My posts on Microsoft Windows

Dell XPS 9530 UEFI BIOS Recovery

Dell recently released a new BIOS for the XPS 9530, A09. This BIOS is mainly for Windows 10 compatibility, but I always like to keep my system up to date. This time however, things didn’t go so well and the BIOS updater program actually threw an error about 20 seconds in during the erase procedure and crashed! This is bad news. Upon rebooting my XPS 9530, I got nothing but a black screen with no backlight, zero life. This was kind of expected, the UEFI firmware has been corrupted and therefore the laptop is now a semi-bricked zombie. Fortunately, the XPS 9530 does have a BIOS recovery procedure even when a bad flash occurs, here I’ll share with you how I recovered my XPS 9530 without having to swap out my system board or call Dell.

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Storage Spaces and the lack of built-in data balancing functionality

I blogged about changing my home media setup late last year on my HP Microserver N54L after migrating from Windows Home Server 2011 to Server 2012 R2 Essentials and choosing to use the Storage Spaces feature with a parity configuration. One key area that became apparent more recently is the lack of data balancing in any given pool configuration. This is potential trouble spot for a few reasons. I’ll go through the pains and workarounds of getting data balanced on a Storage Space pool.

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An email developer’s first look at the Outlook Mail app in Windows 10

Windows 10 is the upcoming version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system and there are some big changes coming One area which caught my attention was the mention of the Outlook email client. While its not unusual for Microsoft to talk about their own software, the changes to how Outlook and the whole Office suite will be on Windows 10 is certainly a shift from the current package. Windows 10 will feature a new Outlook app that will be the default email client in Windows 10, replacing the current Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 8/8.1. Not only that but its also a universal app and will be on phones and tablet devices as well.

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HP Microserver N54L using Storage Spaces with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials

After recently migrating away from Windows Home Server 2011 to Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials on my HP Microserver N54L I also took the opportunity to reconfigure my disk storage setup for better optimisation of storage capacity and backup/redundancy. I’ll be going through my previous and new setup detailing the key changes I made and why. My objective was to “future proof” my setup for a good few years to come under Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, making improvements along with the way and leaving expansion options open for the future. I focused on utilising a new feature in Windows Server 2012 Essentials called Storage Spaces.

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Revisiting the email rendering quirks of Office 365/OWA

Recently Microsoft have made an update to its webmail offering Office 365 in terms of how it renders emails. As reported by Nicholas Carter on the Litmus Community many of the previously known Office 365 quirks are no longer happening. Has Microsoft listened to the community on this one and changed its ways? Find out more in my analysis of what’s different under the hood of the Outlook Web App since the changes.

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