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I’m still trying new things with the Mini 9. I now have an image file that I can restore to the Mini which has my base install after running sysprep. The problem I have is storage space – the SSD isn’t quite big enough.

Flush with my success earlier in getting apps installed on the SD card now mounted as ‘c:\SD Program Files’ I installed a few things. I then hit a snag. When you install apps using an MSI, the installation files get cached by Windows Installer. Steadily, c:\windows\installer gets bigger and bigger, so whilst my apps were no longer taking up space, the install files were (and some of those are quite large).

I’ve been chipping away at this for a while now today, and I’ve learned a few things on the way: When Vista says it suggests installing the battery drivers for the system, don’t. The zip file it suggested I install broke power management. Patch the system fully as an admin user before logging in as a restricted user. It will save you hours of time. Sysinternals Diskmon doesn’t work with Vista - you need to run it as admin, and that certainly isn’t an option for my restricted users. Vista when hibernating just shows a black screen. That’s not very helpful the first time you try it, on a silent machine with no disk activity lights at all. think Vista takes longer to hibernate and come back from hibernation than XP, although coming back from sleep is much quicker than it’s older sibling. Overall, I’m still happy. I have Vista, Office 2007 and Live Writer and 3.5Gb of disk space free. With no serious hacking the Dell runs at around 50% memory usage witrh a browser and live writer running. I can live with that. Battery life appears OK. It’s 10:30 and I’ve been using the Dell since 8pm, thrashing the disk (as much as there is one) and the wi-fi, and I’m at 38% battery. That puts me on track for about four hours or so and I can live with that.

Our second Mini 9 arrived in the office today. This one is for Andy and myself to use whilst out of the office. Richard has successfully upgraded his to XP Professional, so we had to try to push the bar out a little further – we’re running Vista Business.

You can’t say that things never change. I nipped out to Tesco last night for a few bits of shopping – you know, some beer, spices for cooking, etc – and came back with an Acer Aspire One. As you do…

Colour me impressed. I managed well over four hours’ battery life today and found the Mini 9 a joy to use. I have encountered a snag, however, and it wasn’t one that I expected.

I’m down in London tomorrow, and rather than lug my laptop on the train I’ve borrowed Richard’s shiny new Mini 9. Overall, I’m quite impressed with it. I’m still not sure about the keyboard, even after a couple of hours typing away – the keys are small and some of them are smaller still, which makes typing an interesting experience. However, I’m sure I would get used to it with time. The thing is, a netbook is not aimed at being your everyday machine, so does a quirky keyboard become a barrier to use if that use is intermittent?

You wait around for ages and then two come along, all at once! No sooner have I downloaded IE8 beta 2 than Google announce Chrome! I’ve been using IE8 for a few days and I’m quite impressed. I’ve just downloaded Chrome and I have to say, it’s a darn good browser. The feature I most wanted from any tab-based browser and one I’ve mentioned before in the context of IE is present in Chrome - tabs you can drag between windows.

As you may remember from my earlier post and subsequent follow-up, we have been seeing an issue related to workflows and the Workflow History list in SharePoint 2007. As I’ve already mentioned, the case is with Microsoft and I also said that I would post updates as new information arrived. Today, more detail has emerged and, as promised, I am sharing.

As part of a customer project I needed to create a Netware environment for testing. It’s been a little while since I did any netware management and I quite enjoyed it. I did, however, encounter a couple of gotchas which I thought I’d write up for the greater good.

Sometime ago we noticed an issue with My Tasks in Project Server. Certain users were unable to access My Tasks at all - they simply got a SharePoint error page.

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider.

I’m not certain how many of you will find this useful, but I had a question about configuring the Touch Diamond to talk to Exchange which I regrettably failed to notice.

My apologies to Craig, who posted a comment to my earlier post about our FBA problems and I didn’t notice until today. To update you all on the situation, the fault is still with Microsoft and I have not yet received a hotfix.

I said I’d post again once I’d had the Diamond a little while. It’s now been two weeks and I can honestly say I’m completely happy with it. Battery life for me is fine - I charge it about every three days and it chugs along with exchange push pretty much constantly. I am quite comfortable with the soft keyboard and I can honestly say I haven’t noticed any issues with the speed of the device either.

I posted last week about a couple of issues we were experiencing with SharePoint. I made some traction on the Workflow History issue at the end of last week and the revelation was pretty far-reaching, so I’m posting again.

In my last post about the Diamond I said I would let you know what the battery life is. I therefore carefully refrained from giving it any charge over the weekend, even when connected to my PC.

That might sound like a strange thing to say, but when my shiny new Touch Diamond, which I picked up from Orange this week, has no Orange branding or customisation of the UI. I hadn’t really noticed that until I went into the manual, where the screenshots are totally different from my phone. I was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong with the setup process, when I saw this thread at XDA-Developers.

Richard’s little mobile blogging app is nice, but he isn’t that responsive to user requests (ie, mine!) so I thought I would see if anything else was out there. Sadly, the answer appears to be ’not really’ However, I did come across Diarist, from Kevin Daly. Perhaps not surprisingly I am using it now. I must say that two thumb typing on the diamond keyboard is not bad, although nowhere near as fast as the real keyboard on the tytn. So is diarist better than blogwriter? Well, it’s easier to add links and images… Still no real formatting support though, which is a shame. Try it for yourself.

Thanks to the advanced notice from Tracy and Matt’s blog, I picked up my HTC Touch Diamond yesterday from the Orange Store and it’s great! ‘But wait!’ I hear you cry, ‘didn’t he go on about the experia x1 and how he wanted one?’