Switch Systems Blog

ArsTechnica Reports on a High Court filing in the UK by Microsoft that Comet created and sold “more than 94,000 sets of counterfeit Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs” source: Microsoft News Centre.

The recovery discs were being sold to customers for £14.99 when customers already have a recovery partition on their computer with the ability to create rescue media.

Comet have responded stating that they were acting in the interest of the customer, due to the policy change that OEM Microsoft operating system installs would not ship with recovery discs.

Congratulations to all who were shortlisted for last nights inaugural Exeter Impact awards held by the University of Exeter. An enjoyable evening with good company, good food, and even a few laughs!

Thank you to all of the RKT team for all their hard work in putting the event together.

From “The Register“, Western Digital are sending in divers to help recover some of their flooded HD manufacturing gear. Analysts estimate that 48 million less drives will be shipped in the last quarter of this year because of the devastating flooding.

We’ve been beavering away on the website with a brand new look & feel, plus new content including our twitter feed and software section. Let us know what you think!

We’ll be adding even more customer testimonials, software development information and other pages as we get round to them.

Some severe snowfall in Exeter means that on-site visits and callouts for today (Monday 20th December) will run at reduced capacity. For more information, please call the office.

Our office hours during the festive period are as follows:

• Thursday 23rd December, 09:00 – 17:00
• Friday 24th December (Christmas Eve), 09:00 – 12:00
• Saturday 25th December (Christmas day) Closed
• Sunday 26th December (Boxing day) Closed
• Monday 27th December (Bank Holiday), Closed
• Tuesday 28th December until Thursday 30th December , 09:00 – 17:00
• Friday 31st December, 09:00 – 12:00
• Monday 3rd January (Bank Holiday), Closed
• Tuesday 4th January, 09:00 – 17:00

For those of you who have 24/7 emergency response, please call your nominated engineer or leave a message on 01392 927001

Starting first quarter 2011 we will be extending our regular office hours to 8:30 – 5:30pm so that we can provide even better service coverage for our clients!

Two interesting announcements continue to further the way we look at our e-mail in-boxes. Firstly, Microsoft’s free e-mail service Hotmail will be offering free Exchange ActiveSync to mobile devices and Google Mail will be rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox.

So what are these features?

Exchange ActiveSync is a technology that allows e-mail, tasks, contacts and calendars to be consistent between all devices you own, where as previously you may have just used an expensive Exchange solution, or a lesser integrated way to synchronise. By keeping it all in one location, it simplifies things significantly.

Priority Inbox is Google’s way of determining how worthy an item is to be in your Inbox. We all receive Spam, but some of us also opt-in to mailing lists which are useful but often clutter up your Inbox view. The Priority Inbox aims to make it clearly distinct what mailings are high priority based upon your communication patterns in the past.

Both are interesting progressions of the way we e-mail. Personally I think the Priority Inbox will be something inherited by other clients before long…

Well the summer appears to have been and gone, but in that time we’ve been very busy!

• We welcome our newest staff member Hannah, who joins us for her year-in-industry placement to provide additional tech support and to help us with our refurbishment project.

• We completed a medium sized SBS 2008 installation at a local Exeter school, providing web filtering, group policy work and remote access.

• Our software development work with Exeter University continues, with the university wide release of an improved system for managing their staff recruitment process.

• We’ve taken in some more end-of-life kit from an Exeter school, which we will be refurbishing and releasing to charity

We’ll be changing the format of the blog shortly, and do a general revamp of all our websites, so watch this space!

In other news

The Small Business Server ‘Aurora’ beta has been released, which we’re evaluating right now. It incorporates features from Windows Home Server (such as drive extending, client workstation backups etc), whilst maintaining the SBS featureset. It’s also the first product to include cloud technology features, though those remain to be detailed (but likely to be some sort of remote file storage system)