Time goes by, and Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is not getting any younger. At the same time, security standards are developing independently of these legacy operating systems. Using them in your infrastructure, you not only put your entire it system under attack, but sometimes just lose functionality.

Here is example when MDaemon cannot establish SSL connection with other mail servers or clients (both while sending and receiving mail)

If you are using MDaemon with Windows Server 2003, you may experience problems with delivering or receiving mail from other mail servers.

In free edition of the Microsoft SQL Server - Express - you have no possibility to schedule backups. But you can set up backups with the help of Powershell scripts and Windows Task Scheduler.

Take a look at the script - that's my way to SQL backups. The script does not delete old backups, but please read my article Deleting old files and folders in Powershell, it will help. And also - Running Powershell script in scheduled task.

Please notice highlighted lines - there you will have to set your SQL-instance and path to backups.

In the brand-new 36 version of Opera browser, developers have enabled smooth scrolling by default. Perhaps, on fast and powerful computers with nice graphics card this feature improve experience on surfing, but on my two PCs with embedded video-card, smooth scrolling is definitely not smooth but very annoying!

Check the simple way to disable it.

Sometimes you need to parse some site or big web-page. Google offers many programs and even software complexes to perform this task, but I want to show, how you can quite simply do this with the help of Powershell.

There is a Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet in Powershell, that actually parse HTML-page by tags and content. Cmdlet give you an object of page with ParsedHtml property. To this field you can apply methods to extract needed data.

Assume you need to get all links from the page. See how it works.

Sometimes installation of VmWare ESXi failed (between 5% and 8%) with the following error:

"partedUtil failed with message: Error: The primary GPT table states that the backup GPT is located beyond the end of disk. This may happen if the disk has shrunk or partition table is corrupted. ... Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk! Unable to read partition table for device..."

These days a lot of attention is paid to the ecology and green technologies, including manufacturers of servers. Hewlett Packard is not the exception. There are number of parameters in the settings of server's BIOS, which affect the power consumption of hardware. And, naturally, these parameters also affect performance. You may not know this, but these are installed by default settings, significantly reduce the speed of the memory and CPU.

I will show you where these parameters are located. Setting the highest values for these settings helped us to significantly increase the speed of VmWare ESXi hosts and to achieve a shorter response for SAP systems. These recommendations are taken from SAP notes.