Out of all the Microsoft products, I am the biggest fan of Exchange Server. Exchange is a messaging and collaborative technology, developed by Microsoft and its latest incarnation, Microsoft Exchange 2007, works beautifully with the entire range of Office Suite. Microsoft Exchange also features the "Direct Push" technology, wherein email and other items are synced in real time on Windows Mobile devices. In other words, Exchange is a truly unique product and there are practically no direct competitors to it in the market.

Exchange is mostly targetted at corporate environments, however, its feature set is best suited for any average user, due to the seamless integration between the client and the server portions, intuitive UI and support for various kinds of access (desktop client, web, mobile). There are various other reasons, and I will let this amazing blog post do the explanation. Since it is practically impossible for a home user to run an Exchange server environment due to hardware, bandwidth and licensing cost constraints, a whole bunch of companies offer, what is known as "Hosted Exchange" environment. I personally run an Exchange server on a virtualised environment, mainly for test and learning purposes, however, I am looking into switching to a hosted environment. There are many players out there, but I am looking at Sherweb's single-user friendly offer. If I do end up trying them out, I will put up a future blog post detailing my experiences.

My trust in Dell laptops just received a significant boost after reading the following story.

Medium rare laptop
http://www.luckywhitegirl.com/2005/11/medium_rare_ele.html

For a $600 device, I should be able to have my own custom ringtones on my iPhone. Apparently Steve Jobs and his minions dont think so. I remember back in the days I had a Nokia 5110i and I could have my own custom ringtones in that too. This is about 6-7 years ago. So some people figured out how to put their custom ringtone in their iPhone...turns out you have to get the phone in a bootloader like stage and then push the files in. I'd say thats really backwards. Anyhow, those interested can check out the full process here.

Thank goodness for Windows Mobile. I love my QTEK 8300.

This comes a bit late, but i wanted to do full justice to this blog post and hence took my sweet time  to write it out. Mind you, I am not complainging about anything, just putting forward my experiences with Dell customer support as an owner of a brand new >$2000 top of the line XPS laptop computer.

My brand new machine shipped with Windows Vista Home premium alongwith all the other useless crapware that comes installed with every new Dell, Toshiba, Sony etc. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to re-format and install Windows Vista Ultimate to have the best flavour of Windows on my machine for bragging rights. The installation of Windows went flawlessly and within half an hour I had my machine up and running with all drivers etc installed. The only missing component was the Dell truemobile 355 bluetooth module. It would not show up under task manager, even with a yellow icon. There are no hardware switches for it on the machine, so it was definitely not turned off. I tried to run the driver setup for the bluetooth module but it would not proceed, saying that I did not have a bluetooth module or its not turned on. Tried every way I could think of to get the bluetooth action going, but no go. Alright, so i decided it was time to use my 1 year Dell XPS completecare warranty support.

I call the support number and get connected in no time to a human. After performing a few basic troubleshooting steps, he decided to remote into my machine. Upon remoting into my machine, the support rep checked the device manager and then launched the services window. He then started to turn on or change the startup type of various random services like RPC, remote registry etc etc to 'automatic'. Curious, I asked him why he was doing that and I was told that something might be dependant on these services. 'Garbage' was what was going on in my mind. After a few minutes, he transferred me to L2 support.

The L2 support rep also tried the same basic steps and then decided to remote into my machine just like the previous rep. same steps again and he had no clue why my bluetooth module would not show up. So he put me on hold and went to ask his supervisor on his next course of action. On returning back, he asked me if my version of Windows was retail or OEM. On hearing that it was a reatil version of Windows Vista, he prompty told me that they do not support any retail version of any OS. Valid point, but what came up next was funny. He suggested to me that returning back to the OEM version of Windows Vista Home Premium which shipped with my machine might help since the drivers in that version might be compatible with the bluetooth module. I felt I was wasting my time here and so I pretended to take his suggestion and politely bid him good-bye. It was 4 am so I decided to go to bed.

Next morning, after a lot of searching, I discovered this issue was common on Dell forums and quite a few users had faced this issue. One of the users suggested extracting the driver setup files and run a forced setup by running a different file in the directory structure. This gets the driver installed and then it is able to switch the bluetooth radio on. The underlying problem was that the bluetooth module is controlled by software and once it gets switched off internally, there is no way to switch it on without the specific dell drivers. On the flip side, the software would not install if the module is switched off internally. There is no hardware switch so this effectively turns this issue into a catch-22 scenario. However, my problem is resolved for now, but Dell should probably publish a KB article about this or many other users will face similar issues. Thats it for now.

Lets talk about something other than Vista for a change. Lets talk about something free. How about free Wi-Fi access and a free Wi-Fi router ? Sometime ago, I signed up with FON for a free wi-fi router. FON's mission is to create the biggest free wi-fi network on the planet. Now this doesnt quite make sense does it ? Well, FON will send you a free router but in exchange they ask you to share your broadband with the public. And their routers are designed such that they have 2 SSIDs, one for your private use and one for the public. So today I received the free router in mail (shipping is also free guys). Words cant do justice to this sweet little deal, so here are the pictures. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section and I will try my best to answer them in a separate blog post. Enjoy !