Partition Wizard Business Edition is a pretty neat tool for anyone but particularly for an IT worker like myself. For the longest time I have been using my employers licensed and/or ‘liberated’ copies of Partition Magic which has generally served its purpose well except when you have forgot your CD wallet of flash drive with your handy apps on them! Since Partition Wizard is free you can just download it from any major open source / free license software vendor (link supplied below). Business users, system administrators or just Joe Blogs can use Partition Wizard to Resize and Move partition, Copy Partition, Copy Disk, Create, Delete and Format partition, Convert and Explore partition, Hide and Unhide partition and much more.

Ghost offers every person in the world a free Virtual Computer with 15GB’s of data! (get an extra 10GB from standard 5GB when you use the promotion code “launch.”). “Ghost”, an acronym of Global hosted operating system (written G.ho.st with two dots because a URL must have dots!). The G.ho.st Virtual Computer includes almost everything you would have in a physical computer – a desktop, file storage and applications.

But unlike a physical computer, your Virtual Computer is “hosted” in a professional data center by Amazon.com in the Internet “cloud” and is accessible as a web page in any browser. You can run the entire G.ho.st VC from any Internet browser without the need to install any software or “sync” files. Just enter your username and password, and continue using your VC from exactly the state you last left it in.

Find out more on their website http://g.ho.st or http://g.ho.st/m from your mobile. I believe they have just moved into the beta phase recently.  

Desktop environment. Based off a typical Windows layout.

Named the ProBook line, which joins HP’s other business EliteBook offerings, the new laptops incorporate a mercury-free design, come in ‘merlot’ red and ‘noir’ black, and feature LED backlit displays in a choice of 14-inch, 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch diagonal widescreen sizes.

Somewhat puzzling are the 16:9 displays on all the ProBook models. While the 16:9 aspect ratio makes sense on HDTVs for watching widescreen TV and movies, most content and webpages are designed for vertical strolling. The move from 16:10 to 16:9 is yet another one that doesn’t seem to make sense for office application users.

That aside, the ProBooks come in both Intel and AMD processor flavorings, the option of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 or Intel GMA X4500 HD graphics, optional Blu-ray Disc drive (to make good use of that 16:9 screen). The notebooks also incorporate an HDMI port to connect to HD displays. Wireless connectivity includes standard Wi-Fi, optional integrated Bluetooth and mobile broadband using Qualcomm Gobi technology.

Source : Tom’s Hardware US

5nine Software today announced the latest versions of its popular virtualization migration planning solution, 5nine P2V Planner version 2.0 and 5nine P2V Planner Free Edition 2.0. The updated software adds P2V VMware planning to the existing P2V Hyper-V virtualization planning capabilities and now delivers side-by-side comparative analysis of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans from the technology, TCO and ROI perspectives.

 ”Successful virtualization initiatives require upfront planning, selection of the most suitable virtualization platform and ongoing project assessment to measure and maximize the return on investment,” said Konstantin Malkov, R&D Director of 5nine Software. “Today we are glad to release the new version of 5nine P2V Planner — the P2V migration planning solution that allows comparison of P2V Hyper-V and P2V VMware migration plans from technology, TCO and ROI standpoint, and helps enterprise and SMB customers to choose the right virtualization technology based on configuration of the data center, its size as well as other specific requirements.”

 ”5nine P2V Planner is a powerful virtualization migration planning solution that enables datacenter managers to create and compare VMware and Hyper-V virtualization migration plans, taking into consideration several important factors, such as software licensing costs, actual memory, CPU utilization, and average consolidation ratios. Therefore it allows selecting of virtualization technology most suitable for consolidation of specific data center,” said Henry Bayard, Vice President, EasyLink.

5nine P2V Planner offers the following features:

– Automated P2V Hyper-V and P2V VMware Migration Planning — Performs sophisticated analysis of the current data center and provides multiple Hyper-V and VMware migration plans depending on particular customer requirements. Optimized placement of virtualized workloads is based on business requirements, technology (memory, storage and CPU utilization, security), and TCO and ROI.

– Side-by-Side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware Migration plans — Enables creation and side-by-side comparison of VMware and Hyper-V virtualization migration plans. It takes into consideration multiple factors including software licensing costs, memory and CPU utilization, clustering and average consolidation ratios for both virtualization technologies.

– Agentless Data Collection — Automatically discovers and collects hardware inventory, utilization data and application performance metrics in a non-intrusive manner without installing agents. It also allows importing this information from an Excel or XML file.

– Simple-to-Use — The product was designed to be used for projects of all sizes — from small virtualization pilots or SMB projects to large enterprise projects with hundreds of servers, hosts and virtual machines (VMs).

– Integrated TCO and ROI Reporting — 5nine P2V Planner creates a variety of technology assessment, workload, and TCO and ROI reports for each migration plan, for easy comparison of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans and decision making.

– Ongoing Value — Whether your P2V migration project is complete or ongoing, the Planner continues to provide value by optimizing the workloads and resource utilization in a virtualized data center.

Pricing and Availability

5nine P2V Planner Free Edition 2.0 is available immediately and is free for any Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX and vSphere environments 5nine P2V Planner is also available immediately, with North American pricing starting at $59.00 USD per physical server. More information, including free trial downloads, is available at http://www.5nine.com/

Yaaarr I be patched I will...

That all sounds pretty great for the pirates at least, but it seems Microsoft are looking at the bigger picture of ensuring a secure environment for everyone while try to maintain their credibility which unpatched pirated software has partially contributed to.

Paul Cooke goes on to say, “Keeping a machine up to date is one of the first steps in helping ensure that they remain reliable, compatible, and safe from threats when they are online. Some of the most famous incidents of malicious software infection have come after security updates were publicly available from Microsoft – Blaster, Zotob, Conficker and Sasser, just to name a few,” Cooke added. “Rest assured that we at Microsoft are committed to making sure that security updates are available to all of our users to help ensure a safe online experience for everyone.”

For this example I have made a user called ‘test’. In a command prompt windows type:

net user test /random

Command line

The password will be reset and it will be shown to you after you pressed “Enter” button.

The output will be similar to:

Password output

A little application called TweetMyPC has the ability to read you tweets on Twitter where ever you are tweeting from, then convert them to a command for you computer to respond to.

For example you are at work and on Twitter. You post a tweet “ip” (without the quotes) your home PC running TweetMyPC will pick this up as a command and reply to you with your home PC’s IP address. There is a number of potentially useful comands which you can find here http://www.codegeeks.net/tweetmypc-what-next.

While this is still an early release of the application and may pose some security/privacy risk, the question has to be asked – are there any limitations  with this seemingly basic social networking site??

• Server Virtualization – consolidating multiple physical servers into virtual servers that run on a single physical server.
• Application Virtualization– an application runs on another host from where it is installed in a variety of ways. It could be done by application streaming (such as that from a Citrix Presentation server using their Program Neighborhood), desktop virtualization or VDI, or a VM package. Microsoft Softgrid (rebadged Microsoft Application Virtualization) is an example of Application virtualization and the latest example being an integral selling point with some version of Windows 7 (more on that later).
• Presentation Virtualization– This is what Citrix Met frame (and the ICA protocol) as well as Microsoft Terminal Services (and RDP) are able to create. With presentation virtualization, an application actually runs on another host and all that you see on the client is the screen from where it is run.
• Network Virtualization– with network virtualization, the network is “carved up” and can be used for multiple purposes such as running a protocol analyzer inside an Ethernet switch. Components of a virtual network could include NICs, switches, VLANs, network storage devices, virtual network containers, and network media.
• Storage Virtualization– with storage virtualization, the disk/data storage for your data is consolidated to and managed by a virtual storage system. The servers connected to the storage system aren’t aware of where the data really is. Storage virtualization is sometimes described as “abstracting” the logical storage from the physical storage. Commonly used with iSCSI setups

If you want to know more about a specific item just Google any of the text in bold and you will find hundreds of technical explainations and setups.