VNC Viewer: You'll probably have used VNC viewer at some point, but if not, let me explain. You can use this to take control of a remote PC. Couple this with PuTTY (in my previous list) and you can access pretty much any system you choose

Symbian DivX Player: Does exactly what it says - a full implimentation of the DivX codec for Symbian S60 v3 phones...

Navimote: Free SatNav! It's never going to be a TomTom beater, but it'll get you out of a spot, and it's free...

Locr: Automatically Geotag your photos - if that's your sort of thing, knock yourself out!

Nokia Step Counter: I'm sure a lot of people are still desperately trying to lose weight as part of their New Years resolution to get fit. Well, with the step counter, you can see exactly how fit (or how lazy) you really are...

SymTorrent: Tie an unrestricted data plan (thank you Vodafone!) with a desire to download stuff on the move, and what do you get? SymTorrent - the only Symbian S60 v3 bit torrent client.

As I wrote a long time ago, before our current Active Directory problems, I'm currently running a virtualisation project. Well, the results are in - ESXi is probably the greatest piece of freeware I've ever used. Many would have thought that VMWare's decision to give away one of the jewlels in their crown for free would be commercial suicide. Well, their freeware has just led to a sale of tens of thousands of pounds, as we've bought all of the nice twiddly stuff that comes as an extra.

I'll say now that, in a small environment, it is perfectly possible to run ESXi as a freeware solution and pay nothing for the add-ons. If you've collected images of your servers, you can deploy them with ease on your ESXi box - simply import the image and away you go. And the free version is not crippled in any way - we're running 64bit guests at 99.9% native speed. It's a superb product. There are a few caveats - the approved hardware list is about 5 lines long (not a problem for us, as we have an HP Blade Centre and an MSA1500 SAN) so make sure you can actually run the thing! It'll only support 2 physical processors, but it runs quite happily on four cores on each, and the word is that Intel's i7 will be just fine too. We've taken our entire server estate and collapsed it to 6 blades, which astonished us! Our server room looks like a ghost town!

The big advantage is the flexibility that you get - I can honestly say that I've never been able to play with configurations as much as I can now. I've just created a log-ship populated SQL reporting server from scratch and deployed it in an hour. There's no way I would have gotten the budget for that normally, but ESXi allows me to use the spare capacity, and if it doesn't work, you delete the VM with no harm done.

There are loads of add-ons available, and we've bought a few to streamline a number of our processes. This seems to be where VMWare are positioning themselves, and I think they've got it spot on - give the product away for free and charge for the extras. We've gone from being pretty much a VMWare free house to basing our next 2 years on it, so in our instance it's a net gain for them...

All I'll say is this - have a play. It's a breeze to deploy, and it might transform your whole way of thinking...

I'm currently running a large infrastructure project for a new university in Buckinghamshire. As part of this, I've taken the decision to virtualise the Active Directory, Exchange and SQL Server boxes that'll be used on the site. We have an HP blade centre in the server room with 8 fully loaded blades - dual quad core Xeons and 16GB RAM - together with an MSA1500 SAN, so power and storage won't be an issue. The only decision left to make is which virtualisation path to go down - ESXi (now free), or HyperV on Windows 2008. Over the next week or so, I'll be investigating both solutions, running some benchmarks and generally getting a feel from the guys that'll be administering the network what their thoughts are. Then I'll be sharing them with you, because that's the sort of chap I am...

Should be an interesting project...

As you use Windows more and more, your talents will progress to the point that you may want to get in to debugging. I'll save the in's and out's of that for another post - in this one, I'll show you how to generate a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), and more importantly a crash dump file that you can use for further analysis with your debugger of choice.

Open regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\i8042prt\Parameters

Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll

Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify

Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK

Close regedit and reboot

To generate a BSOD, hold down the right CTRL key and hit Scroll Lock twice

You may also want to have a look in the startup and recovery settings (Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery)

Here you can change the amount of information collected during a crash, and redirect where it is stored...

Happy BSODing!

Having finally found myself back on UK time, I thought I'd have a look at the photos that we'd taken on our honeymoon (all 1600 of them). The first memory card was slotted in to the card reader in my laptop and I happily copied the photos over. I popped in the second card and... Nothing... At this point I started to panic a bit - there were over 700 irreplaceable photos on it. Ejecting it, I put in the third card and... Nothing... At this point I started sweating - the two cards contained more than 1200 photos. XP apparently wanted to format them, which would not be a good thing! With a sense of rising dread, I put the second card back in to the camera, switched it on, and lo and behold, the photos appeared! Same thing happened with the third card. After transferring them with the camera software, I could relax and start to think more logically.

The only difference between the card that worked and the two that didn't was the size - the first one was a SanDisk 1GB whilst the second and third were SanDisk 2GB. The fact that the camera could read all three quite happily suggested that the cards were OK and that the problem lay somewhere inside XP.

The first place to look was the card reader. My laptop's an HP NC6220, and the card reader is a Texas Instruments PCIxx21 FlashMedia Controller. A quick Google showed that other people have had similar problems. I downloaded an updated driver, which you can find here. After installing it, I rebooted, popped the card back in, and everything was rosy again!

It just goes to show that you should always keep your drivers up to date!

You may well have seen these funny little designs on web pages and in magazines:

What you may not know is that these seemingly random sets of dots can contain a wealth of information.

Traditional one dimensional barcodes can contain a limited amount of information, typically around 15 characters. The 2-D barcode format expands this in to the kilobyte range. They are therefore ideal for tagging items - we've just started using them as asset tags on our PC's. If you want to create your own, Nokia provide a handy little online app that will do just that - pretty much every Nokia camera phone comes with the software to read these codes. You can create your own designs here. Alternatively, if you have more heavy duty needs, I can heartily recommend BarTender - you can download a 30 trial version here.

Before the Mac and Linux fanboys start shouting about journaled file systems, let me say this. Defragging is cool. Running the Windows 98 tool made you look like you knew EVERYTHING about computers (if the people watching had never used one). I can remember people looking on in awe as the little blocks shuffled about seemingly at random.

Well, those days are here again! Auslogics Disk Defrag has a very similar interface to the old Win98 defrag tool, but it's a world apart in quality.

As an alternative to the built in tool, Disk Defrag gives you a wealth of information, and more importantly will show you the speed increase given by running it.

If you fancy giving it a go, head on over to their site

Over the past few years, people have become much more used to getting things for free. Linux has progressed from an academic project to the OS of choice for half of the servers on the internet. This acceptance of free software has led to the creation of some truly fantastic software. Much of this has been reviewed by myself and others repeatedly - Firefox, OpenOffice and The GIMP are known by anyone with even a passing interest in computers. There are however a few gems that you might not be aware of. In the next couple of posts, I'll be sharing some of my favourites with you.

The undoubted king of DTP is QuarkXPress. Since its inception on the Apple Mac over 20 years ago, it has been the defacto choice for print work. The Open Source community is never one to duck a fight though, and thus Scribus was born...

What can you say about it? Well, if you've used MS Publisher, this'll be like driving a Ferrari after plodding along in a Skoda! Unless you are an international publishing house (and to be honest, even if you are), Scribus will do everything you need. It's a triumph of coding, and it's free! I've been using it for my print advertising for a while now, and I'm hooked - having used Quark before, you can easily make the transition, and if you haven't, the learning curve is not as steep.

If you'd like to learn more, head on over to www.scribus.net

If you're in any way involved with coding, you'll probably have your own preferences with regards to a development environment. IDE's (Integrated Development Environments) range from a simple editor such as Notepad or vi, all the way up to full studios like Microsoft's Visual suite. In many situations, a fully fledged environment is overkill. However, it's also nice to have a few time saving features. This is where Notepad++ sits.

The program supports all of the popular programming and scripting languages, and will highlight them appropriately. There are also a vast range of community produced plugins available, as well as the standard integrated ones like the Hex editor and file explorer.

Obviously, you wouldn't want to write an entire operating system using it, but for some down and dirty editing, it's a life saver.

You can download Notepad++ from SourceForge