Menu - Settings - Connectivity - Mobile Networks - "GSM/3G Networks"
Change the option from "GSM and 3G" to "GSM Only".

The 3G icon will then disappear from your standby screen. You can always switch this back when needed or if all of your friends suddenly go out and buy video phones!

Instead of a long drawn out review, I just want to give a quick summary of this book and my opinion on whether it is worth buying.

The first chapter concentrates on giving you an overview of the components of MOM. Specifically, what MOM is capable of and used for, different ways of accessing MOM (web interface, admin console, etc), how the SQL database is configured, and generally how MOM achieves it's aims. Everything is well explained and the fictional company 'Leaky Faucet' is introduced to the reader; This is your typical multi-site business with a few hundred managed servers and 2 MOM2005 management servers. This section is worth reading as they go on to use Leaky Faucet as an example of how MOM might be deployed throughout the book.

The next few chapters explain how to plan and deploy MOM. One of the books strengths is the section on planning the deployment, as it goes into a lot of detail and gives you a good idea of what overheads you should expect on your management servers, depending on how many agent managed and agentless servers you are managing. Moving on to installing MOM, my thoughts are that actual act of installing MOM is pretty non-eventful, so you might not need to spend so much time reading this section. I skipped forward because the stuff they were explaining was obvious and done already.

The book goes on to explain management packs and how to use the consoles in a good level of detail. However, as I reached the end I started skimming back through the pages to look for the chapter on how to configure rules, and then realised there is no such chapter. The book does give snippets here and there, but in my opinion configuring and creating rules is such a massive and important topic that it should have had a lot more time and space devoted to it. Also, topics such as creating your own events for MOM to monitor are mentioned in brief but not enough for you to use in your deployment.

The last quarter of the book is set aside for MOM reporting, but again I felt let down as I feel they went in at the wrong angle with this. The book discusses how to configure the reporting server, which mostly is a pretty straightforward process. It does not tell you the really useful stuff like how to pull custom reports out of MOM. The default reports installed with the management packs are OK, but this week when my manager asked me for MOM reports showing typical CPU usage, free disk space, number of CPUs and OS service pack level on a subset of servers, this book was no use and I had to turn to the Internet for answers.

So to summarise, the bottom line is this: There is a lot of good content in this book, and it may be useful to you if you are an absolute beginner to MOM and are looking to deploy a vanilla installation of MOM2005 across your network. However, for serious system administrators, I would not recommend reading Essential Microsoft Operations Manager, as some information I would consider to be essential is missing. The book offers a good introduction to MOM, but you will need to do further reading to supplement the book in order to support MOM2005 on a day to day basis.

Technorati Tags: MOM, MOM2005, Book review

SpeedTest results

The official site that BT use for line testing and fault finding is test.speedtester.bt.com.

How to use:

• Disable all anti-virus software
• Disable all firewall software
• Visit http://test.speedtester.bt.com:50301/
• Enter your BT phone number and hit Go!

As you can see, I am getting a pathetic 100kbps instead of the 5Mb I am paying for.

BT Broadband SpeedTester

Apparently it will be fixed in the next few days....

Technorati Tags: Broadband, BT, Speed test, Bandwidth test

Here's the annoying thing - on my monitor (and countless others - read these comments) ClearType fonts look absolutely awful. It makes me squint and actually hurts my eyes after 10 minutes of exposure to it. And, the IE installer does not ask you if you want ClearType enabled, it just installs it and you have to lump it. It's basically a system-wide change to your fonts and display options, without any notificication to the user, and with no means to configure it or switch it off in Control Panel.

But before you uninstall IE7 in a flash, you might like to know there is actually a control panel applet for tuning Cleartype, but it's a seperate download from Microsoft called the ClearType Tuner Powertoy. It allows you to optimise ClearType for your monitor, or if it really doesn't look good at all, you can just select a box to turn ClearType off.

Microsoft, if you're reading this, please make this powertoy part of the IE7 installer and run it as a wizard the first time IE7 is launched? It will save users a lot of headaches - literally.

Technorati Tags: IE7, Internet Explorer, ClearType