I learned a lot about money lately, the hard way. Here's 4 money tips that'll help you make payments, the easy way. I feel like 2014 has been a big year for payments systems. Change is in the wind, not in my pocket. For me, there's four recent tales to tell here: How to survive with just an Co…
Reminder, you'll need Microsoft TechNet or MSDN for many Microsoft downloads, which are paid for services. For multi-gigabyte downloads like Windows Technical Preview (Windows 10), you may want to get IE11 to cooperate and allow you to use Akamai's edge-of-network locations. The only problem is th…
When booking my flights and hotels for my work related month in Germany, I realized I have a list of go to services, apps, and devices. Thought you might find this particular combination of travel tools helpful. First, got my trip booked with corporate AMEX, who shared my itinerary details while…
I'm running Windows 8.1 on my ThinkPad W520 laptop, equipped with 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. Pretty run of the mill these days. In this video, I use Task Manager to determine that a given set of 20 tabs open in my 32 bit Chrome use up about 1.8GB of memory, and takes about 40 seconds to load.…
If you're at all curious what I'm up to, and what kinds of things I might be researching lately, simply check in on my Google +1's. Virtualization, hardware, software, tips, and more. Don't forget to follow me on Google+ too. I use it as a master bookmark repository, for the sort of items that…
Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE250BW Using vZilla's most important VM, Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, has its advantages. It allows me to easily do a network boot for a bare metal restore to new SSDs, for example.…
I use a standing desk. Reasonable size and weight for my 3 monitors is almost as important to me as excellent image quality. Having had thousands of hours using my Nixeus NX-VUE27 these past 2 years (Close look at my Nixeus NX-VUE27 2560×1440 27″ monitor Aug 24 2012), I'm now able to offer some comparis…
Let's say you use WordPress editor, or other online web forms. Even if you don't use an Editor plugin like Tiny MCE Advanced, you can still have real-time as-you-type spell checking. You may find that the proper setting to enable Chrome's spell checking is turned off. If you notice that Chrome …
I've used LogMeIn for many years, occasionally helping remote family members with computer issues. I liked a lot of the features, including the ability to easily collaborate, with both of us able to see the screen and control the mouse. Worked well. I also liked that I could centrally see a list of…
Yes, many folks still use Lotus Notes / IBM Notes. Myself included, several dozen hours a week actually. By default, Notes really doesn't take advantage of modern systems with lots of RAM. This article will help your Notes installation use your sytem's memory more effectively, which also means…
With all this GPU power we have these days, you'd think we'd all have smooth scrolling, where you can actually read the text as it glides up the page. Turns out we all can, with the right mouse and the right software. Sure wish I upgraded to a better mouse wheel years ago! Then again, it…
KVM over IP, LSI RAID, VMFS corruption averted, unplanned smartphone replacement, cablemodem replacement, and phone line replacement. What a month! Follow along and learn from my mistakes, and successes. KVM over IP. Got my Lantronix KVM-over-IP device working, at last. Finally a way to replace my…
I traveled for work. For years. Decades actually. Been to about 30 of these 50 United States, usually for 3-5 day trips, often confirmed the week before. That lifestyle sure made volunteering for things like giving blood a challenge, canceling most of my appointments last minute. My personal …
Your browser saves bandwidth by saving parts of web pages, usually to your hard drive, in a system known as cache. This ensures that identical content is downloaded only once. Sometimes, strange website behavior can make it necessary to bypass this cache, forcing your browser to re-download a web…
When speaking publicly, it's certainly handy to be able to show a live demo of a smartphone or tablet, on the projected image. It's also best to not have to assume anything about the facility you'll be presenting at, if possible, relying instead on USB cables that'll also serve to keep your gear …
For years, I've been seeking a reliable way to be alerted to calendar events on my iPhone. One of the drawback with iOS has been the default calendar's behavior, where an event may bet set to trigger an alert or two before or at the start time of some personal or professional appointment that…
Download - Steps 1, 2, and 3! ESXi 5.5 ISO image (includes VMware Tools) 2014-03-11 | 5.5.0 U1 | 328 MB VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.5.0.update01-1623387.x86_64.iso If you get a "All Downloads" screen instead of a Save as Dialogue, try this authentication required link instead. VMware vC…
Aug 04 2014 Update: See also Problems downloading VMware vSphere VMware vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1c Appliance, and a way to download 1b (that can be updated to 1c). Original article appears below To get started with your own vSphere 5.5 home lab, you'll find that there's just 3 files needed. …
I had Vonage for 7 years for my 2 phone lines, but the prices crept up to the point where the savings over cable company phone lines had nearly vanished. I then tried Ooma for the past 2 years or so, and the voice quality has been decent. After spending about $220 in hardware to get going with the…
[June 10 2014 Update - be sure you use Chrome Canary 32 bit download, to avoid incompatibility with VMware Client Integration Plugin] If you happen to prefer Chrome over Firefox, like to have a lot of tabs open, and rarely need to reboot, you will likely need to restart Chrome fairly often. Lately,…
On December 2nd, 2013, Anthony Bartolo published this sweet and simple guide to activating disk performance counters here, also pictured below. This diskperf function goes back to Windows NT in 1995. Because of the slight overhead imposed by turning on these counters, Windows Server variants …
Rear view of Headset May 3, 2015 Update - I have come up with a $140 solution with much better sound, documented here. Original article appears below. Noise Suppression Stereo Headphones with Bluetooth Controls (4 item shopping cart) I often find myself searching for a device that nobody seems to m…
What if you'd like to connect your Windows 8.1 laptop to four routers, each at factory defaults, doing the initial configuration, one router at a time. But each router is also a DHCP server, feeding your laptop with a 192.168.1.x address. If you put an ethernet switch or hub between your laptop and…
If you buy an item that ships from Amazon, the refund experience is amazing, here in the United States. Better than anything I've ever experienced anywhere else. Here's 3 such stories, followed by a simple tip to simplify your shipping and return experiences. Story #1 - Router Refund Let's start…
TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here, not my employer's.
Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.
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After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. So far, Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh looking a little better for 2024. More cores, but still just PCIe Gen4 and DDR4. Looking ahead, I'm glad it's Pat Gelsinger at Intel's helm. I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when Pat was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
