Click on Start>Control Panel>System Security>Administrative Tools and you’ll see the task scheduler there.

Click on that, and then ‘Create Basic Task’ (on the right hand side):

You’ll see the following screen come up. Give the task a name and a description so you know later on what it is for.

The next screen is the trigger for the task. How often do you want it to occur? In this example, we want the shutdown to occur every day.

The next screen will allow us to specify and starting date, and what time (each day) the task will be scheduled.

As this scheduler can be used for many things, we are asked next what do we want to do once the ‘trigger’ is hit. In our case we want to start a program (and that program is a shutdown sequence).

We have to locate the shutdown program from the next screen.

so, click on browse and navigate to the \windows\system32 directory and find shutdown.exe, and select it.

Once selected, put /s in the ‘Add Arguments’ field.

Once done, the final step should look something like this:

Click on finish, and you’re done!

The advantage of using an existing standard as opposed to creating a new one is that it can reuse existing encoding hardware that is already in place in millions of cameras and chipsets worldwide. Pretty smart.

Human Monitoring’s hipix™ patent pending technology utilises the existing h.264 video Codec to achieve two to seven times more effective still image compression compared to JPEG images. Sounds almost too good to be true, but if you check out the demos on their website, you will be suitably impressed.

To view hipix images on a computer or mobile device, users must initially download a viewer and to create or convert images users need the hipix “Wiz” application. The applications are available for Windows, Linux and Android operating systems.

Just think of the how much bandwidth could be saved when emailing or sending photos over the internet – all while keeping a very high quality image.

Check out the video demo:

More info can be found on the hipix website here.

* Wallpapers for the home screen – yeah nothing new for most other phones on the market but great on the iPhone (now)

* Multitasking – great innovation but I would prefer to be able to select what apps I want running in the background (not just all)

* Better mail interface – You can separate the viewing of different email accounts, or have them together

* Systemwide spell checker

* Sorting of apps into folders – awesome idea as I have a LOT of apps on my phone

* Create playlists ON your iPod

* Message app improvements – for example you can search through your messages

* iBooks – so you can read books from the iTunes digital bookstore

* Digital zoom on your camera – yeah, still no replacement for a ‘real camera’ . Note: There is no optical zoom on these cameras. Google what the diff is if you don’t know

* Change your default search engine in Safari

Well, they are the major changes to the OS. For a more graphical view, go here.

I have read that the upgrade takes 30 mins, but for me it took closer to 2 hhours when you take into consideration the downloading of the new OS, restore backup and a couple of PC (required) reboots. Oh, and make sure your iTunes is up to date before you start too.

I’ve only had it running for about 24 hours, but the phone performs quite well, and the new features I’m certainly taking advantage of on my 3GS iPhone. Well done, Apple.

Well, here’s a fix:

Type “gpedit.msc” into the run box, go to Computer Configuration>Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Windows Update and enable the options “No auto-restart for logged in users…” and “Re-Prompt for restart with scheduled installations”.

Pretty easy all up, and you have some flexibility in how you want to configure those options. Note: you may have to run it as administrator if using Vista.

Incoming search terms:

• disable auto restart after updates sbs 2008
• stop nagging windows seven after update
• stop restart nagging window
• windows update message

The AVG Rescue CD also contains the following set of admin tools:

* Midnight Commander – a two-panel file manager
* Windows Registry Editor – simple registry editor for more experienced users
* TestDisk – powerful hard drive recovery tool
* Ping – to test the availability of network resources (servers, domains, IP addresses)
* Common Linux programs and services – vi text editor, OpenSSH daemon, ntfsprogs and the like.

Now I haven’t actually tried this yet, but from what I’ve read it’s not a bad little addition to the IT professional’s toolkit. If you want support for this from AVG, it is free if you have a purchased AVG product. Else check their forums.

Check it out here, and if you have tried it let me know what you think of it.

This post I will tell you what we ended up with – Amazing how much things change and how budget doesnt really come into it once you are at the PC shop

Anyway, here we go. This is what hardware we ended up with (and why):

Gigatbyte GA-MA790GP motherboard – not sure why this particular model, but I have alway trusted Gigabyte and I just wanted to make sure that it had enough SATA and USB connectors. Bonus is thus it has onboard firewire and HDMI (may be normal these and I’m just ignorant of technology).

AMD X4 Phenom2 Quad Core CPU – Now this was not one of the latest and greatest but still a nice CPU (which a good price tag). 10X better than what he had.

HIS PCI-E 1Gig HD4850 Graphics Card – recommended by a workmate. The 512M version was $7 cheaper so … why bother

Thermaltake V9 case – now this is a nice looking case. I wanted to get a Sunflower brand case but they came with only a small PSU, so I thought I’d get my mate a decent case (without PSU) and he could then select what to throw in it.

Coolermatser Real Power Pro 650 Watt PSU – Man, this thing was heavy, and the box it came in had it’s own handle. For the price, it would want to have a heap on connectors and be prety quiet (later we were to find we were not disappointed.

Now, to make a complete PC, we also added a Seagate 1TB SATA HDD. Oh, and 4Gig Kingston DDR2 RAM.

The price? He went a little over budget but I assured him that he would be happy with the setup. He currently has a Athlon 2800 that does some really weird stuff. It’s not his OS but definitely a hardware problem.

Where was I? Price… AUD$1100. About $700 over budget but that was OK. The initial $500 mentioned was only a rough guide.

Here’s a pic of all the goodies

Next post, let’s take a closer look at the hardware……

MD5 (Message digest 5) is used for a variety of things, but what you are probably interested in is that it can be used to verify the integrity of a file.

Why would you want to do that? Well, to see if the orginal file has been altered in any way (eg malicious code intserted into it etc).

How does it work?

Download the file as well the the MD5 has key (which will be a long string of numbers)
Grab a MD5 checker (such as the one here), and paste the MD5 key into this as well as point the checker to your downloaded file.
The checker will tell you whether the MD5 matches ie. you have an unaltered file. Simple!

Oh, for all you nerds that want to know more about MD5, have a read of RFC1321

In case you missed it,

Incoming search terms:

• 123456789

The challenge – a decent PC (not for gaming but one with a bit of grunt and the ability to run some virtual OS’s too)
The budget – about AUD$500 but as a guide only. There was room for movement (just as well)

So the research began. AMD or intel CPU? What sort of motherboard? How much RAM? What sort of graphics card? And certainly how big a power supply to run it all? And after the hardware was sorted out, what OS did he want to run?

After much deliberation, we decided on the following hardware (or very similar):

AMD X4 Phenom II 9650 CPU (the general consensus was a quad core of some kind)
Gigabyte motherboard
4Gig RAM
Sunflower case of some sort (a workmate told me they are pretty good)
ATI graphics card (at least 512M)
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
SATA DVD burner

As far as the OS was concerned, my friend decided on wanting to run OpenSuse 11.1 as the main OS, and probably Vista X64 in a virtual image for the stuff he could not find Linux equivalents for.

So, off to the shop I went with him to buy all the gear.

Next post, I will share what harwdware we ended up getting and the total cost …..

Found such a great reference: