Upgrade your laptop with a nice SSD drive

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If you have a decent laptop that is only a year or two old, a great upgrade is an SSD hard drive.  It really perks up the computer. 

Here are some of our favorites from Samsung featuring: 

  • Form Factor: 2.5 inch
  • Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (Compatible with SATA 3Gb/s & SATA 1.5Gb/s)
  • NAND Flash: 32 Layer 3D V-NAND
  • Thickness: 7.0 mm
  • Optimized performance for everyday computing needs
  • Sequential read speed 540 MB/s; Sequential write speed 520 MB/s; Random read speed 100K; Random write speed 90K

Sizes: 

500GB: http://amzn.to/1MAGy1G

1TB: http://amzn.to/1MAGgb4

2TB: http://amzn.to/1H9uFDy

 

 

What to do when your Dell computer ships without cables

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A lot of recent dell orders have come in without the cables for the monitor.   Here are your options: 

Use normal DVI cables:
http://amzn.to/1Q3IypR

You can use the display ports with normal DVI monitors with these adapters:
http://amzn.to/1Q3IEhn

OR if your monitors and computer both have display ports, you can get Display Port only cables:
http://amzn.to/1OlriMA

Desktop scanners we recommend

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If you have to get up to scan somewhere else in your office, it likely will not happen.  Its best to have desktop scanners for productivity. 

We have used and worked with many desktop scanners over the years.  Fujitsu has been our go-to bulletproof performer.

The Fujitsu Scan snap is the entry level around ~$400 and they go up from there.  If you are looking to get started wiht scanning, you cannot go wrong with a Scan Snap.  If you need a LOT of speed, and will be scanning all day, go for the faster option below. 

Entry level option:

Scansnap:http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/scansnap/ix500/index.html

Good place to buy: Amazon

Faster performance option: 

Faster:http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/fi/index.html

Good place to buy: Amazon

 

Tired of excel sheets opening in the same window

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I’ve been working a LOT in excel lately, and with multiple sheets and multiple monitors its SO FRUSTRATING when excel sheets open in the same instance EVERY time… working around it to open excel first is a drag, so I finally found some instructions on how to change it.

Go here, put some registry keys in, and be on your way to Excel opening in SEPARATE windows every time!

http://www.excelqa.info/2011/06/17/how-to-open-excel-files-in-a-new-application-instance-windows-7-or-vista/

Low Cost Disaster Recovery Options For VMware

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For years now Corner Edge Solutions has been using VMware exclusively for all of our new server installs, and even for hardware upgrades by virtualizing the original server install and configuration to a new physical server with VMware.  This goes for even a small, one server setup as well.  We have felt this is a great way to increase reliability as well as improve disaster recovery times.

While having two complete setups of VMware is probably cost prohibitive, with the small footprint of VMware ESXi, you can use a simple workstation or even a laptop as a cold spare DR backup.  As you’ll see below, I have easily installed VMware on my laptop, and with a large enough hard drive, and enough memory, I could run a small to medium office server environment setup on my one laptop, or even a mid-range business desktop.  The cost of these is usually around $1500-2500, and when you consider the cost of a second server may come in at $5000 or more, this is a great low-budget way to have your office back up and working quickly in the event of a major disaster.

To do this simply, just power off the VM’s on a schedule that fits your DR needs and copy the files from the main DataStore and upload them the the DataStore on your backup setup.  You will want to make sure your backup processor is a 64-bit proc with VT enabled if you are running 64-bit VM’s, you have enough storage space for the foreseeable future, and definitely install as much memory as your budget and workstation will allow, and that should be it.

You clearly shouldn’t expect the same performance of this setup as you would get from a true server, but it would get people back online and running again while you work on the main server.

  

 

 


Here is a quick picture I took of my laptop running VMware ESXi just for fun.  I had installed ESXi on a USB stick, and booted to that when I powered on my laptop.  This install was originally done on a PowerEdge 2950, and without any modifications to the install, it came up just fine on an Dell Latitude E6500.  Simply carry a USB flash drive and a large external storage drive and you can have a backup ESXi server wherever you go.

Flash AS2 Tips for Designers, variables in target paths

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How can I use a variable in a target path? This may be a well known bit of info for many Flash developers but for this designer who is not code jockey it was a  quite a challenge. I have a flash file that has a movie clip (myclip) attached to it dozens of times, each clip is dynamically named (myclip1, myclip2, myclip3, etc.) and each contains a variable (var_in_myclip) which is loaded from xml. The root contains 2 variables, one is a number (var id:Number;) and the other is a string (var whichclipvar;).

So I need my “whichclipvar” to be the same as one of my “var_in_myclip” in one of “myclip” movie clips and I want to use my “id” number to target a specific “myclip” to get it’s var, like this

whichclipvar = _root.myclip1.var_in_myclip;

But I need the myclip1 in the target path to change if “id” changes.

The solution is to create a new variable that can be used as a string in the target path. Like this:

var myclippath:String=”myclip”+id;

Then use [myclippath] in place of the movie clip in your target path. The square brackets are important for this, and no preceding “.” who knew? The whole code looks like this and requires a movie clip on the stage with an instance name of “myclip” and its symbol properties must be set to export for action script and named “myclip”:

var id:Number;

//// NOTE: the id var can be set in any way that works for your purposes///

var whichclipvar;

var mycontent:XML = new XML();

mycontent.load(“my_content.xml”);

mycontent.ignoreWhite = true;

mycontent.onLoad = function (success) {

if (success) {

var myxml = this.firstChild;

for (var i=0; i<36; i++) {

myclip.attachMovie(“myclip”, “myclip”+i, (0+i), {var_in_myclip:myxml.firstChild.childNodes[5].childNodes[i].childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue,});

}

}

var myclippath:String=”myclip”+id;

whichclipvar = _root[myclippath].var_in_myclip;