You want a laptop huh?  Well you have 2 basic choices, netbook or notebook.

A netbook is a cheap (around £300) small laptop that is good for basic web browsing and low power apps.  The benefit with this is you can replace it every couple of years and it wont break the bank.
If you choose a netbook, you should go for either a Samsung N110 or Asus Eee PC 1005HA

A notebook is all other laptops.  You can have a bigger screen, bigger hard drive, more performance, better graphics, etc and all for just more money!
If you choose a notebook, I would recommend:
- either a Intel Pentium Core Duo 2, or an Intel i3 i5 or i7
- at least 3GB RAM (more = better)
- at least 250gb Hard drive
- separate graphics card
- At least 1440×900 screen resolution (assuming a 15″ screen)
- Windows 7

HP make some nice laptops around the 750GBP mark.

I read the bbc news story today – which reports that a group at Cambridge University found that the direct URL to uploaded photos on various sites continued to exist 30 days after they deleted them.

Is this news?  These sites have several hosting challenges, one key area is caching.

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I’ve been in Germany this week installing a new branch office.  The phone system is to be the very capable IP Office 500 from Avaya – which is great for branch offices as its pretty cheap and remotely configurable, and has the capability for small community networking across the VPN.

A couple of things caught me out on this install
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Google may contain badware!

Earlir today Google flagged every site with the statement “This site may harm your computer” in its search results on both Google.com and Google.co.uk.  I saw this issue live, and immediately started using Yahoo for search.

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A few thoughts on the problem with a tiered internet and why ISPs who deliver content need net neutrality to avoid a conflict of interests.

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In MSSQL2k, a lot of users would use the detach command within the GUI to kill all the active processes on a DB, this functionality is somewhat cut down in MSSQL2005 – you can see the processes & kill them individually, but not as a bulk kill.

To detach a database in Tsql, you can use:
EXEC sp_detach_db 'database', 'true'
This will detach the DB and skip checks on doing so.

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