July 2, 2010

Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4

Dear iPhone 4 Users,

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. For the vast majority of users who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your bars more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused.

As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

We hope you love the iPhone 4 as much as we do.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Apple

A couple of news items:

Adult Obesity Rates Rose In 28 States, And Fell In Just One, USA

Obesity Rates Highest In Southern States

So what does this mean to me?  Well, as a nation, we’re growing fatter, and as I live in Alabama, my region of the country is in the lead.  And while I have no statistics (yet) to back this up, I see a lot of fatties in IT.  Present company included.  I think IT, due to the stressfulness and sedentary, chair-bound working environment leads to weight gain and therefore has a high percentage of overweight people.

We can fight this, at least a little.  So I’m posting five good ideas of things to do that will help work off, or at least keep off the pounds

1.  Get out of the chair!  Remote desktop is a great tool, but do try to visit the server room at least twice a day.  If it’s on  another floor, use the stairs.

2.  Eat s-l-o-w-l-y.  Studies have shown that rushing through your meals doesn’t give your digestive system time to let the nervous system know it’s full.  We tend to grab a quick lunch when we’re busy.  I’ve tried the following:  I eat some of my lunch, say 1/4, and get up and go do some small thing.  Since I’m always busy, there are millions of small things needing to be done.  Just avoid having such a nice lunch that it will tempt your coworkers to finish it before you return!

3.  Avoid junk food!  We also have a tendency to grab a bag of chips and a coke, or a snickers, or something out of a machine, when we’re so busy we have no time for lunch, or we wind up working after hours.  Try to have healthy snacks available.  Carrot sticks are an excellent item as the biting and grinding tends to help work off stress.  Try seedless grapes, melba toast, celery, other raw veggies and fruits.  Keep your hands busy while your mouth is crunching for good stress relievers.

4.  Drink water.  It has zero calories, and tends to fill you up.  It’s healthy and you need it.  Don’t you remember learning in school how are bodies are 60% water?  Of course, you could argue that you’d lose weight by drying up some, but you’d probably kill yourself at some point!  A skeleton is dry and weighs a lot less, but it is dead.

5.  Get plenty of sleep.  Stressed out and overworked, staying late and coming in early takes its toll, but the more sleep we get, the better we’ll maintain our health and keep our weight down.  You should strive for 8 hours a night, but not less than six.

Windows Intune Beta

Windows Intune simplifies how businesses manage and secure PCs using Windows cloud services and Windows 7—so your computers and users can operate at peak performance, from virtually anywhere.

Windows Intune is a comprehensive solution that includes PC management, malware protection, Windows upgrades, and more.

Use the Windows Intune cloud service beta to:

• Manage updates
• Protect PCs from malware
• Proactively monitor PCs
• Provide remote assistance
• Track hardware & software inventory
• Set security policies

One of our client’s file servers crashed this weekend but they were able to get the system to boot one last time in order to copy over the most important files and directories.  It was an older server; originally running Windows NT 4.0 and later upgraded to Windows 2000 Server.  They didn’t have a good backup! The last four backups had a disk error in the early part of the file copy they were using for the backup (something the NT 4.0 admin from years past had scripted for them) and it was aborting, which they didn’t notice as the file copy backup script didn’t log anything. So they got the system to come up despite the disk error—I had them start copying the files over to a newer system while we figured out what to do.  We were able to copy over the files.  Their plan was to decommission the older server anyway.  It had been running since 1998!  Miraculously they were able to copy all the shared folders. After that, it went belly up and would not come back up.  Still, they had to re-share everything.  They did not have a list of who had access to what.  Not in ntfs or the file share permissions. 

They wanted me to do a miracle fix for them.  Not possible given what they didn’t do.

So, a word to the wise.  It’s a good idea to have written documentation of your file, folder and share permissions.  Oh, and keep a current backup using a good backup program! 

Here is the demonstration steps from my presentation at Microsoft TechEd NA 2010, New Orleans, June 8th, 2010…

Start, Open Programs… Expand Windows AIK, highlight “Deployment Tools Command Prompt”. Explain why it is necessary to use “Run As Administrator” for this. Right click and Run As Administrator.

Create a new folder at the root of C:\ Some names we can use: win7pe, win7re, win7_64, etc.

mkdir c:\win7pe

cd c:\win7pe

Create two new folders; mount and mountre in the root of the folder above.

mkdir mount

mkdir mountre

Explain why we need the installation DVD. Explain how the recovery environment is available in the install.wim image, and what we are now going to do is extract it from the install.wim. Explain that the install.wim file is huge (perhaps even show it from the DVD drive, at DVD drive letter:\sources\install.wim); almost 3 GBs, so the copy will take 6-8 minutes.

copy d:\sources\install.wim c:\win7pe

When the file completes its copying, then we can mount it and extract the recovery environment wim.

We’ll use DISM to do so, rather than imagex.exe If you check Microsoft TechNet article on making a recovery environment iso, it uses imagex.exe. I will use the dism tool because it is designed to be the replacement for this feature (mounting, etc) from imagex. DISM is superior to imagex and is several tools rolled into one.

dism /mount-wim /wimfile:c:\win7pe\install.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\win7pe\mount

This will mount the install.wim into the mount directory. We can see the file format in Windows Explorer (do so). Point out the winRE.wim located in \windows\system32\recovery. This is the file we’re after and why we’ve used the installation DVD in the first place. In fact, after we copy out this file we’ll discard the install.wim.

copy c:\win7pe\mount\windows\system32\recovery\winre.wim c:\win7pe

Now that we done so successfully, we can unmount the install.wim and discard any changes we’ve made to it. We’ll do so using DISM again:

dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\win7pe\mount /discard

And then we’ll mount the winre.wim using DISM:

dism /mount-wim /wimfile:c:\win7pe\winre.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\win7pe\mountre

Now use Windows Explorer to look at the various directories. Note that windows\system32 does not have the imagex.exe program. We need it for latter. To that end, we’re going to copy imagex.exe into the mounted winre.wim. We need to ensure we select the imagex.exe program from the correct architecture: 32-bit, 64-bit, or Itanium. So open up windows explorer and look in c:\program files\windows aik\tools. You’ll not the x86 folder (32bit); amd64 (64-bit) and ia86 (Itanium). Each folder has an imagex.exe in it. Since we used the installation DVD for Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit edition, we need to copy over the imagex.exe file from the amd64 directory, as follows (explain necessary use of quotes below and why):

copy “c:\program files\windows aik\tools\amd64\imagex.exe” c:\win7pe\mountre\windows\system32

Since that is all we need for this WinPE/RE UFD (USB Flash Disk), we can now unmount the winre.wim file. Since we want to make the inclusion of imagex.exe a permanent thing, we’ll commit the changes, using DISM:

dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\win7pe\mountre /commit

This will save all changes back to the c:\win7pe\winre.wim file. We can now proceed to the final step.

Since it was the recovery environment we wanted to have on the UFD, in addition to WinPE, we’ll follow the steps outlined in TechNet to create a WinPE UFD. The first step is to extract the everyday WinPE 3.0 that comes with the Windows AIK:

copype amd64 c:\peufd

This will create a multi-directory structure with WinPE in it

.

We will now copy over our WinRE.wim we extracted and updated earlier. We’re going to rename it boot.wim when we copy it, so it will fit nicely onto the typical iso for WinPE:

copy c:\win7pe\winre.wim c:\peufd\iso\sources\boot.wim

Our next step will be to clean and partition our UFD and place the ISO on it, and that is in the second demo.

Insert a USB Flash Disk (UFD) into a USB port. I’m going to use a 2GB UFD. The next few steps will wipe out any data on it, so do not use one that has data you need to keep. We’ll be using the DISKPART command line tool to wipe and format the UFD.

In the Deployment Tools Command Prompt, enter:

diskpart

If more than one HDD is on the host machine, select the proper number! Since HDD are numbered cardinally (starts with 0) the UFD will be the last drive number. I have only one hard drive, so the UFD will be disk 1. If you have two HDD, use disk 2 for your UFD.

At the diskpart prompt type:

list disk

(SHOW DISKS MAKE SURE YOU USE THE CORRECT ONE!)

select disk 1

clean

(This really wipes out the disk! Careful!)

create par prim

sel par 1

active

format quick fs=ntfs

assign letter=f

exit

Diskpart closes.

Now we simply xcopy over the iso files from the iso root to our ufd..

xcopy c:\peufd\iso\*.* /e f:\

And we now have a functioning UFD WinPE/RE! We can boot to it (on motherboards that allow USB booting—most modern motherboards do). So we’ll now take the UFD to a machine we can boot from USB and boot it.

WCL318: Using Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) 3.0 to Troubleshoot and Fix Problems, and to Capture and Deploy WIM Images

My video commercial!

In just a few weeks I’ll be in New Orleans at Microsoft TechEd 2010.  I’ll be conducting a breakout session on Windows PE 3.0, and how to use it to create a USB Flash Drive containing PE and assorted tools that allow you to fix systems and even capture an image of an existing system and deploy that image (or other images) onto hardware.  It’s a tall order and involves a little work but in the end it gives you a powerful tool to use in your everyday administrator’s toolkit.

In any case, I’m going to use this blog to detail all the steps I’ll use in the session, and even video how-to’s I’ll be uploading to Youtube.

Watch this space!

Dave