After some positive feedback from our customers about last month’s customer interview with City of Miami, we wanted to provide IT Pros with another dose of real-world, Windows Vista customer insight. Additionally, recognizing the interest in Windows 7 over the past few months, we know IT professionals are wondering whether to upgrade to Windows Vista today or wait for Windows 7. I could give you a whole bunch of reasons for investing in Windows Vista today (security, data protection, etc.), but I thought you’d like to hear from an IT professional like you who has made the move to Windows Vista and is glad he did.

I talked with Mike Calabrese, Senior IT Architect - Global Desktop Services of PPG Industries, one of the world’s leading coatings and specialty materials companies, about what keeps him up at night, and how Windows Vista helps address some of his biggest challenges. Here’s an overview of our conversation:

The Windows Blog: Hi, Mike – thanks for chatting with me. What are the biggest challenges in managing your IT environment?

Mike Calabrese: We are like any other business. We keep a close eye on our key resources: time, money and people. As an internal IT department, my biggest challenge is to be able to provide continuous value to PPG’s large and diverse set of end-users. My focus is global desktop services, so PPG employees are my customers and my work directly impacts their day-to-day productivity and ability to collaborate. I have to find the right balance between delivering the flexibility that my customers need, while doing it in a way that is secure and properly supported … and doing it all in a cost-effective way.

The Windows Blog: Finding a cost-effective way to manage all that sounds like it could be a challenge – how are you controlling it?

Mike Calabrese: Right now, we are in the process of upgrading 26,000 desktops and laptops to Windows Vista. As a global company, servicing 25 different languages in more than 60 countries, one key benefit we’ve seen upfront is the ability to create and deploy one global desktop image, rather than creating a separate built-from-scratch, localized image for each supported language or country. This alone is a huge cost and resource saver.

The Windows Blog: Are there any other benefits you’re seeing from Windows Vista?

Mike Calabrese: Management is another area where Windows Vista adds value. The vast number of group policies provides the ability to customize desktop configurations globally with just a few clicks. One example of this is the configuration of wireless profiles that define our access points globally. Any PPG Vista user can connect to our highly secured access points effortlessly.

And I would say that security is the other key reason why we moved to Windows Vista. From an end-user perspective, security is not the most exciting feature, but it is one of those critical issues for IT. We were looking at third-party products to provide additional security, but after a thorough evaluation, we’ve decided to deploy BitLocker on every machine to take advantage of this added layer of security protection available with Windows Vista, without enduring the additional cost or complexity a third-party security product would introduce into our environment.

The Windows Blog: With features that may not be immediately visible to the end-user, did you find it difficult to get your employees on board? How did you sell the value to your colleagues?

Mike Calabrese: Like you, I’ve heard and read all the criticisms of Windows Vista. In my experience, Windows Vista delivers amazing value and addresses the things I care about the most – reducing costs, empowering our users to be productive, and improving manageability and security. Microsoft has been a good partner throughout our deployment process and we expect to continue to see the business benefits with our move to Windows Vista.

The great news for PPG is that its investment in Windows Vista is paying off now and they will have a much easier upgrade path to Windows 7 when they make the decision to deploy. I’ll be sure to keep you updated as I continue to talk with Windows customers – it’s their experiences and opinions that truly tell the stories of our products.

Description of System Booster 2009 and consequences of its residing on your PC

System Booster 2009 (SystemBooster 2009) represents less popular trend in the malware business. However, like in case of any other unnecessary program, we say remove System Booster 2009. The trend represented by SystemBooster 2009 is propagation of fake system optimizers (or one may say system boosters). Their principal difference with larger group like virus and malware removal tools is only in declared features. System Booster 2009 promises to repair errors in your system and optimize its performance, while the removers, in their turn, misleadingly promise to remove dangerous programs from your computer.
Get rid of System Booster 2009, because it is not just the waste contaminated your PC and thus started to rest in piece making rare invokes to pay for something that can hardly be understood. “All evils here contaminate the mind” as System Booster 2009 uses tactics of system disordering by means of dll files it includes. Needless to say, if you do not remove SystemBooster 2009 from infected computer, this program will boost your Windows so good that system will fail to start at all.
Click here  to start free scan and remove SystemBooster 2009 and all programs of its tribe.

System Booster 2009 Technical Details

• Full name: System Booster 2009, SystemBooster 2009, SystemBooster2009
• Version: 2009
• Type: Rogue anti-spyware
• Origin: Russian Federation

System Booster 2009 Screenshots (click to enlarge):

Signs of being infected with System Booster 2009:

SystemBooster 2009 is not a partisan and does not hide in a jungle of your computer. It may be installed manually from the home-page, but, perhaps, majority of its installations are illegal interventions with Zlob.Trojan or Vundo.Trojan. There is no free trialware installation option at home-page of SystemBooster 2009 so in case of manual installation one has payable full version at the computer and very likely to complain there is no use from this program except alerts for payable updates.
In case of trjan’s support, do not hesitate too long and better remove SystemBooster 2009 immediately as trojans may leave rootkits so complete disk reformatting would be the only one way to remove SystemBooster 2009 completely.
SystemBooste2009 usually produces every time a user logs on to Windows its central pop-up which includes options of free scan for detection errors in your system and  registration (paying) option. This sign is quite visible for easy threat identification. Click here to establish whether infected or not and remove SystemBooster 2009 not omitting relevant trojans.

Automatic Removal of System Booster 2009 from your PC:

As there are trojans serving  SystemBooster 2009, remove System Booster 2009 in safe mode and better using professional tool. Follow the link below to get rid of System Booster 2009 automatically or to scan your system in order to identify residing malware and viruses.

Download System Booster 2009 Removal Tool

Manual Removal of System Booster 2009:

Malware and virus removal process requires user to have certain degree of skills, in particular, dll files and Registry managing. It is recommended to remove SystemBooster 2009 manually only if you are sure this is a single threat and that you can easily perform deletion of dll files and Registry entries. In case of shadowed installation of trialware, remove SystemBooster 2009 manually after starting Windows in safe mode to prevent trojan’s intervention.

Remove System Booster 2009 files and dll’s

SystemBooster2009.exe

Unregister System Booster 2009 registry values:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SystemBooster2009
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SystemBooster2009

System Booster 2009 Remover with free scan

I have noticed this for a good while now, but sort of ignored it since I also get weather updates through my Windows Live Weather Gadget on my Windows Live Space and through Yahoo! Mail box Home page. But what is bothering me is the non-functioning weather Gadget included in both Vista and 7. At first I thought it had become corrupted, so I tried it in another account, same results. I have come to find out that my Vista system is not the only one affected, it happens on my family and friends systems running Vista. The error message I keep getting is ‘Service is not available in your region.

 

No support for local towns and cities anymore?

What's interesting is, when I enter locations that I am sure would be available such as ‘Redmond, WA’, I get the ‘cannot connect to service’ error too. The weather applet on Windows Live Home page works just fine and I am sure the data is coming from the same source: Foreca. I wish services like this could be more federated, I am signed into my Live Space with the same account as my Live Home Page. I hope Gadgets are more synergistic in Windows 7 where information delivered to user is relevant to their region.

 

The Weather Applet on my Windows Live Home Page and the Live Gadget on my Live Space.

Another issue I am experiencing is the Windows Live Weather Gadget. Prior to the recent Windows Live Spaces update, it worked just fine for my region ‘Mandeville, JAM’, now it only defaults to ‘Seattle, WA’. I have modified settings, at first it added my parish as a second weather gadget. Since I don’t live in Seattle or have any need to see the weather forecast for that region, I close it out and and click ‘Save’. When I am taken back to my home page it defaults back to ‘Seattle, WA’. What gives? I have tried adding my area as a second Gadget, but it ends up only displaying ‘’Seattle, WA’. 

To determine the best web server for your use, consider the needs of the website you manage. Does it need heavy security (for e-commerce), multimedia (music, video, and pictures), or the capability to download files easily? How much are you willing to spend for the software? Do you need software that is easy to maintain and troubleshoot or that includes tech support? The answers to these questions might steer you to something other than Apache.


Apache Web Server
Apache is the most widely used web server on the Internet today, according to a Netcraft survey of active websites in June 2007. Note that these statistics do not reflect Apache’s use on internal networks, known as intranets. The name Apache appeared during the early development of the software because it was “a patchy” server, made up of patches for the freely available source code of the NCSA HTTPd web server. For a while after the NCSA HTTPd project was discontinued, a number of people wrote a variety of patches for the code, to either fix bugs or add features they wanted. A lot of this code was floating around and people were freely sharing it, but it was completely unmanaged. After a while, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick set up a centralized repository of these patches, and the Apache project was born. The project is still composed of a small core group of programmers, but anyone is welcome to submit patches to the group for possible inclusion in the code.

There has been a surge of interest in the Apache project over the past several years, partially buoyed by a new interest in open source on the part of enterprise-level information services. It’s also due in part to crippling security flaws found in Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS); the existence of malicious web task exploits; and operating system and networking vulnerabilities to the now-infamous Code Red, Blaster, and Nimda worms. IBM made an early commitment to support and use Apache as the basis for its web offerings and has dedicated substantial resources to the project because it makes more sense to use an established, proven web server.

In mid-1999, The Apache Software Foundation was incorporated as a nonprofit company. A board of directors, who are elected on an annual basis by the ASF members, oversees the company. This company provides a foundation for several open-source software development projects, including the Apache Web Server project. The best places to find out about Apache are the Apache Group’s website, http://www.apache.org/, and the Apache Week website, http://www.apacheweek.com/, where you can subscribe to receive Apache Week by email to keep up on the latest developments in the project, keep abreast of security advisories, and research bug fixes.

Ubuntu ships with Apache 2, and the server (named apache2). You can obtain the latest version of Apache as a package file from an Ubuntu FTP server, through Synaptic, or by getting the source code from the Apache website and, in true Linux tradition, build it for yourself. To determine the version of Apache included with your system, use the web server’s –V command-line option like this:

$ /usr/sbin/apache2 -V
Server version: Apache/2.0.50
Server built: Jun 29 2004 11:11:55
Server’s Module Magic Number: 20020903:8
Architecture: 32-bit
Server compiled with....

The output displays the version number, build date and time, platform, and various options used during the build. You can use the -v option to see terser version information.


Sun ONE Web Server
Despite the Netcraft numbers shown previously in, there is evidence that the Sun Java System Web Server (formerly known as the iPlanet Web Server, and subsequently Sun ONE Web Server) might be even more popular than Apache in strictly corporate arenas. The server got its start as the Netscape Enterprise Server—one of the first powerful web servers ever to hit the market. Sun ONE Web Server comes in many flavors, and all of them are big. In addition to the enterprise-level web server that can be run on Ubuntu, the software features application, messaging, calendar, and directory servers—just to name a few. Sun ONE Web Server is great for handling big web needs, and it comes with an appropriately big price tag. It’s definitely not something to run the school website—unless your school happens to be a major state university with several regional campuses. For more information on Sun Java System Web Server, you can visit its website (http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/web_srvr/home_web_srvr.html).


Zope
Zope is another open-source web server. Although it is still relatively young and might not have as much flexibility as Apache, it is making strong inroads in the web server market. What makes Zope different from Apache is the fact that it is managed through a completely web-based graphic interface. This has broad appeal for those who are not enthused about a command-line–only interface. Zope is a product of the Zope Corporation (formerly Digital Creations), the same firm that made the Python programming language. And, like all things open source, it is free. Information on Zope can be found at both http://www.zope.com (for the commercial version) and http://www.zope.org (for the open-source version).


Zeus Web Server
Ubuntu sites can also use the Zeus Web Server from Zeus Technology. This server offers a scalable SSL implementation, security settings across multiple websites, and an online administration server. The current price is $1,700 for a host platform with up to two CPUs, but load balancing via the Zeus Load Balancer costs $12,000 (at the time of writing) for each pair of load-balancing computers. You can get more information about the Zeus Web Server at http://www.zeus.com/products/zws/.

With the advent of better and efficient hard disks on the rise, PC geeks are now in for a treat as Seagate Technologies has unveiled a new 80 gigabyte hard disk that comes with higher performance specifications and makes swapping drives easy. For most PC owners, hard disks have a limit as far as usable life is concerned. While we now see the 160 gigabyte hard disks in the market, the new 80-gigabyte Intel X25-M SATA offers half the storage but with more reliable speed and flexibility.

The best part of it is that you can use it on a laptop or a desktop. The interface is similar to most, using an USB interface where you can copy and safeguard your data if you are worried about your hard disk crashing at any moment. So while others are still using the traditional optical storage drives or larger capacity flash drives, why bother to limit yourself if you can get an efficient hard drive that can store your files and documents handily?

The Intel drive is expensive — about $540 online — but comes with higher performance specifications and a three-year warranty. Solid-state drives are obviously an expanding niche in the world of laptop computers. The explosion of digital data is so overwhelming that even if our notebook disks become smaller, we will still have to keep our data somewhere.

So if you are looking to buy a new hard drive, hold on a bit. This may be expensive but it is sure to answer all your data storage needs.

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