Month: May 2009

Central IT services once again are useless with their choice of software and as such our use of Exchange server and Outlook has caused much important email to go wandering. It took the input of Zeyn to tell me that although I have “all” of my central email forwarded to the department, this did not include anything sent from within the university as this would get redirected to my adf email address and therefore end up in an unchecked and unloved Microsoft inbox.

After finding all my missing email from months back and having to make rushed decisions about things I had months to contemplate I decided to try and sort out the forwarding debacle. Central support were about as useful as their software and therefore I took it upon myself. I researched OWA and found that I could set rules. I tried to do this, but it is only supported on the “enhanced version” which only runs on IE6 or above! This made this worse as I then had to try and find a Windows machine and battle with the never-before-configured IE7. Finally I made the rule, with a very unintuitive interface, and hey-presto it *might* work. Since I am not in the central university I can’t actually send myself an email to try it out since all external mail was being forwarded anyway.

So we might know at some indefinite time in the future if it has worked, or not because I may not get sent another email through that route, and if I were I may not know.

Microsoft are “giving away” Windows 7 to people. On the whole a good business strategy, but terrible for all those poor people who think it would be a good idea to “upgrade” for “free” (as in beer).

For starters, Microsoft will just be using you as slave labour to find all the bugs so they don’t need to pay internal testers as they should do. The benefit of which will be for their commercial product, and not something you will be able to use indefinitely for your time and frustration. Then after they’ve had their fill of you the product will be released and your “free” license will be revoked, forcing every user to stump up full retail price otherwise format their system in order to go back since we are all aware that “downgrading” is not allowed.

If you do insist on installing Windows (at all) or even Windows 7, please make sure it’s not on a machine which you value your data on, otherwise you will be charged a nice fee to retrieve it in a years time.