and we have to deal with it. I followed all of the documentation in the Volume Activation 2.0 Planning Guide but when I went to enter my Windows 7 KMS key onto my Windows 2008 Server that is my KMS Host, I received an error message (0xC004F015) and was unable to proceed. After more reading, making phone calls, and ultimately opening a support case with Microsoft, I have found the answer.

When installing a product key for Windows 7 into your KMS host, you need to install a Windows 2008 R2 product key instead. Apparently the Windows 2008 R2 product key also activates Windows 7 clients. Another caveat, don’t install the Windows 7 KMS license code actually on a Windows 7 computer. If you do, it turns your machine into a Windows 7 KMS host and will activate other clients on your network (but if you decide to do this anyway, make sure the computer is always on and probably not someone’s laptop). There is a generic product key that you need to install on your Windows 7 clients that will be activating against your onsite KMS. You can read this article for more information, as well as the product keys.

Yesterday I began reading up on deploying Windows 7 to our laptops. Wow, what a change from XP’s imaging process. I guess this is what I get for skipping Vista! For XP, we are using a small Sysprep script that changes the machine name, strips the SID, and joins our domain. In order to get the deployment tools for Win7, I had to download a 1.7 GB file with the deployment tools and documentation. Yesterday I spent 3 to 4 hours reading through the documentation, and am really feeling overwhelmed. The Microsoft documentation sucks, and is overly complex.

I’m open to suggestions about better documentation, or a good book to read!

Well we are 6 weeks into the 2009-2010 school year, and our first year of 1 to 1 with Apple MacBook laptops. That’s right, we switched our program to Apple this year. Last school year we surveyed the students, as well as potential students, and decided to conduct a trial year with Apple. So far, so good. We’ve had no virus issues on Mac, and Apple’s management tools are great! I think that Apple’s Remote Desktop program is quite possibly the greatest management program ever written, especially for the cost.

We have installed Windows XP on the MacBooks inside Sun’s VirtualBox software. Academic institutions qualify for their Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). We considered using BootCamp, but by using virtualization the students don’t have to reboot their computer in order to change operating systems.

The hardware is not as great as we expected it to be. We had more out of the box problems than we had with HP or Toshiba laptops. Once the initial problems have been fixed, they have been very reliable — so far.

Students and staff have been asking what we are going to do for next year. It’s a little early to say with 100% certainty, but we aren’t ruling out anything. We have to look at the economy, our budget, and the fact that we can purchase netbooks for a fraction of the price we spent on previous notebooks. Ubuntu Linux on netbooks looks like a great solution. We’ll see what the future brings.

I’m not sure who at Microsoft decided that they would create an entirely new “normal.dot” file and go against everything that we’ve been taught. Specifically, I’m talking about Word in MS Office 2007. The default font is now Calibri for the body, and Cambria for headings. I’ve seen countless laser printers struggle this these fonts, as they are not standard fonts. To further complicate things, the font size is 11, not 10 or 12 that has been standard since the manual typewriter.

The default margins have been moved back to 1” after being at 1.25” left and right in Office 2003. But now they have changed default paragraph spacing from the standard 1 line to 1.15 lines.

I know, this is nothing new. After all, that’s Office 2007. It just pissed me off enough today that I thought I would spout off about it. I’m working on a new magazine article and have been somewhat irritated!

This past weekend, Windows 7 BETA was released to the public and I was one of the millions of people who attempted the download. It took me about 19 hours to download which isn’t too bad, but that was after more download servers were added. I am installing it on a VMWare virtual machine as well as a ASUS Eee netbook. We’ll see how it goes.