Google your way to an online Office alternative

Most people have used Microsoft Office or if not one of its competitors such as StarOffice. Most of these office "suites" tend to include at the very least a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation system in the case of Microsoft Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint respectively. By default most people seem to end up with these office packages on there home or work computer even if in truth they use about 10% of the features that they offer. I know people who have bought Office and use as many features in Microsoft Word that can actually be found in WordPad or Notepad that ship with Windows by default. If you use an office suite its also pretty hard to share and collaborate on documents even with added infrastructure in place such as Microsoft SharePoint sites used by some businesses. Normally you end up e-mailing people copies of the document which then comes back to you with changes and hey presto - you now have 2 copies of the file. You also need to worry about the backup of your data because the documents you create tend to be stored on your hard disk or on a file server somewhere.

Google Docs is a free online alternative - actually offline too as I will explain shortly - that includes the ability to create all three of the standard files you would expect in an office suite - documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as "forms" which are used to create spreadsheets too. Basically the system runs within your web browser be that Internet Explorer, Firefox or whatever and for this reason doesn't care what operating system you are running on either be it Windows, Ubuntu or something like your mobile phone. Because its a Google service my initial thought was that the system would be unavailable if I didn't have an internet connection. This isn't the case. Yes you need to be online to sign up for the service and synchronise your data but if you install something called Google Gears an offline copy of all our your documents are available when not connected to the internet. I will cover working offline a little later.

Another big advantage is that your documents are stored online so if you need them you can get them anytime from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. This is unlike the standard situation you will find yourself in with documents on your actual hard disk. As I said earlier I should also repeat the important fact that Google docs is free.

Creating an account..

This is very quick and easy. Just visit the http://docs.google.com web site and sign up. If you already have a google mail account you are ready to go. If not just enter a valid e-mail address and create a password. I will mention it later but if you want to use Docs offline (i.e. with no internet connection) you are better signing in with a googlemail account.

Using the various applications..

The Docs interface

When you open Docs you first see a list of your documents sorted by default on date modified. This can be changed to view by name etc. You can also create folders at this point which show along the left hand side of the screen. Using these you can organise your documents which can be put into these folders using drag and drop. Each document shows information such as when it was last modified and if its shared with other people. You can rename and delete documents from here and also search through all of your documents for certain keywords. It is here by that you start new documents by clicking on the "Create new" button.

Word processing

You firstly create a new document from a blank sheet or from a template. In case you aren't used to the various office suites a template is a predefined format to base the new document on. containing information you would add to every document based on it. Docs come with an impressive array of these either created by Google or by other people who have submitted them. These include the likes of resume/CV's, cover letters, basic invoices, business plans, fax cover sheets etc. Templates are also available for the spreadsheets and presentations.

Either way you end up with the typing screen which will look pretty much like any "windows" based word processor you may have used. Most of the tool bar options people are used to are there, File, Edit etc.
All of the standard stuff is there for "basic" word processing - changing the font, size, bolding, italic etc and adding tables if needed. You can also create headers, footers, paragraph styles, do spell checking, add images etc.
How does it compare with say Microsoft Word 2007. Well its not in the same league as far as features go's - what you have to ask is how many of these do you actually use though?
The one thing I did find a bit fiddly was formatting tables. I guess I am used to how easy this is in Microsoft Word and found just moving the size of columns to be a bit of a hassle. One thing I found very useful however was "revisions" which allows you to go back to an older version of your document. I found this useful on a couple of occasions after accidentally deleting a chunk of text and saving my document.

Spreadsheet

Like the word processing this is again a very usable application. I use this to do my home accounts but in all honesty I dont use spreadsheets for much more than that with simple additions. Would I be able to just use this if I was a top financial type person - I doubt it. However it does have some nifty little features such as online look up of company share ticker information for example.
Of all the Office applications I find Excel gets the most use from power users and they want the big features. A lot of those features are just not available in Google Docs.

Presentation

I have been a big user of Microsoft Powerpoint since its inception but generally I would have to say that I don't really use any more features now (even though there are loads!) than I did when I first used it. I have slides with a background with information on them and that's about it. When you create a new slide you get the option of 5 different slide layouts. For this the presentation part seems to work fine. You can also add standard stuff such as speaker notes. You can also do things such as insert video for instance which allows you to search YouTube and also insert an image and point to a web location for the image.
As I said earlier with the word processing you can base your presentation on a number of predefined templates.

Collaboration..

Collaborating is one of the really good things about using Google Docs. Let me give an example of how 3 people (I will be original and just call them X, Y and Z!) who are working on a presentation based newsletter for the local football team might currently do this. Lets presume all have Microsoft Office and each has a e-mail account at the likes of Yahoo! and Hotmail etc. Lets say X creates a presentation in PowerPoint and then e-mails this to Y and Z to see what they think and to change it and add things as necessary. Both of these have to save the file from e-mail and work on it and send it back. X receives both back via e-mail, saves them and has to look through both to merge them together. X now has three different version of the presentation to contend with. With Google docs you don't send an attachment you send a link and give people the chance to work online with it directly. To do this you just open the document, click the "share" button and provide the e-mail addresses of the people who need to work on it. If these are accounts that have Google Docs they can just open them up and work on them. When complete X can publish the presentation directly onto the internet for the team members to view it. You also get supplied with code so you can embed this into a current web site or post it on a blog.

Working Offline..

As previously mentioned I had thought that I would have to be connected to the internet to work with Docs. This is not the case and you have an "offline" button within Docs. When you click this for the first time you are prompted to install Google Gears. This makes any documents you have created available offline (basically it copies them down to your hard disk). From a security point of view this isn't something you would particularly want to do on a shared computer however.
Generally speaking I found the offline access to work fine with a couple of exceptions. Firstly (and I couldn't personally find this in the online help) you have to be using a google account name to log in - i.e. when you create an account you can use any login name or a NAME@googlemail.com account. Only the latter seem to work offline. Secondly making my documents offline via a company proxy/firewall did not work correctly - a direct connection to the internet fixed this. You also have to install Gears for each web browser you use - for instance on my machine I had to install it for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. When you exit and enter Docs your documents are synchronised so the latest versions or are on both the compute and the internet. Overall the whole offline system seems to work pretty well

Integration with other office suites..

The biggest problem you will have with Docs is the integration with current office suites and working with other people who are still using them. If you want to import documents into Docs then you should be fine with most formats although certain features are not supported such as footnotes, tables of contents and pivot tables for example. You can import word processed documents in most of the formats produced by Microsoft Office and StarOffice for instance. There are some size limitations that may catch you out however - Word documents for instance can only be 500 KB in size which is pretty small. Spreadsheets are a little better at 1MB and presentations from PowerPoint can be imported up to 10MB in size. I personally have a lot of files over this size which I was unable to import however this is often down to bad formatting of the documents in the first place - see my review on NX PowerLite for more information on this. In my tests most Word, Excel and PowerPoint files uploaded fine.

One problem you wont get round easily though is getting e-mailed a large Word document for instance from another source. If you receive a small Word document to your googlemail account you can open it in Docs or view it as HTML. However if its large as mentioned above you can only view it in HTML format so cant edit it.

In summary..

Clearly Microsoft Office is the competition for Google Docs that you would normally install on your PC. Google aren't taking on Microsoft as far as operating systems go anytime soon so have wisely taken the approach that you don't actually need a certain operating system to install an office suite on or rather it doesn't matter which one you use as long as you have a web browser. Google Docs has online competition as well though in the likes of ThinkFree and Zoho which are also very usable. For me Google has the advantage other these already with its brand name and the tie in with the very popular Google Mail.
Is this the death of Microsoft Office then? Certainly not yet. Firstly if you need the extra features that the various parts of that suite offer you aren't going to get them just yet in Google Docs.

None of the Google applications have anywhere near the same number of options that Microsoft Office have - but do you need them all ? I don't doubt though that Google are adding new features all the time to try and catch up. Secondly because such a large number of people already use Microsoft Office and have trained on it in shook, college and previous work no business is going to want to change to another system anytime soon. Finally large documents maybe received via e-mail cannot be opened or imported into Docs. Microsoft though must be looking at these online packages and no they have to offer more down that route soon and have started addressing this with "OfficeLive" which has online collaboration and I will try and review at some point also.
Many people, and certainly organisations, will also be concerned that there data is stored on a file server somewhere on the internet that is not under there control. Its unlikely but what if Google you loose your data because of a crash, virus or hacking?

Where I think Google Docs is ahead of Microsoft Office without having to get extra infrastructure in place is collaboration though. Its quite scary that in my own "Microsoft" work environment we are constantly having problems with limits on disk space, e-mail size, sharing files between sites that have low bandwidth connections and that our users would actually be better using Google Docs in some respects. Clearly in a corporate environment you dont want to be loosing control of your systems like this with people just signing up to these sort of services.
You also have to consider the ease of upgrades. When you decide to upgrade from Office whatever to the latest version you may have to do this on anything from one to thousands of computers. New versions of Google Docs will just be there so there are no upgrade hassles to worry about. With Office you also have to worry about the data - if you are not storing it on local machines you need a back-end server to store it. And if on local machines how are you backing the data up?

As far as speed goes using Google Docs its a double edged sword. Its an online service and I have found it fine as far as this goes. If you have want to compare it with Office it very much depends if you have this installed on a very slow or fast machine On a final note I should mention I had previously read some time ago about problems connecting to Google Docss and various errors people were getting. In the time I have been using it I haven't failed to get on to do my work.

If you work for a decent sized company then I suspect you wont be moving away from the likes of Microsoft Office anytime soon. If you are home user, small office or club/etc. then I would say Google Docs is worth a look especially for the collaboration tools and if you dont wont to have to worry about file servers etc. to store you data. As your business grows then maybe its worth looking at Google Apps which is the premium service for Docs. Clearly some sort of online collaboration options are the future and dont be surprised to see an online version of Microsoft Office in some shape or form sometime soon. I rate Google Docs as highly as I do Microsoft Office but for the different reasons and they cant be compared like for like. Google Docs is just very good at the target audience it is currently aimed at.

This would make me Merry at Christmas!

Now then.. this is much more like it...

First though let me first quickly remind you of my Christmas quest for a beer to help me fight my way through the turkey, sprouts, queens speech, Wizard of Oz (is it on this year?) and endless games of being cheated at Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly on December the 25th. So far I have tasted and tested Rosey Nosey and the somewhat better Wonkey Donkey. Both met some but not all of my criteria for a Christmas beer based on name or packaging, something that gives it that wintery difference and a bit of bite to see me through the big day.

I have to be honest and say I actually wanted to like this beer as it's from what is the nearest micro brewery to me. The brewery is based on a farm in the Yorkshire Wolds a stones throw from the North Sea (and my house). Based on a farm they use there own home grown barley and being on the Wolds chalk filtered water from there own borehole. Run by a small team including the owners, husband and wife team Tom and Gill Mellor, the brewery produces a number of cask and bottles ales. I first stumbled across the fact I had a micro brewery nearby when I started seeing their beer pop up in local farm shops and of all places garden centres. They must be doing something right as I have now seen the beer sold in chain supermarkets such as Proudfoot and ASDA but whether you will get that outside the Yorkshire region I don't know. As well as this they can be found selling there beers at local events such as farmers and Christmas Markets. You can also order the beer off the internet also and I will provide those details at the end of the review. The brewery also have an open day each summer which I keep promising but never quite get round to visiting each year.

Anyway back to the beer. First off it certainly passes the Christmas test in the naming and packaging. Previously called "Cracker Black" it was renamed this year simply to "Merry Christmas". Maybe a copout of a name but that's a tick for me. The label on the beer shows a Christmas pudding with cream on it topped by a bit of holly. Have a closer look though and the puddings the world with each country a splash of cream on it. Snow is falling onto it or again is that cream? So the name and bottle couldnt get much more Christmasy - so far so good. The bottle itself is 500ml and I bought a couple of bottles from different places, one at £1.95 and the other at £1.99.

So onto the tasting. The beer poured with a slight head. This soon disappeared but the beer was still lively enough and a quick twirl of the glass showed how lively it still was in the glass. The colour was a nice dark chocolate which showed up to be a dark ruby colour in the light. The bottle itself describes it as a "deep red hue". In the glass it looks dark and smooth.

I had mentioned in my previous two reviews on beer that despite reading up on the subject I hadn't really managed to detect anything during the "sniff" test on either. I know people smell all sort of things when doing this test, anything from different fruits to old socks but for me both previous bottles has smelt to me of, well, beer. A good wiff on this one hit me straight away though. It instantly reminded me of walking into a rum factory and the smell of molasses. Maybe even a scent of chocolate in there. And malty. Or am I now just taking this all too seriously and imagining things? Reading the website after the beer is made from roast Barley, pale chocolate malt, Progress and Styrian Goldings hops. So maybe I didn't imagine the chocolate after all.

After a couple of minutes the beer remained lively in the glass without being too fizzy. The taste also came through with a bit of alcohol bite that I tend to find in a strong Belgian beer without being in the leas bit unpleasant. Certainly enough taste to cut through the sprouts. It certainly hit me and no doubt the culprit for that was the 6% it weighs in at.

This beer is only available in October and January although the brewery's blog mentions due to its popularity they might make it into a year round beer. For me this is a beer for a dark and cold day or night and wouldn't be for me sat outside on a summer day as a session beer. Either way this is the best beer I have come across for my Christmas meal so far. The website describes it as follows and I don't think I can beat this description - "This is a winter beer that is ultimately best described as moreish!"

Whether a few more Christmas beers will pop up in the next couple of weeks to review remains to be seen. Either way I am visiting a Christmas market tomorrow and I think it would be rude not to stock up on a couple of these bottles - even if it doesn't win I will have something to look forward to on a cold night in January.

Web site - http://www.woldtopbrewery.co.uk
Merry Xmas - http://www.woldtopbrewery.co.uk/merrychristmas.html

Would you drink with this three legged Donkey?

Little Donkey
Little Donkey
On the dusty road...

OK so I may be grasping at straws here. If you have managed to read my review of Batemans Rosey Nosey beer you will know that I am trying to find a beer fit for the Christmas table. It's a bit like that thing on TV where they get different chefs to cook and then eventually choose one to cook for the queen - but at the same time nothing like it. Without having to read the previous review (please do though) the beer has to meet some simple criteria, namely a connection to Christmas by its name or packaging and must also smack a bit of wintery bite.

Now I have to say I haven't had that much luck finding Christmas beer its a bit early yet, not stocked everywhere and if they are tend to be a bit expensive. So the link may be a little loose at the moment but I think Wonkey Donkey should be just about allowed in because after all without the Donkey it would have been a long trip to Bethlehem. I promise a purchase of some "proper" Christmas beer soon but until then this will have to do. First off then before I manage to get my hands around a Wonkey Donkey here is a little bit more of information on the product and where it comes from.

Wonkey Donkey is produced by the Goose Eye Brewery, a brewery I had not previously heard of to be honest. It is based in Keighley, West Yorkshire but on the web site describes it to be in "the heart of the Yorkshire Dales" which seems either a bit optimistic or a significant change of geography has occurred. Established in 1991 it's a family concern with the whole family involved in the operation. The brewery has won numerous awards from the Campaign for Real Ale. The company produce a number of cask ales but the only bottled beer available is Wonkey Donkey.

So onto Wonkey Donkey. Before anything else though I thought I better do a quick bit of research into what a "Wonkey Donkey" was. Quick research using an online urban dictionary suggested "someone on ketamine" or "a women with one breast larger than the other". I also remember some link to Ant and Dec on Saturday morning TV. However I think the label on the bottle quickly gets rid of either of these two suggestions simply showing a three legged Donkey at the bar after a few too many beers stood rather, well, Wonkey I guess. Onto the pouring the beer.

Anyway if you have read my previous beer tasting you will perhaps know I am no expert on all of the various tastes and smells I should be getting yet - I just know if I like the beer or not! On pouring no real head was evident and I was slightly concerned it was going to be a bit flat. However it was certainly not flat and in a few seconds a head did develop although admittedly this was gone within a minute. However as I said the beer certainly didn't look flat and was lively enough without being like a glass of lemonade.

Holding the glass up I was quite surprised at the colour for what is a bitter as it almost looked like a lager. However reading the bottle the description is spot on as pale amber bitter. The beer itself uses pale Maris Otter malt.

On tasting the beer left a pleasant fizz in the mouth and as shown visually was certainly not flat. For a bitter it was surprisingly refreshing with a smooth but lively finish. My overall impression was a pleasant bitter that was light enough to drink even on a warm day, something I wouldn't normally say about an ale. However I was surprised by my second bottle.

When tasting Rosey Nosey I decided I would need two bottles to get a proper feeling for the beer. As it happened when I bought Wonkey Donkey it was on a deal if you bought three bottles (£4 at ASDA for 500ml bottles) which of course I was happy to go for. I hadn't actually intended to get stuck into the second bottle so it wasn't served as cold as the first and it also just happened to be served with a fairly strong Chicken Kiev pizza (which may have affected the taste and how well it would go with food).

The second bottle poured with a much better head. It straight away looked much more like a normal bitter but still with that nice amber colour. The head stayed around the glass and just seemed better conditioned.

My third experience a few days later was very much the same as the first. Not quite as smooth as you would expect from a bitter but still nice enough. Again though I served this slightly cold so suspect this beer is better served at slightly warmer temperature.

Overall then I thought Wonkey Donkey was a pleasurable experience and after few of these on Xmas day and I could well be looking like the animal on the front of the bottle. Maybe this isn't a Christmas ale but I would certainly try it again anyway even in summer. I preferred this to Rosey Nosey so at the moment Wonkey Donkey even on three legs has overtaken it but I still doubt this will be served with the Turkey in less than a month's time. What I would say with both of these reviews is that I would encourage you try the different beers. Obviously any beer (or drink for that matter) is an acquired taste and often when you read a review on this site for a hotel or a washing machine it tends to be just good or bad and relevant to everyone so just because I don't rate one doesn't mean you wont.

Incidentally Mary would not have made it to Bethlehem on the Wonkey Donkey on the front of the packaging. History would have been very different!

Compliments any Turkey!

OK this is a first for me. A review of beer. In theory this should be easy. I drink more beer than I go on holidays, use new computer utilities and visit Internet sites all of which I have reviewed. That was the theory the reality turned out to be different. The problem is I have no sense of description - I laugh at Jilly Goolden giving her take on the smells and tastes she finds in wines and pretty much came up with the conclusion she must be making them up. I did do a bit of research and even acquired the Dorling Kindersley guide known simply as "Beer" to help me out. But what its going to come down to is not the colour, the fact I can smell chocolates or old socks in it (neither as it turned out) but what the beer taste likes. For me it could look like day old washing up water and still go down well.

So why did I decide to review this beer. Well first off I set a small challenge. I wanted to review and pick the beer that was going to make it onto the table at Christmas. That's right think of this as the X factor of Christmas beers with just one entrant at the moment. Why just one entrant at the moment? Well this is the first one I have come across so far that passes some simple criteria - it has to be designed for Christmas - be it by packaging or name. Secondly it has to have at least a little bit of bite - it has to be able to overpower the sprouts in taste and in strength has to numb me enough to be able play endless bouts of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit while wearing a ridiculous new jumper. Finally it just has to feel as though its right for a cold winters day - with global warming I may yet be drinking a widget induced Fosters one Christmas Day but hopefully not just yet.

Let me now introduce my first entrant, and as we stand default winner, Rosey Nosey from Batemans. I say default as I have yet to see any other beers that meet the criteria mentioned above - if you have any ideas however poorly linked to Christmas ("Wizard of Oz ale"?) please leave them in my comments. This brew is only available in November and December and is part of a seasonal range from Batemans that brings up three more beers in Spring, Summer and Autumn. Batemans incidentally is an operation run from a site based on an old windmill overlooking the River Steeping in Wainfleet, Lincolnshire. If you have seen their beer on draft it is more than likely to have been the award winning XB or XXXB. You can also if you wish visit the brewery. As I understand it however Batermans no longer have the facilities to do the bottling and this is actually done by Marstons.

I managed to pick up a couple of 500ml bottles of Rosey Nosey at ALDI during there weekly special buys at £1.39 a go. As far as meeting my Christmas criteria goes it ticks all the boxes. The bottle label features a Christmassy scene - a nice looking snowman and reindeers flying past the moon. The dominating picture however is of a dodgy looking Santa Clause who looks like he has spent too much time on a sun bed. You wouldn't let your kids sit on his knee. Coming in at 4.9% the beer should also have the kick I required.

The beer (according to the label at least) is based on English Goldings hops. However the web site description of the beer goes a bit further adding Challenger and American Liberty hops to the mix. The malt is made from Marris Otter Barley.

So to the tasting. Firstly I know that ales are supposed to be stored at a certain temperature. I am going to be honest and admit to serving the beer at "was in the back of my car all day in November" temperature. It seemed about right anyway.

Firstly the pouring. The beer was a nice clean copper colour. The beer was lively without being overly fizzy. A nice head formed in the glass although this did disappear within a minute. That said the beer itself stayed lively enough. Unfortunately despite the claim on the website that it "compliments any Turkey" I have to admit not having one to hand at this time of year and with my girlfriend out it was a birdless tasting experience. Quite how it would compliment a Turkey is questionable anyway - "You look well" perhaps? Whether this would have affected the outcome of my tasting I cannot say.

The company web site states that Rosey Nosey has "A complex, rich tasting beer with plenty of roast malt character and generous hop flavour" and I have to come clean and say it must be complex because I didn't really pick any of that up. What I would say is it was a pleasant enough tasting ale that despite the lack of a decent head certainly didnt have a flat taste to it at anytime. Clearly my palette and sniff is not there yet despite my best efforts to learn. For me it didn't have enough bite for a winters ale either.

I have to say a lot of my drinking is done at home by bottle these days and certainly will be on Christmas Day. In my opinion ales do suffer from bottling and maybe this has been the case with Rosey Nosey. It is also available on draught and I would certainly give it a try and encourage you to do so should it be spotted to compare it to the bottled version. I don't dislike this beer in the least, it's pretty nice but I hope it doesn't win the battle to take its place on the Christmas table. I think the Turkey deserves better.

LogMeIn to the Rescue

Before anything else I should explain that this review is for LogMein RESCUE. LogMeIn produce a number of different products ranging from free basic remote control packages to remote backup solutions. LogMeIn rescue is a pretty expensive feature packed product for providing remote control solutions for internal and external end user support via an internet connection. If you are looking for a free remote tool then this is not for you although I should add LogMeIn do offer a very much cut down free version of this tool called simply LogMeIn Free. All products can be found via logmein.com.

Remote control allows you to view and interact with the desktop that the end user sees to help them out with a problem. If you work as the end user of a computer system you have no doubt been amazed at some point (at least the first time) when a technician took control of your machine and your mouse suddenly started moving around the screen. Magic it wasn't. Plenty of remote control software already exists - Windows itself offers such features as Remote administration/desktop, 3rd party utilities such as Dameware are available and high end tools for use within an organization such as Microsoft SMS. What LogMeIn offers differently is multiple platform control as it works on Windows and Mac machines as well as smart phones and is generally "clientless" in that nothing needs to be installed. The user needs to download and run a file from the internet but does not actually need any software enabled or installed beforehand. Because of the way it uses a secure channel through the internet it can also work through corporate firewalls - as long as you have an internet connection its almost like having a direct link. To say that LogMeIn rescue is just a remote control tool though is missing out a lot of its functionality.

I was wondering how best to review this and think the best way is to give an imaginary scenarios and how they would be solved using LogMeIn rescue.

Let's say an external client rings up and has a problem with a file server that you support because it runs your software system for example. The server is going slow and some strange error messages are on the screen. It doesn't need to be server - it could be a PC, a Mac or even a Blackberry phone for example.

All the server and you need at this point is an Internet connection either directly or through a company proxy and firewall.

At your end you launch the Technicians Console via the LogMeIn website. This is done by opening a web browser and going to www.logmeinrescue.com and logging in with your account. At this point you launch the technician's console which is the front end to most of the work you will do. You then create a new session for the user with a problem. To allow the user to connect you get the option for a PIN code, an e-mail or a link. PIN code is perhaps the easiest. You enter the persons name and a unqie PIN number is created. The user then opens a web browser and enters this PIN ay www.logmein123.com. Alternatively you can send an e-mail link that sends them directly to your session. If you don't have an e-mail client such as Outlook installed it can even be sent via LogMeIn. The final option is a link via the clipboard to be sent via mail or more likely and IM client such as Messenger. Whichever way the client goes in they end with a file that is downloaded and run which is less than 1MB in size. Like I say they just run it - nothing needs to be installed.

Once the user has connected (a matter of a few seconds) all of the console options become available to you. In my example the first thing I would want to do is actually see the server screen. As far as the customer desktop goes you have two options - to launch remote control session (interact with the computer) or launch desktop session (just see what is going on). If you just want to see the screen and the end user doesn't want you just taking over the latter option would be used. However if you want to start doing some work on the machine such as actually moving the mouse and typing on the keyboard you would choose the first. Either way the user will get a message and have to accept that you want to connect - you can't just take control without the other person knowing.
One more important choice at this point is "Restart Applet as System Service". Basically when you connect to a machine you may be connected to a user who does not have "administrative" access to the PC. You may need to log out and log in as a true administrator (that is a person who can make changes to the operating system and software). Because you need to log out of the computer to do this the software needs to install as a "service" and you need to enter the administrator username and password to do this.

Once connected a number of options are available to you aside from just working on the users screen.

Firstly both users have a chat window. Therefore if you aren't speaking over the phone you can chat to discuss the problem the person is having. I find this useful when "talking" to people abroad who don't have English as their first language. It gives them more time to explain their problem and understand what I am suggesting.

You can also work full screen or in a window. You can choose the colour of the screen you are viewing from "Very low (black and white for dial-up connections)" to "High". The lower the quality the quicker the remote control session especially over a slow link. Finally can also set a percentage on the amount of screen you can see and magnify to certain areas if you wish

Other tools while viewing include the following. You can automatically start the Windows "Task Manager". This is just a windows tool for troubleshooting but its useful to be able to launch it directly from LogMeIn.
If you want to point out a couple of things to the user you have the whiteboard and a laser pointer. The whiteboard is for circling or marking around things while the laser pointer is just a dot to point at things. Hours of enjoyment can be spent by the more childish drawing silly freehand drawings on the screen (guilty!).

The next option is screen recording. Lets say this was a new problem you hadn't encountered before and you wanted to record the steps you had taken for perhaps training purposes or to remind yourself in the future how you fixed it. These record to an AVI format file on the technicians computer - A 1 minute recording will be around 2MB in size. You also have an option for screen capture which is just print screens stored in different graphic formats.

It's worth knowing at this point you can also share your own desktop. So if you wanted to show the person at the other end how something should look from your own display you can do this.

As well as this you can invite another technician. So perhaps you want another technician involved to train them on how you are going to fix the problem or want advice from them. The other technician would need another LogMeIn licence to do this however as a second connecting person.

So you have remote controlled the server and realise that a piece of software is outdated and you need to copy it to the remote machine. This is where the "File Manager" becomes useful. Again when you launch this the remote user has to accept your connection so no security is compromised. When you do this you see a 2 pain view of the file system on the local machine (you) and the remote (them). You can then drag files from one computer to the other. The transfer shows up on the chat windows to show what percentage of the transfer has completed. You can also synchronize and replicate folders so they match on both machines.

Another useful tool is "System Info". This is broken down into a number of different tools but all showing information pertaining to the remote system. The "Dashboard" for instance will return the operating system running on the remote machine, the BIOS version, CPU information, memory information, space used on disks as well as the useful top 5 processes running and last 5 errors in the computers event log.
You can also request a full list of the process and services running on the machine, what applications are installed, what drivers are installed, all of the events and particularly useful for solving spyware type problems, what applications are set to run at startup.

So let's suppose now that you have seen the problem (using the remote control tool), have copied the files across (using the file managed) and installed them but now need to do a bit more work on it. Unfortunately the user at the other end needs to go home. If this is the case you wouldn't be able to get on again if you decide to reboot in maybe half an hour as the user would need to login again and accept the connection. The "Reboot" option available to the technician has a number of normal reboots available to them including a useful option to "Request Windows Credentials" before choosing one of these. Clicking this button prompts the user to put there password in and then LogMeIn can automatically enter this when you have rebooted the remote computer.
Another useful reboot option on Windows machines is "Safe Reboot and Reconnect" which starts the machine in safe mode but with networking enabled. This is again useful for fixing spyware and virus problems.

The next option which is a subject in its own right is "Scripts". Let's say the machine has a virus. The technician knows how to solve this problem but it takes him 15 minutes to complete. Another 10 machines then get the same problem. The scripts allow you to create an automated job to carry out certain repeat tasks. Like I say this is a subject in its own right but can have massive time (and monetary) saving benefits.

Two final options are also available "Calling Card" and "History & Notes". With a calling card you can setup the system so that your important client can initiate a session with you rather than the other way round. The "History & Notes" allows a technician to see what work has been done on this machine in the past and if any notes from previous problems have been left.

All in all this is an excellent tool for support professionals. Aside from any of the other tools the remote control is fast and useful in its own right. However it comes at a price. It costs 1188 US$ for a year, 129 US$ for a month and 768 US$ if you want the option to be able to remote control smart phones. For a large IT support centre it still represents excellent value and could through its tools (such as scripts) actually make savings in reality. For smaller companies and home users check out the tools available to you within Windows or try LogMeIn free. Either way if you want to give it a try all of the LogMeIn tools are available on a trial basic via the website.

Reducing the size of Microsoft Office documents - I have the power!

If you are a big user of Microsoft Office you will have no doubt come across large document files especially those that contain graphics. Sometimes this isn’t a problem especially if you have loads of disk space. However problems occur when you find yourself limited by e-mail size sending limits or just the amount of time it takes in space and cost to backup especially if you use one of the growing number of online backup systems that are capped.

To explain the software lets take a real world example with a file I currently have in front of me. I have a Microsoft Word file with a number of pictures that I have pasted into the document. When I pasted a lot of these shots into Word I was lazy and cropped some of them - this is a key point. The file size is now 15MB. Now I cant send this document by certain e-mail services - for instance a lot of online mail providers have things like 10MB limits and at work we have a 5MB mail transfer limit. Certainly most wont allow a 200MB PowerPoint presentation!

I could try zipping the file. With WinZip (a zip compression tool) I managed to get the file size down my 1MB to 14MB. This was still no use to me. I could use something like a file splitter but this is a nuisance. And I could upload the file to a hosting point for someone to pickup, that is presuming they want to download this on perhaps a slow link or a smartphone etc. Needless to say my 15MB isn’t as much of a problem as a 100MB PowerPoint presentation or a 50MB JPEG for instance. Another option would be to use a PDF creator which again can get the file size down significantly. However unless the other person has similar software they can’t edit the file if needed. I guess this is the key point of using NX PowerLite - the person at the other end does not need any extra software and the file format is exactly the same.

So to get around these problems my tool of choice is a utility called NX PowerLite currently at version 4. What NX PowerLite does is "optimise" the document file unlike something like a ZIP format that "compresses" it.

In the example of my Word file I can either right click on it within Windows Explorer and choose to "Optimize with NX PowerLite" or you can launch NX PowerLite and drag and drop files into it. Just a note that you can optimise multiple files at once by selecting multiple files in Windows Explorer or dragging a number of files into the software.

You then choose to optimise the file. You have 4 options as to how you want this optimised - Screen, Print, Mobile Device or Custom. On this note its maybe a good time to explain how NX PowerLite works. Firstly because of these options let’s talk about resolution. When people takes digital photos etc. they tend to forget that the resolution that the photo is taken is a lot higher than is required to print or display. For instance a picture taken on a state of the art camera is wasted on a presentation running from a machine capable of displaying only 256 colours - a bit of a far fetched example because most computers now have a much higher resolution but should give you the idea. One of the first things that NX PowerLite does is just this - it compares the quality of the images within a document and depending on the option you choose adjusts them down as necessary. Secondly it gets rid of wasted bits. Most lazy people like myself will often paste a picture into Word or PowerPoint and then crop the image to the only part required. When saving the document however the entire picture is still stored. You can get round this to a certain extent by using "Compress Image" within Office but it’s not as automatic as using NX PowerLite.

Anyway just to give you the results of my example. By default you end up with two files - your original and a compressed version with the same file name but with (NXPowerLite) appended to the end of the file. Obviously to save space you would want to delete the original when happy with the new smaller file. The 15MB file ended up the following size with the different options. Screen - 397kb, Print 1.3MB and Mobile Device 131kb. I am sure you will agree most smartPhone users wouldn’t thank you for making them download a 15MB file rather than a tiny file than can be seen just as well on there screens. This was just one example. I have compressed massive PowerPoint files to literally nothing.

NX PowerLite works on Windows 2000 or later and can optimise Office 97 documents or later (to actually integrate into the Office toolbar you need Office 2000 or later). If you are a user of Google Docs, StarOffice etc. you can also take advantage of NX PowerLite by saving the documents in Microsoft Office format. It can also integrate into Outlook and Outlook Express to automatically ask if you want to optimise an attachment. As well as Microsoft Office files NX PowerLite also supports the compression of JPEG files using the same methodology. So if you work on a lot of graphic files the software is also worth a look.

You can download a trial copy of NX PowerLite from their website. This allows 20 runs of the software to give you a feel of how well it works. I would certainly recommend giving it a go.

How to become a walking wifi hot spot!

Every now and then I come across a little utility and think how useful could this be and why don’t more people know about? This is what happened to me when I stumbled across WMWifiRouter when doing some research on my Palm Treo Pro Smartphone.

Now my Palm Treo comes with data access - i.e. I can look at Internet sites on my phone and I can also get on the Internet on my laptop using a USB cable to my phone or via Bluetooth. In there own rights this is really useful for me. Because a lot of the phone contracts now have pretty good priced data rates for say 5GB of data downloaded in a month it is actually better value for me to use this than paying an over the top Wifi rate in a hotel. Don’t get me wrong a lot of the time it makes sense to use the free Wifi when available in places such as McDonalds etc. But when you have to pay or are in the middle of nowhere the mobile phone connection comes into its own. When I am on my own with a laptop and mobile phone the USB or Bluetooth can work fine. But what if I have a colleague with me? Or two or three people with me? Or I have more than one computer? This is where WMWifiRouter comes into its own - by sharing the mobile Internet access as Wifi so more than one device/person can use it.

Installation Requirements

First of all WMWifiRouter is only for Windows mobile devices – i.e. the operating system running on your phone. If you need this sort of a facility on a Symbian based smartphone you need something like “JoikuSpot”. WMWifiRouter is supported on Windows Mobile 5 AKU 3.3 or newer or Windows Mobile 6.x. Your smartphone will also need to have a wifi connection (not all do) and have Windows Mobile "Internet Sharing" available - some providers get rid of this built in feature. If you intend having a look at this software you can find a section for "Compatible Devices" on the web site. This not only lists devices (phones) that can share the Internet connection but those that are known to be able to receive it. Because of the way the phone creates ad hoc wireless networks some devices such as certain games consoles cannot connect to it.

Installation

The software can be installed by either downloading an EXE file to your PC and then installing using ActiveSync or directly to the phone as a CAB file. The file is around 2.5MB in size. Either way the actual installation is the same.

The installation itself is via the usual "Set-up Wizard". You are firstly asked which connection you want to "share out". On my Palm Treo I was offered "Contract WAP", "Contract MMS", "Vodafone prepay GPRS" or "Contract Internet". I shared out my contract Internet.

You are then asked what name you want to broadcast your wireless network out as when complete - by default this is WMWifiRouter but you can change this.

Next you are asked to generate a WEP key. Just in case you don’t know WEP is a way of securing your wireless connections. Some people may think that WEP is not good enough these days for security reasons and this software does not support the newer WPA standards. However what I would say is that because of the nature of moving around with a mobile phone and perhaps not using this system all the time it would be pretty hard for someone to stumble across your system looking to "hack" into your network and having enough time to crack the WEP security. But if security is a key concern this is certainly worth noting. And that’s it for the actual installation

Usage

The application is started by selecting "WMWifiRouter" from Programs. You are greeted with a simple display of six icons, one of which is "Exit" with the others being -

3G to Wifi

This is the main reason to use this application as stated above. Starting this will share the Internet connection on your mobile phone as Wifi allowing numerous people to connect at once.

3G to USB and
3G to Bluetooth

Now I have to say I am not totally sure as to what the 3G to USB and Bluetooth options bring to the party. The reason I say this is because I think you can do this using the built in "Internet Sharing" that is available in Windows Mobile. ActiveSync is needed for the USB method to work. Using USB does use less power than Wifi.

Wifi to USB
This allows you to pick up a Wifi signal on your smartphone and then deliver internet access to a laptop with a USB cable. So in other words say you go somewhere with free Wifi you pick this up on your mobile but access the Internet on your laptop. Now if you have Wifi available on your laptop (which most do now) you don’t need to this as far as I can tell.

USB to Wifi
Not to be confused with Wifi to USB above! Best way of looking at this one is with an example. Two or three people with laptops go to an office/hotel that has one wired internet connection which you can connect to on one of the laptops. You then plug that laptop into the smartphone via USB and the smartphone shares this out via Wifi. The other 2 people can then get on the Internet also (presuming there laptops have Wifi cards).

To start your connection you just click on one of the 5 relevant buttons above. Once this has done it takes around 15 seconds in the 3G to wifi connection to become enabled.

Connecting was easy enough. My laptop was given an IP address of 192.168.3.85 with a default gateway of 192.168.3.1 which was the smartphone.

2 buttons are then shown -

A graph which is you click on shows an overview of inbound and outbound traffic as well as wifi and battery usage

A simple red "X" lets you end the session.

Overall

Using this connection from my laptop was good for web browsing. Don’t forget at the end of the day its only going to be as good as the Internet connection on your mobile. Also before sharing out mobile Internet connections you need to make sure you understand how your data contract is working and how much you are allowed to download etc. With data rate prices coming down though will we see the day when you just need a mobile phone in your house for everyone to get on the Internet?

Finally with regard to the mobile phone itself. What I did notice is that battery consumption of my smartphone went down pretty quick and the phone certainly got warmer. If using for any length of time you would need your mobile plugged into power I think. I should also add that the network is not dropped if you are talking on the phone - quite an important point! The software is available on a 30 day trial from the web site so if anything in this review sounds useful it certainly worth giving it a try.

Do I need a firewall? It's up to you with Comodo Firewall Pro

Do I really need to install a software firewall and if so which one do I need? This was the question I was asking myself after I stumbled across an article showing how well (or not in the case of many) certain virus, spyware and malware protection packages where performing. Of course with a bit of doomsday marketing everyone may presume they do. And if I do need some extra protection which product should I use and would I need to pay for it?

I will try and answer the question to do I (you) need a software firewall first. Then take a look at a specific package - in this case Comodo Firewall.

First off a very quick explanation of what a firewall is and does. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to let you know where the term originally came from. A firewall was a brick wall built between two buildings to stop fire spreading from one to the other. Take this analogy as one house been your home computer and network and the other house the Internet or other outside network. Anything you don't want is blocked by the firewall.

So do you actually need one? Obviously different circumstances exist and I will try and explain these. Firstly let me explain my current configuration and compare that to another example. On my laptop at home I run a well known anti-virus package that I keep updated, a well known spyware/malware protection package and I keep my Windows updates pretty much up to date. As well as this I do regular backups of both my system and my data. On top of this I run this behind a NetGear router that also includes a built in firewall (see my other review). The Windows firewall built into Windows XP is also switched on.

Now lets look at another example - someone who may well be running all of the above but has a broadband "modem" (i.e. has no built in firewall) and travels regularly connecting to WIFI in various locations and cable connections in different offices. In the modem instance they are literally attached to the internet directly and when at other locations may well trust the connection but they cannot be guaranteed to be safe.

In my case I have to say I am not convinced that I would need an extra software firewall. In the second example I think there is certainly a case of installing a 3rd party firewall. You may well ask why not install one anyway - it wont harm so put it on even if you don't think you need it? Well firstly you may well have to pay for the firewall (although in the case of my review you can get this version free). Secondly system performance. Any extra software makes the system more cumbersome and slow - just try a machine without any anti-virus, spyware protection installed to see how fast it can actually go. And finally software firewalls have generally been intrusive - its very much down to often inexperienced users to decide if something is valid to be allowed to connect to or not. Its out of the scope of this review to really help you decide if you do need a software firewall or not - a true security expert would be able to give you plenty of reasons to have one, arguing for instance that a hardware firewall could fail leaving you unprotected, telling you not to rely on the built in Windows XP firewall because it doesn't protect outbound connections etc. What I would say is try this product if in doubt. If you do find it hard to understand, intrusive or whatever you can easily uninstall it. What I would also recommend is trying an online service such as Security Space to see how vulnerable you currently are to help you decide.

After checking a number of other reviews for free firewall software and trying a couple of options I decided to fully test out Comodo Firewall. First of all you may ask if this application is any good why would it be free, there must be a catch? Basically Comodo make security certificates and so are trying to build brand awareness. One of the ways of doing this is putting out good quality free security software such as this firewall and anti-virus software.

The software is just under 80MB to download and comes bundled as part of the Comodo Internet Security package - you can also install the anti-virus module if you wish. As part of this review I didn't as I already have a virus solution I am happy with.

During the install you are asked a few questions. Firstly whether you want -

Firewall only
Firewall with optimum proactive defense
Firewall with maximum proactive defense+

This is quite an important question and one that I don't think is well explained during the installation. What it boils down to however is really how intrusive you want the system to be - i.e. how much do you want to be asked about. The default is Firewall with Optimum Proactive Defense. This can be changed once you have the software up and running.

Next you are asked if you would like to join the "Threatcast community". The default is yes and I will explain this option later. Again you can change this within the application if you decide to later.

You are then asked if you want to use the Comodo secure DNS servers or the your current DNS server (the default). DNS is the mechanism of resolving a host name such as www.yourcompany.com to a computer understandable address on the Internet. Using the Comodo DNS server in theory this has a number of advantages over normal DNS servers that may suffer from poisoning attacks (that is sending you to the wrong address). It also resolves some well known misspelled domain names to the correct location. However unless you are confident of the implications of not using your normal DNS it's probably better to stick with the default. Interestingly I did read on a some forums that the Comodo DNS feature did cause problems for some people.

Finally by default the installation will scan for already present malware. This is a good idea - no point trying to run any sort of security on an already infected computer.

So after installation what happens when you want to install something or make your first connection to the Internet with the likes of Skype, Spotify, instant messaging etc.? Well one of two things can kick in - either the Firewall or Defense+.

The firewall is the actual protection of inbound and outbound network connections. For example should you be able to receive music from Spotify or a make a call on Skype. Defense+ is something different. What Defense+ is protecting against is not the inbound/outbound network connections but what is getting written to your file system (i.e. hard disk), windows registry or memory. For instance when something like Firefox (a well known web browser) gets updated it needs to write to the hard disk to install new files.

As an example I started Skype - a valid application - that I do wanted to access the Internet to make a phone call. The Firewall popped up asking me what I wanted to do with this connection. One useful early indicator is the colour coded warning of yellow, orange or red dependent on potential risk factor. I was prompted with two pieces of information. Firstly potential "Secutiry Considerations" and because I had installed it a "ThreatCast Rating". The "Security Considerations" try and give an as un-technical explanation as they can about the implications of allowing this connection. However I have to say as with all software firewalls this is one of the major problems - it is very hard to explain to a non technical person what is actually going on. In theory then the "ThreatCast Rating" is a really good idea. It basically tells you what other people have decided to do when prompted with this information - in the example of Skype 95% of users thought it was OK. However I do have slight doubts on this too - I think of it as a bit like "Ask the audience" in "Who wants to be a millionaire" - will they always be right? At this point you basically have to choose whether to Allow or Block the request.

The Defense+ follows along the same lines exactly. The "Security Consideration" is slightly different in that it will tell exactly what resource - files on your hard disk, the registry or memory is being accessed. Again you can either Allow or Block the request. You may think what is the point of this anyway if I have virus or spyware protection? What you have to remember is that most anti-virus packages are only as good as the updates they get because somebody has had a new virus, reported it and new protection has been added to the update. With this you can block any suspicious activity.

Needless to say the product can be a lot more complicated than this. Within the application you can see what connections you have open, create special network zones and as I said within the set-up routine decide how intrusive (that is how often you want to be informed) that "something is happening on my system". The system has a good summary section which is pretty easy to understand - telling you how many potential intrusion events have been blocked and what sort of traffic has been running between yourself and the Internet.

I hope you have found this review useful. It's hard to strike a balance between something people would read and getting even more technical. I tried to write the review somewhere in the middle. I have to say I have been pretty impressed with the Comodo Firewall. It scores highly in tests trying to break through software firewalls and does its best to try and explain in plain English what it is defending you against. That said it certainly doesn't lend itself to very non technical users but this is just the nature the complications of software firewalls do bring. And finally as I said initially - not everybody needs or wants this extra protection.

X marks the site!

One of the biggest annoyances with my very frequent use of use Internet Explorer favourites and Firefox bookmarks is the backing up and synchronizing of these items. Just in case you are totally new to web browsers I will quickly explain what these are - when you visit a site that you want to keep a record of you add them to our favourites/bookmarks depending on which web browser you use. I own a couple of computers at home and use a couple of computers at work and on these I have both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Until I came across Xmarks it was always a case of eight (one on each web browser remember) very different lists of my favourite sites and ones I wanted to remember to visit in the future.

Not only did I have a problem with all these different lists, each time I replaced my computers or had a full system crash I had nearly always forgotten to back these up. Sometimes I actually remembered to use the File, Import Export option in Internet Explorer but again it didn't take long to have a mix of different versions.

I tried using "Delicious" for some time and maybe this is worth a review sometime but basically I didn't get along with it (although for reference you can import "Delicious" saved bookmarks). I then stumbled across an add-in for Firefox called "Foxmarks". At the time this synchronization tool was only available for Firefox but was re-launched this year as "Xmarks" with added support for Internet Explorer and Safari on the Mac. Millions of people have now downloaded and used this tool.
As I have said the main point of Xmarks is to be able to synchronize your bookmarks (or favourites in Internet Explorer) between multiple computers and web browsers. An added feature of Xmarks in Firefox (but not in IE and Safari) is the synchronization of stored user name and passwords. Also included is "Site Suggestions" and "Smarter Search" Again I will cover this in the review.

Firstly one of the key differences with Xmarks for Firefox and Internet Explorer is the feel of the utility. Xmarks for Internet Explorer looks and feels more like a Windows service. Anytime you access Xmarks from within Firefox you are doing it from within the browser. The Internet Explorer icon however is accessed from the system tray within Windows itself. But either way it works just as well.

So let's take a look at how this works when installed. The first thing to do is synchronize one of your browsers to the Xmarks server on the Internet. A point here is that you can actually host your own internal Xmarks server. This may be useful to companies who want to sync browsers without connecting to or trusting the Internet. You then have a choice of whether you want to sync to the server, from the server or merge the two together. Eventually after running this process on each of your computers or web browser you will get a fully synched version of your bookmarks on each machine. If you may want to organize your bookmarks you can also do this centrally via a web browser by logging into the Xmarks site. So you can still get to your bookmarks even if you are on somebody else's computer or in an Internet Cafe for instance.

One useful feature is also to create profiles with your bookmarks as a subset. For instance you may not want all of your work and home bookmarks to be mixed and available on all computers and browsers. Xmarks comes with predefined "Work" and "Home" profiles so you just choose which sites you want in these and only sync this part to the computer. Another predefined profile "mobile.foxmarks.com" is used and optimised for mobile phones.

You can actually share your bookmarks by posting them to a web page. Again this can be done through the Xmarks web site.

So really that's its for the synchronization. It really is quite simple. If that wasn't good enough already though Xmarks does include some extra features. Firstly there is "Smarter Search" - this allows you to get some basic information about a site before opening it. For instance when you do a Google search an you get an icon next to the result for each site that when clicked shows you a basic screen shot from the site, reviews of the site and where it is ranked in different categories.

A couple of other features seem to be included in the Firefox version only at the moment.

When you open a site in Firefox with Xmarks installed you also have an option to "Get Site Info". This gives you a basic description of the site and also gives you its top 5 suggestions for similar sites - for instance going on Facebook suggested Twitter, MySpace etc. This is actually really useful for discovering new sites.

The final and perhaps most useful extra tool and again only available in Firefox is the synchronization of passwords. I should add actually that the Internet Explorer version of Xmarks has this as "coming soon". If you use Firefox you will know that when you log into a web site that requires a username and password you get an option to save this information. If you look in Tools, Options, Security, Save Passwords.. you will see this information. What Xmarks can do is synchronize this between your different computers. To keep this secure you not only need to log into Xmarks but create a PIN to upload/download the passwords. This is then 256 bit encrypted for security. Again I find this a really useful tool and look forward to it working within Internet Explorer too.

So that's it really. I have to say Xmarks does exactly what it promises and a little bit more and has certainly made my multiple computer/browser life much easier.

Utilities and commands to automate the Windows 2003 Server ASR backup

In my previous Blog posting I talked about the theory in automating a Windows 2003 Server backup. Let's now look at the actual utilities and commands to make this possible. I will run through the command in the actual order I use them in a batch file. I would in fact run through these commands outside of a batch file first to check each command runs successfully on your server. Links to the utilities used can be found at the end of the Blog.

The first utility we need it Devcon. This is Microsoft command line utility that can be used instead of Device Manager. What we are going to do is disable the physical floppy disk device using this utility. Once you have Devcon installed first issue this command which should list any of your devices with the word "floppy" in it –

DEVCON find *floppy*

What this should do is return some sort of floppy disk drive if you have one installed. To disable this device I then use

DEVCON disable *floppy*

If you check Windows Explorer or Device Manager you should now find the floppy disk drive is missing/disabled.

The next utility I use is "Virtual Floppy Drive". Once this is installed I can use the "VFD" command to manipulate the virtual floppy disk drive. First I issue the following two commands –


VFD start
VFD open /force

This starts the virtual floppy and "opens" a blank 3.5" 1.44MB disk into it

Next we start the actual backup. Like I said previously I store the backups on an attached USB device that is shared. This way I already have the backup ready on a removable device. So the command issued here is quite simple –


ntbackup asrbackup /j "ASR" /f \\SERVERHOSTINGTHEUSBDEVICE\ASR$\%computername%\asr.bkf

Just running through the above the "asrbackup" just tells ntbackup that we are running an ASR backup. The /j "ASR" just gives the backup "job" a name which is useful for checking log files. The /f just says we are backing up to a file. Within the file location I add the %computername% so that I get a structure of server names on my USB device.

Once the ASR backup has finished we end up with some key files on the virtual floppy disk. So I then issue a COPY command of the floppy disk files to a subdirectory of the backup called FLOPPY. For reference it's also worth knowing you can retrieve these important files from the backup file itself. If you had to do this you open the backup file in ntbackup and open the second listed drive C. In there you will see a Windows directory and then a repair directory. You can navigate to the files within this directory and restore from there to a floppy disk.

Having copied the files from the floppy I can stop the virtual floppy disk drive. This is done using the following command –

VFD /stop /force

And once the virtual floppy disk has been stopped when can enable the physical floppy disk drive using

DEVCON enable *floppy*

So that's it really. The only additional thing is to schedule the task using the built in Windows scheduler. Just one thing to remember here and it relates to checking the backup log file. To open a log file you can open "ntbackup" and then choose Tools, Report. Just remember that if you create the scheduled task to run under a separate username the logs are stored under that user's profile. And finally this system should work exactly the same way on Windows XP.

The following utilities were used -

The utility can be downloaded from the following location -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272

Virtual Floppy Drive -
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

If you do have any comments or a better way of automating this system please post your comments.

The theory of automating the ASR backup on a Windows 2003 Server

OK so if you have read my previous Blog post you will know how handy it is to keep a copy of an ASR backup. However at this point we have been looking at this as a manual process by starting the "ntbackup" application and running the ASR Wizard. So first of all in this Blog I am going to explain some of the problems associated with trying to automate this process and at a high level look at ways of getting round the problems. In a follow up Blog I will post the actual technicalities of getting the automated method to work.

So let's look at the first problem which is telling the Windows Backup Utility from a command line to run an ASR backup with user intervention. I am sure you will know but running "ntbackup /?" will show a list of parameters available from the command line. What isn't documented however is "ntbackup asrbackup" command. With this one command we have solved the first hurdle of automating the backup.

The second and perhaps most complex issue however is that of the floppy disk. Let's consider first the problematic scenario in that the server has no floppy disk. If we manually ran the ASR backup this wouldn't actually be a problem as we could just cancel out when prompted for a floppy disk at the end of the backup. The next problem is if the server actually does have a floppy disk drive. Most administrators would not want to leave a floppy disk in the drive for various reasons not least if the server rebooted and the boot order was set to start from a floppy disk. Before explaining how I get round these two issues I will point out one more thing. As far as these instructions go at the moment you don't need a floppy disk drive on the server to create the backup. However if your machine does not have a physical floppy disk drive you will need a USB floppy drive during the recovery operation. In a future Blog I intend to cover any potential methods of getting round this problem and would like to hear from people who have worked out a way round this problem. At the moment I keep one USB drive for all of the machines with no floppy drive.

So to address the first problem I use some virtual floppy disk drive software. This mounts a virtual drive A: that the backup can write to at the end of the process.

Second on machines with a physical floppy disk drive I also use the virtual floppy drive. However before doing this I disable the physical floppy disk drive using the Microsoft DEVCON utility. When the ASR backup has finished I enable the physical device.

And finally in this stage the actual ASR backup job is run using the built in Windows scheduler.

Before stopping the virtual floppy disk drive I copy the contents from it to a subdirectory of the backup. This saves me having to extract the files needed for the floppy disk from the actual backup file.

As for the storage of the ASR backups I use a network attached USB device that is shared from a machine. This way I don't even need to copy the backup when I need to recover a system, its already on a device I can attach to the damaged machine.

So that's it in theory. In my next Blog post I will put this together showing which utilities and commands I actually use. If you have any comments or ideas on how this process can be improved on please let me know via the comments section.

Introduction to ASR

Welcome to my new Blog that covers information on PC and Server imaging and recovery using a variety of systems including Ghost, Microsoft's built in Automated System Recovery (ASR), Remote Installation Services (RIS) and Windows Deployment Services amongst others.

In my first blog I am going to look at the somewhat underrated, somewhat under documented but very powerful ASR available in Windows XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server. I shall follow that with an overview of automating this process with a scheduled task - not as easy as it sounds!

OK so let's start with a look at what ASR is. I am not going to spend ages on this. At the end of the day the basics of ASR are well documented on the web by Microsoft amongst others. The first basic thing you should know is that ASR is built into the bundled Windows Backup Utility ("ntbackup"). The system is started using the "Automated System Recovery Wizard". After running the wizard you end up with two things - an actual backup in a location specified and a floppy disk that contains a couple of key files that identifies specific information about your system.

Secondly ASR is only interested in the recovery of your system partition (i.e. where Windows is installed) of your PC or server. For instance if you have a machine with drives C, D and E and your hard disk fails only drive C is going to be recovered if that's where your Windows system is installed. So ASR is not a replacement for your normal backup procedures and merely compliments it. On such a system you would restore using ASR and then restore any data on the D and E partitions using your normal backup software.

The next question is what does actually get backed up and restored using ASR? System state data which includes the likes of the registry, boot files and IIS Metadirectory (if Internet Information Server is installed) amongst others and services are all recovered. ASR documentation seems to imply that "data" does not get backed up and restored during this process. This may be referring to data as in the example above if its stored on other partitions. However in my experiments I have always found data that was stored on the system partition is backed up and recovered.

You should remember that recovering from an ASR backup is a last resort method of recovering your system. You should try using methods such as safe mode and last known good configuration before resorting to the ASR method.

To recover the system using ASR you boot from your operating source CD and then press F2 when prompted. You will be asked for the floppy disk created above and finally the location of the backup file. The floppy disk is vital this process but if you have lost it don't worry. This can be created again from the actual backup and I will cover this in the next section when we automate this process.

If you would like to comment on what you have found gets recovered and what doesn't and what problems you have found exist with the ASR process it would be great to hear from you. I will update the blog when possible from such comments.