I recently managed to get 2 new PC's for the office and I have spent more time than I had wished trying to get the things to play nice. I was amazed when we got the machines as they were such a great deal from Dell - Intel Quad Core 6600, 3GB Ram, 22" Monitor for €850! - I couldn't wait to get the PC's setup and find my productivity shoot through the roof. Little did I know that Microsoft had other ideas in store for me.

First off, I need to make it clear that I am not a Microsoft hater. In fact I find the majority of their products are well built and I know I would not have my job if it wasn't for them but when you have problems with Visual Studio 2008, their flagship programming environment, running on Vista, their flagship OS, then you know things aren't good. Add to this the Word crashing incident I had and I was starting to wonder why I decided to upgrade at all!

Let's take a look and see what the problems and solutions were!

Problem 1: Fresh install of Word doesn't open. Splash screen loads up and then nothing.

Solution: This one caught me for a bit. I tried to do the 'Detect and Repair' option for Office from the Add/Remove Programs option in the Control Panel. This didn't work. So I tried to uninstall Office, restart the machine, and reinstall it. This didn't work either. The problem remained. Excel worked fine, Outlook worked great and Access would open and close perfectly. Next stop - Google :) After much searching I came across some posts that were similar to my issue. The problem was to do with a Printer Driver I had installed. There was an issue with that driver in Vista - even though it installed without issue and printed a test page for me! I set my default printer to the default one in Windows Printers and Faxes and sure enough Word opened up without any problems. A few more searches later and I found the right driver to use. One issue down!

Problem 2: SQL Server 2005 installation fails to install.

Solution: This only happened on one of the new machines I bought. At first I was stumped. Surely if it wasn't compatible with Vista I would have had issues on the other PC? I quickly found the solution though when I noticed that there was an Office Web Component download that needed to be installed in Vista from the Vista Auto Update Tool. Sure enough once I installed this I didn't have any problems with the installation and it went on perfectly for me. Of course, this isn't the end of the road if you plan on using SQL Server 2005 on Vista as you need to download SQL 2005 Service Pack 2 before it will work but Vista should give you this warning before your install.

Problem 3: Visual Studio 2008 will not debug. Internet Explorer 7 will open up ok but your page will not be displayed.

Solution: By the time I got to this issue I was beat. All I wanted was a new PC that was faster and would help me work more efficiently. I don't want things not to work. I hate when things don't work! So when I opened Visual Studio 2008, made a very simple test page that did nothing more than output a 'Hello' in a label and pressed F5 to debug I couldn't believe it when the page didn't work. *Sigh* Why is this happening to me? Who doesn't want me to have a new PC out there? I tweaked the IIS settings, I downloaded every patch out there and prayed to the Gods but nothing. Then I thought about some issues I had before with Norton Internet Security in the past. I have Nod32 on my Vista machine at work and this had an Internet security setting. By excluding Visual Studio from Nod32's filter I should have gotten my test page to show. But it didn't. What I had to do was locate the following file:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Open it in Notepade and remove the line that says

::1             localhost

Your debugged site will now show up. I'm not sure if it is just Nod32 that causes this or not but it's handy to know for anyone else experiencing this issue

So there you have it, my trials and tribulations with my new PC. Even though it broke my heart to get the machines setup it is great to finally have a dual monitor setup for me and my other developers. The new machines are super fast with Visual Studio 08. I just can't wait to start doing some development work now.

Just a quick post to let you all know that PrizeQuestion.com is finally live. I've been working on this project for a few months and it's great to see it finally launch. I'd like to wish Jason the best of luck with the site.

Head on over to the site and see what all the fuss is about yourself! Let me know what you think.

I really don't understand this. It happens all the time. No matter what company I contact for support it's always the same. No matter what the issue is - hardware related, software integration assistance, new sales enquiries even - I always seem to get rubbish response times.

Maybe it's just me? If I email into a support desk I expect at the least an auto email telling me a ticket number or a response from an actual person. If I phone for support I expect to be able to talk to someone who knows a bit about the product I'm looking for support on. Yet this is the exception and not the norm for all businesses big or small that I've dealt with in the past.

Inside in Dragnet Systems we pride ourselves on our level of support. It's true that you pay a bit more to be with us but you definitely get your money's worth! If someone rings our support line they get through to someone who knows about their product or if a more technical question needs to be answered and someone can't take the call we take a message and call back within 2hrs usually. If someone emails us a request, it's usually done within the hour and the customer updated.

The amount of business we get alone because other companies don't offer proper support is amazing. It happens at least once or twice a week and it's rising. I believe people are fed up of crap support and I agree with them. There's no excuse. No matter what size a business is.

To give credit where it is due, there is only one company I could put my hand on my heart and say offers exceptional support and they are our hosting providers RackSpace. They offer us outstanding support and if I ever have any queries I will get a response in around 10-15mins by email or instant if I ring in. They are also the only hosting partners that have never over promised and under delivered.

But enough of the back patting. I just wish other businesses would follow in our foot steps and offer customers the level of support they deserve. I mean, we did pay for the service when we bought your products which you were quick enough to take money for.....

I'm sure as a DBA/technical person you have faced this yourself through the years, especially for those who deal with non technical people who own websites.

Customers are always asking us for dedicated servers, High Available (HA) setups for web and database, Load Balancing, etc. I will always sit down with these customers and go through the basics before I get any pricing to get an understanding of the type of setup I feel they would require.

• How much traffic is the current site getting?
• If it's a new site, what traffic do they expect?
• Is the site using HTTPS? Are payments handled by the site?
• Are there spikes in site usage during promotional sales, etc?
• Is there a database right now? What size is this? What is the database design?

I have certain server setups that I can give them ballpark figures for based on the answers above. This gives me an indication if they are serious or not for me to go further and get real pricing. If they faint when I tell them a XXXX amount then I know there is no point getting a quote. However this is not the end of the discussion by any means.

More than likely the client will say - "OK, so we can't afford this option or that option so how can we achieve HA setup?". The simple answer is that you can't unless you spend the money. The real question is always "Do you need it?" 99% of the time the answer is no - not right now anyways. These customers could more than likely afford1 web server, 1 database server and 1 firewall. By monitoring server usage/database stresses you will know when it's time to upgrade by which time the customer should have enough sales to justify the costs.

For those customers that absolutely have to have it. I make sure that I tell the pros and cons of any type of setup. The best setup to me is one that can be easily scaled up. There's no point in having a setup that requires the customer's servers to be offline for upgrading, maintenance or additions. So a setup with mirroring, load balancing, redundancy etc is required. Again, it's finding a balance with hardware/cost that's always the difficult part. It's a challenge but if you're like me it can also be fun and interesting coming up with weird server setups that fit a customer's needs perfectly.

If there is one thing I hate it's meetings. Don't get me wrong, a company cannot function without everyone knowing what people are working on, where people are with timescales,etc. I just feel that 90% of meetings are completely pointless as they are not planned out better.

I've taken a shine to bringing in my laptop during meetings now so that I can get work done. If a question needs to be directed my way I can answer it and then get back to being productive. Most of the time my input in meetings is about 5 mins. It's not that I don't have anything interesting to say but the majority of the meetings questions are not my field or are for other people in the meeting to discuss.

To plan a meeting better I think the meeting organizer should do a couple of things. When you read this list you might think it is self explanatory but it's amazing how many managers overlook these items:

• Only invite the people that need to be there. If the meeting is about the company finances then there is no need for the tech support guys to be there.
• Don't tell everyone in the meeting to be more productive when you've halted everyone from working so they could listen to you ramble on for 45mins.
• Make sure you have an agenda of topics to discuss. Stick to this agenda as close as possible to stop meetings over running.
• Allow people to ask questions but where possible have people ask the questions once you've covered your topics.
• To help with people's attention span be sure to make sure that the room you're in is properly ventilated with fresh air and have water on the desk.
• If you are having a long meeting (anything over 1 hour) then be sure to take breaks. Ideally take a 5 mins break. Don't let the breaks take too long or it will feel like the meeting is never going to end.

If people stick to the above points then the meeting should be a productive one for all involved in my opinion. What do you think?