servers

Few PC glitches are more frustrating and more difficult to troubleshoot than your e-mail program failing to connect to a mail server. Recently, a family member told me about the enervating problems he experienced trying to figure out why his new Vista notebook wouldn't link to his office's mail server.

"I have Office 2007. Our firm uses Exchange Server 2003. I was having the damnedest time getting Outlook on my new laptop to sync with the server away from the office. I was at this for hours and hours reading through a bunch of 'fixes' until I … Read more

Tom and Rafe report on how gear works in the real world, including Windows Home Server, the iPhone, and the Canon S90.

Microsoft announced Wednesday that it is ready with Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, a product that lets schools run a classroom full of systems using just a single computer.

Based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Multipoint allows up to 10 different set-ups, each with their own keyboard, mouse, and monitor to run from a single server.

"We heard clearly from our customers in education that to help fulfill the amazing promise of technology in the classroom, they needed access to affordable computing that was easy to manage and use," Microsoft vice president Anthony Salcito said in a statement.

Microsoft … Read more

Apple has updated a few knowledge base articles that address problems with the Aperture 3 update, disc-burning issues with iDVD, reinstalling the Server Diagnostics utilities on the Mac Mini server, and managing noises in newer iMac models.… Read more

So, you just cannot make up your mind about what kind of RAID configuration you need and how many hard drives your NAS server should have. Synology, the vendor of multiple CNET Editors' Choice-winning NAS servers, has a solution for you.

The company announced Friday its first scalable NAS server, the DiskStation DS710+. The new NAS server starts out with only two bays for two SATA hard drives, but later on can be scaled up to have seven bays. The NAS server is designed to support multiple traditional RAID configurations.

Synology claims that the DS710+ will also come with Synology … Read more

Apple and Microsoft are being sued for patent infringement, according to a report on AppleInsider on Thursday.

The patent in question, entitled "Apparatus, method and a computer readable medium for generating media packets," was awarded to Emblaze, who filed for the patent in 2002.

The patent describes "a method for generating media packets, the method comprising the steps of: providing at a storage unit packet boundary information representative of locations of potential packet boundaries within media objects; said packet boundary information facilitating generation of packets of varying sizes; wherein said packet boundary information comprises intra access unit … Read more

IBM on Monday is launching its long-anticipated Power7 processor and systems based on the chip.

The processor is a big step for IBM, integrating eight processing cores--four times the number of cores in the prior-generation Power6--in one chip package, with each core capable of executing four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors--systems that Power7 will compete with--typically have two threads per processing core and contain four cores.

Blg Blue has already tipped its hand on the Power7 chip in discussions about its upcoming Blue Water supercomputer. … Read more

The Transaction Processing Performance Council has released a new benchmark called TPC-Energy for measuring how much work computers get done for a given amount of energy.

The move reflects the growing concern with power efficiency given environmental issues such as carbon footprint and financial issues involving the cost of electricity for running computers and cooling data centers.

The group already has developed a variety of server benchmarks: TPC-C and the newer TPC-E for database performance and TPC-H for data warehouse performance. TPC-Energy in effect does a little extra math on those tests to yield a "watts per performance" … Read more

Most of the tech products you buy are disposable.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average cell phone life span is 18 months. One hundred and twenty five million phones are discarded every year, resulting in more than 65,000 tons of waste. A lot of folks get a new computer every few years.

Bought a new home theater receiver last year? Great, but its HDMI 1.3 connection is about to be superceded by HDMI 1.4. That won't reduce the receiver's usability, at least in the near term, but it's unlikely you'll want to keep it around for the long run.

Audio Research's CD8 Reference player was designed to last a long, long time. It's also one of the least "digital"-sounding CD players I've ever used. That sort of statement is usually followed by something like, "CDs now sound a lot more like LPs." That's not the case here, but the CD8 is considerably more musical than other state-of-the-art CD players. You can read my complete review on the Home Entertainment Web Site.

Audio Research's CD8 Reference player uses vacuum tubes to amplify the converted-to-analog signals. That's hardly a new idea, as designers started sticking tubes in CD players in the 1980s. But most of those players used just a pair of tubes, typically as a "buffer" output stage. The CD8's tubes are configured much as they are in Audio Research's very best stereo preamplifier, the Reference Pre ($12,000). Measuring an imposing 19 inches long by 5.25 inches high by 15.3 inches wide, the CD8 is the size of a pretty serious power amplifier.

The CD8 doesn't have a disc-loading drawer; the drive mechanism is located under a sliding door on the top panel. Disc loading involves placing a small magnetic clamp on the disc. I like the "hands-on" approach, maybe because it's more like playing an LP.… Read more