The Sikh Geek

You can register for this event which is on 29th November at Microsoft, Reading. I was on a conference call with Sonal Parekh of Microsoft today and she was telling me that I must attend this, so Susanne has got people well briefed. My Account Application form to Westcoast has been sitting in my Inbox for far too long, so I might have to get this sorted. Having been given the opportunity by Suze to meet some of Westcoast’s team, I know they want to serve us all more effectively. Oh, and they’re allowing me to talk about The Community along with Gareth. There’s a pre-event meet up the night before and have some drinks as well, which is one of the things that I really enjoy.

Not being one to gloat but just couldn’t resist - thanks Mr Harbidge

Just got back from this event a little while ago. It was a great session and I learnt some great new stuff thanks to Matt and Sven of Microsoft about Windows Deployment Services. I met with Richard Tubbs, James Harbidge, Andy Parkes and Susanne Dansey for lunch beforehand. The SBSC session seemed to go quite well and there is nothing as nerve wracking as presenting to your fellow peers but I had some people come up to me afterwards wanting to get along to the SBS Midlands Group which was great and people talking of possible business opportunities, wow! Thanks to Jen Brinton and Sonal Gathani of Microsoft for getting on the road and talking to SBSC Partners. Next stop Glasgow. 

One thing that Anne Stanton reminded me about was CRM Live which is the hosted version of CRM 4.0. It’d be worth signing up for the early access programme in my opinion - I’ve already done that. There seems to be some excitement around this and the pricing per user looks very competitive. From what Anne is saying it seems it’ll be a fully functional and configurable version of CRM 4.0, codenamed Titan and she has a list of features on her blog of CRM 4.0.

I saw a couple of interesting posts by Anne on using CRM 3.0 for IT Consulting Businesses. As there is quite a bit of talk about things like Autotask and Connectwise, I’ve been thinking how easy it would be to use CRM 3.0 for our types of businesses. Seeing as we get CRM 3.0 SBE in our Action Packs, it would seem like something worth trying. However, I think like many Small Business Partners, I’ve never really got past the installation stage. It would be good to know if other people use it within their business?

Now, this is the kind of social networking you want !!!

Just saw that Hugh is becoming a regular contributor to The Register.

I took the plunge and upgraded my laptop to Vista Business x64 from Vista Business x86. I didn’t have any major problems with device drivers and even my Samsung SCX 4100 printer has Vista x64 drivers. I’ve had my issues with Vista performance and there is a growing view that this is an issue with Vista. From my personal experience, from using it constantly, since the Beta days I think there is issues. Starting Vista from from a cold boot-up to a point where you login and the OS is ready to use seems like forever and that is not including starting Outlook 2007 and the folders to be updated. One of the performance issues seems to be the Indexer which starts up on boot-up, so can be heavy on disk use. The Vista standard gadgets use quite a bit of CPU, so I just turn those off. There are other apps that slow things down outside of Microsoft such as Anti-virus but you can’t really not have that installed. My laptop is an AMD 64 Tutrion x2 with 2GB RAM and Aero capable ATI Video Driver but even after having upgraded to Vista x64, it still doesn’t feel that I’m really using a powerful machine. I like Vista and wouldn’t go back to anything else but I just hope that with the Vista SP1 release Microsoft will be seriously concentrating on the performance issues. Vista performance improves over time which sounds a bit strange but the indexer gets to a point where it’s done the work so sits in a fairly quiescent state after some time. Also, I use the Sleep mode which allows me to logon much faster and be up and working quite quickly. Vista is a complex operating system but I think the generic problem with Software development is that developers are not optimising their applications as much as they could. It takes a lot of skill to understand the architecture of the hardware and then again to know how to use the compiler to the optimum point.

A couple of strange things on the Vista x64 installation is that it wouldn’t allow me to install the Sharepoint Services 3.0 SDK saying it wasn’t supported on this version of the OS and I couldn’t install Windows Live Writer!!  

 OpenSUSE 10.3 has been released, click on the button to get it!