A few months ago I gave a tryout to a free inventory management tool called Spiceworks. I had always been hesitant trying out freeware but it was worth a look at and since then I haven’t looked back. While it is not perfect (I still wish it had AD integration) you can’t beat it for the price, especially in today’s dwindling IT budgets. Well I just stumbled upon another tool (thanks 4sysops) called Spotlight on Windows. This looks like a dream tool to manage your system’s health, monitor Event Logs, etc. I hope this is as good as...

As I am planning out my 2009 data-center implementation at my job I learned that Dell and HP are going to be releasing their servers with VMWare ESX 3i “embedded” in early April for Dell and March 31, 2008 for HP. For those considering virtualized environments and are considering diskless servers, this might be the way to go!

For almost 17 months my household had enjoyed a 40 hour Series 2 TiVo with almost no problems at all, but for May and June the unit was progressively dying, what was once the occasional artifacts became “Dark Screens of Infinite Pause”. Since then we had contemplated what its replacement unit would be. After moving to NY, we decided to give the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD a test spin. Preface This article was originally two articles (published on 07/19/2005 and 11/16/2005) first praising the unit and then scaling back that praise. I have decided to combine both articles into this single...