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New community focus – adding a climate smart twist to IT!

I’m adding a new dimension to my community work – combining passion in work with personal interest and believes.

My work which is all about helping organizations build and maintain a secure, mobile, and modern IT workplace. My interests are much about traveling and basically everything that has to do with flying. The last part is something very close to my heart and that is to help reduce impact on the climate and Earth’s limited resources, reaching a sustainable future.

If you combine this, you get Climate Smart IT (https://climatesmartit.com) and how IT can contribute to the organization’s sustainability goals! More can be done for the climate than just enabling double-sided printing :)

Did you for instance know that a typical corporate laptop in its entire lifecycle generates the equivalent amount of CO2 emissions as a 4-hour flight?

Follow my work with Climate Smart IT at climatesmartit.com or follow this LinkedIn group, the Meetup community page or Twitter!

Blog post highlights of 2011

Another year has passed by and I would like to take the opportunity to share some of my most interesting blog posts during the year. First off is Busting the myths: Windows 7 require Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 domain controllers and raised functional levels.

Second off is the guide I wrote up the other day on a very hot subject, how to handle user group policy settings when migrating for instance from Windows XP to Windows 7. Third comes the strange things UAC may cause, and this one is about mapped network drives not being accessible when cmd.exe is run with admin privileges although the same user account.

One last thing I want to highlight is that although it is actually from last year but still worth noting, this little tip on how to very easily discover performance issues such as drivers making going to sleep/resume from sleep slow, apps making your machine start and shutdown slower etc, HOW TO: List performance issues with your Vista or Windows 7 machine.

Top posts of 2009

So to summarize the past year I would like to highlight the most popular posts. It is pretty clear that how-tos are without doubt the most popular posts…

#1 How to clean out the Installer directory correctly
MSI and MSP files are stored in the %SYSTEMROOT%\Windows\Installer directory and to free disk space and to clean out this folder you can use the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to remove orphaned objects.

#2 How to install Nvidia video drivers on laptops when all else fails
For instance Sony do not provide 64-bit drivers for a large range of their (older) laptops which makes Windows 7 use a Standard VGA adapter. Nvidias official mobile drivers will not install on many systems but the solution to get those drivers to install is quiet simple and makes graphics on laptops run as smooth as it should.

#3 Troubleshooting blue screen of deaths
This is simply a guide on how to manually debug what a blue screen of death is caused by. Very handy!

Mailbox moved to Exchange 2010

Been home from TechEd for a couple of days and getting back to speed on everything at home. This morning I moved my mailbox to Exchange 2010. The Outlook Web App (previously known as Outlook Web Access) is real slick and now I am just waiting for Office 2010 beta to be released to take full functionality with Exchange 2010 with the new Outlook 2010. Well, the Technical Preview has been out since this summer and although it is promising it contains quite a few bugs and therefore I have reverted to Office 2007 until the beta of 2010 is here. There are a lot of changes coming in the beta compared to the Tech Preview so I hope it will be here soon.

TechEd recap – so far so good!

Halfway through TechEd Europe and so far it has been great! Long days attending sessions and walking around talking to people and long nights with social activities. The sessions I have been to have had high standards and I have not (yet) been to a bad session so far. I finished off yesterday with watching fellow country man Marcus Murray do a session about hack proofing Windows 7, quite interesting and it is always fun to watch Marcus in action. I guess all sessions will be available online some time after the conference and I will get back on that later on. Now a new day with lots of sessions await. So long!

IPv6 – learn it today!

I’ve just watched Mark Minasi doing an interesting presentation on IPv6. He is indeed a great speaker by the way. I’m not going to get into details on what the presentation was all about but instead I’m going to sum it up with a few words. Do not be frightened by IPv6 and do not disable IPv6 on your machines. Instead go on and learn it, today! You will have to learn it sooner or later anyway and the sooner the better I would say :)