The developers had ordered memory upgrades to 2GB for D810 and D505 Dell Latitude laptops. I had to replace the present memory on laptops with the new ones. After going the instruction manual I made an attempt to change them. While replacing D810 I couldnt find the second PCI slot at the back of the machine though D505 had two slots at the back and I replaced the memories. On refering to the dell support site I found that second slot for D810 was under the keyboard so I had to remove the keyboard of the laptop to replace the second memory. After upgrading the memory I had to go into the system setup from PXE mode and confirmed that the memories were upgraded correctly.

Installed Windows Vista onto one of the machines and started testing its features. Used some of its features which did not seem to be working right.

Jayesh, Software Support Analyst needed Cisco's VPN as well Check Point on his system. Actually our company's standard virtual private network solution is Cisco's so he had it on his machine already while supporting Metro he had to have Check Point which is their standard he needed in order to support them.He logged a call that he was facing problems downloading Check Point and everytime he tried to the system would just stop responding.
I and Alan spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting it and atlast managed to configure it right by removing Cisco from his machine and downloading Check Point and then putting VPN onto it. It all worked well this way.

Got a Dell Form Factor from server room for building latest version of Vista. Set it all up on my desk and used a laptop to burn the downloaded version of Vista. I had to first backup the hard drive of the form factor onto mkhqfile server using acronis true image software. After backing it up started booting off the Vista CD to rash the hard drive. System failed to boot off the CD. It was absolutely weird. At first it appeared to be problem with the CD drive. Diagnosed it and came across the fact that it was just CD-ROM and Vista one was a DVD.
Ulrik Loretzen had problems with applying an office 2003 application called Remove Hidden File Tool which verifies the hidden component in a office document and allows the user to remove them. He installed the software from the microsoft website but could not run it. I had to go through the process of downloading it onto my my machine and troubeshooting how to use it. Went through microsoft and some other independent articles on how to implement it. Cracked it and sent him an email since he had left for a business trip abroad.

On friday Craig had logged a call that he was facing some problem with his laptop keypad. The keys did not write what they were supposed to. To diagnose it I had to reboot the laptop and go to preinstallation mode by pressing F2 and then run the diagnostics.
It came up with the error in keypad. I logged a call with Dell and talked through the problem. Just to make sure the guy asked me to run the diagnostics CD which comes with the dell laptops. Went through that and confirmed the problem. A new keypad was confirmed to be shipped. I have recieved it today but Craig's outside the office for today.

Nigel Garrett, Sales Director needed a memory upgrade on his machine. I called him to find out his present configuration. Asked him to scan his machine buy going to site http://www.crucial.com/uk/ and following the appropriate steps. But he could not complete the scan since it required some additional hardware information. I took the control of his machine and tried to figure it out. I did manage to find the specs and the possible upgrade. Now the problem was that I required the DIMM for his RAM which was not showing up anywhere. I tried system configuratio tool and even tried to find from preinstallation mode but it was not mentioned anywhere. The last option I was left with was to send someone to physically open his box and find the DIMM spec. At last I had it and then created a purchase order and forwarded to Nigel. He got it signed and forwarded it to me. All that I was left with was order it online from crucial memory using the company credit card.

Over the last couple days I have been studying about various concepts. Alan's been sharing his experiences with me IP Addressing, Internet Security, LAN, VLAN, network management tools,hacking, antispyware, switches,hubs and routers.

Started with resolving problems on the intranet site which based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Dave came in the problem that he could not copy anything of the cd onto his hard drive. Went through all possiblities and found that he had two user accounts as himself for administrator of the local machine. Logged him out and logged in as an administrator of the local machine. tried to read of the cd and it worked........

Installed XP onto the new hard drive using acronis 9.0. started with the testing of the Microsoft Technical Demonstration Toolkit. It took ages since it did not have the recommended ram on it i.e 2GB.

As we are Microsoft Certified partner we recieved Technical Demonstration Toolkit which includes 66 of the famous applications for demonstration purposes to our clients of what we can provide. We were looking to test it before hand. We had this spare Dell D505 laptop with the image of Stuart's server 2003. The first thing to do was restore Windows XP onto the machine using Acronis which would save time. While doing that I could notice some kind of noise from the machine. After restoring it asked for a reboot. I tried to reboot and it failed. I ran the diagnostics and found that the hard drive had crashed. Logged a call with Dell and orderd a new hard drive. Got an old dell laptop from the warehouse and replaced the memory. Used Acronis again and restored XP onto it. But this old laptop had only 20GB of memory which did not solve the purpose so used an external 150GB memory. Started installing the Microsoft Demonstration Toolkit Applications on the external memory. It was expected to take it more than an hour so called it a day.

Recovered Stuart's system by booting from the acronis true image server 9.1 CD.

CRM server was live and I had to back it up. The problem was that when I installed Acronis True Image Server 9.1 it required a reebot. I was not sure what to do so Alan helped me with it.
We went through all the running\started applications on the server and configured to manually from automatic control. Backed the server across the network onto mkhqfile server in workplace domain.
The new test version for Windows Vista is out now so spent some time reading about the pathes and features of Vista.

Started with trying to backup Windows server 2003 across the network onto mkhqfile server with aid of Acronic Version 8........unsuccessful. Alan always knew it would not work. He wanted me show the restrictions and shortcomings. He forwarded me the mail containing the downloadable version of Acronis True Image server 9.1 along with the key. He taught me the basics that why do we need a different version for backing up servers. I had to create a CD and a bootable CD unlike a version 9 one which was bootable. I learnt what makes a CD bootable and how to write them. we did all the tests and now intend to backup the mkhqfile server once its been updated by Steve with Microsoft CRM databases.

Yesterday I had managed to finish with the Internet Kiosk project by locking down all the chrome icons of the browser and providing the user with only forward and back navigation icons.
The only way to come out of the kiosk mode is to press ctrl+alt+del and bring up the task manager and cancel the running application.
Today I have been testing Acronis True Image Version9 for cloning machines. I used it to backup an image of Windows XP Pro onto the file server across the network and then used the Acronis cd to boot up the system and restore. The next plan of action would be to blast the system with Windows server 2003 and use Acronis version 8 to clone.

I straight away started editing the registery by following the instructions I found on the internet. I managed to lock down most of the icons and features of Internet Explorer. It would not allow the user to browse the internet since I removed the address bar and locked all the tool icons which were not required. I enabled the system to autorun the internet explorer and disallowed the used to use chrome feature of close.

Spent the whole day configuring the Internet Kiosk Pro to work as required. There were a few concerns like some of the links on our website did not open. All the documents were in .pdf format which coul not be accessed when computer in kiosk mode hence I gad to test all the fields and diagnose the shortcomings and resolve them. Did manage to get evrything right afterall.
But then happened as I expected Ian(Director) said it was too sophesticated and he wanted it to be as simple as possible. He intended not to provide the keyboard to the user. Allan was there aswell and advised to use registery hacking. I did not even have a clue what he talked about. I followed his instructions to find how to make changes in the registery of a Windows XP.

On friday Alan asigned me a task to create a system for training and marketing purpose which would be placed in the reception and allow visitors to surf only our website. They would not be allowed to do anything else at all.
I began with finding it on the internet and came across many options of which one was very simple and straight forward and asked to edit the registry of internet explorer.
Now since I could not take the risk of changing the registry of my computer I had to build another PC and try on that.
Today PC was all ready and I tried to implement registery editing but unfortunately that did not work. I had to look at other options and came across this piece of software called Internet Kiosk Pro which costs a bit of money but was available for trial. Downloaded it and configured that but that did not seem to be working either.