Switch Systems Blog

Ars Technica reports that the Unreal Tournament 3 demo is due out sometime in the next 2 weeks, according to posts on the official forum.
Team Fortress 2 is also out tomorrow at $29.99 for those of you who haven't purchased the Orange Box. Shack News has the new 'meet the demoman' trailer up.

I found a cool little table which shows the degredation that installing different types of AntiVirus and Firewall software - check it out:

Software	% Boot Delay	% Prime Delay	% FileIO Delay
Norton Internet Security 2006	46	20	2369
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8	7	20	2246
Norton Internet Security 2007	45	8	1515
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006	2	0	1288
ZoneAlarm ISS	16	0	992
Norton Antivirus 2002	11	8	658
Windows Live OneCare	11	8	512
Webroot Spy Sweeper	6	8	369
Nod32 v2.5	7	8	177
avast! 4.7 Home	4	8	115
Windows Defender	5	8	54
Panda Antivirus 2007	20	4	15
AVG 7.1 Free	15	0	19

As you can see, norton's internet security suites have a huge impact on system performance. Our recommended antivirus software (AVG, Avast! and Panda) do quite well.

From Ars Technica, this article outlines BT's hopes that it's users would share their internet connection, using a new router which allows secure public access. BT's Gavin Patterson holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain." "We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity," he added in a statement. "If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny." Sounds like a good idea to me!

Switch has been nominated for this years small business award, organised in conjunction with the Exeter Business School and the Express and Echo. A big thank you goes out to all of our clients who took the time to nominate us, check out the coverage here.

Just been playing about with openVPN, and have got a multi-site network successfully working. What amazes me is the speed, we did some windows domain joining and client app transfers and they went through with no hitch, and shared folder browsing is faster than via terminal services! We love you openVPN!

At the Popular Science Blog, this entry shows a portable projector (think size of a mobile phone) in action. I want one!

According to this article on The Register, don't ask Excel 2007 to calcualte what 77.1 x 850 is! There is a bug in the new calculation code which presents itself when multiplying two numbers whose product equals 65,535 - or the limit of a 16bit unsigned integer. A fix is in the works, apparently... another reason we're not advising clients to upgrade to office2007 at this time!

This Article by the BCS reports on a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit that says 83% of CEOs now believe that IT's predominant purpose will be to enable revenue growth and actively drive business performance (within three years).

I've got to say, these 3Ware Escalade raid cards are brilliant - the drivers and web-based UI are well programmed plus the performance is great - I really like it when things "Just Work"!

I've had enough of this card already... I bought it to replace our cheaper silicon image cards, only to find out that they are also re-branded silicon image cards! We have several Fujitsu Primergy servers, and one card installed fine into one of the servers, but it doesn't seem to want to work in this other identical server. If drives are attached to the card, it hangs windows2k3 startup (and safe mode doesn't work either). Disconnect the drives, and the card is fine... This is the third make of SATA RAID card that I've tried. We had some good looking Promise cards but they had bios conflicts with the Primergy's onboard SCSI Anyway, i've wasted enough time on this - we've now got some 3ware Escalade cards on order, lets hope they fare a little better.

The Exeter Uni Mens Hockey Club (whom we sponsor) are playing their opening home matches this weekend for the Slazenger England Hockey League (South Division). Matches are at the University Sports Park on Saturday at 13:30 when the team takes on Robinson's from Bristol, followed by Holcombe (Kent) at 12:30 on Sunday. Good Luck everyone!

It's my birthday (yippee!), I think the best gift so far has been a £300 mechanics bill for my car At least i'm mobile again and can stop borrowing my flatmate's car... In other news, I had to remove the front USB, front audio, card reader port and power button from my PC case in order to fit in a new graphics card (one that'll play ET:QW at a respectable framerate!). Now the only way to turn on my PC is to wake-on-lan!

This article by the BCS says a leading IT security representative group has urged small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to take security issues seriously when adopting wireless technology.

I'm really looking forward to this Wii game, it looks like it's taking shape very nicely!

The new Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo will be released to the general public at 6pm BST. I can't wait! There's a yahoo video preview here.