So you want to get yourself a shiny new SSD drive, do you? But wait a second, which one do you buy? What should you look for? Well luckily for you, Dr. James is here to help you out.
Controllers matter
First things first, hopefully you’ve got yourself an SSD based on a good controller, which essentially links the I/O to the flash memory. I’ve used SSDs based on Marvell (Crucial C300) and Sandforce (OCZ Vertex II) controllers, which both offer excellent performance. If you get a poor controller, it’s likely that you’ll never realise the full speed boost that an SSD can offer.
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Getting your internal SBS DNS configuration right is an easy thing to do, especially when the most common error that I see is badly configured zones – which are easy to fix.
So let’s say that your company’s internal domain name is company.local and their external domain name is company.co.uk. Now most people would create an ADi primary lookup zone for all of company.co.uk and then create A records for each host they want, so you end up with hosts like webmail.company.co.uk and www.company.co.uk all under this one zone.
Instead of this, why not create individual zones for each of your A records? So for example: webmail.company.co.uk should be its own primary zone (not ADi) rather than an A record in the company.co.uk domain.
In most of my deployments, I have about five manually created zones that serve Exchange requests (autodiscover and email) and remote access (SSTP and the like). This makes it easy to make changes to DNS, and also means that I never have to update records for external resources (www for example).
That’s all for this week. Have a lovely Christmas and see you in the New Year.
- James | Dec 2010
Have you just purchased SLI?
Are you getting weird artifacts appearing on the screen, or is something else random happening?
Make sure you’ve completed the list below, to ensure your SLI is happy…
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For the past three years Firefox has been my default browser. I like the speed that I can navigate the web, the extra items you can add in and some of the features they’ve added over the years (including the isolation of plug-ins, like Adobe Flash). On any and all of my computers, Firefox is still the king of browsers. It even continues to enjoy its dominant position on my Taskbar and Start Menu.
However, for a while now it’s had a challenger to the throne…
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If you’re running a Dell laptop with the DW1501 wireless adapter, you may find that wireless is slow.
Really, really slow.
I had this problem the other day, and tried everything to sort it out. Eventually, I went through the settings for the WLAN card itself, and found that all my performance woes were resolved by changing the BSS mode from 802.11n to 802.11g .
Now it runs brilliantly.
Awesome to the max.
- James | Nov 2010
