The first of these stories should interest the do-it-yourselfers who like to tinker and perform their own computer repairs. It concerns the Surface Pro. This new Windows 8-based tablet proved so popular that one of its configurations sold out literally within hours. If you purchased one and you like to open up your own hardware, you could be looking at a world of hurt: iFixit, a website known for doing a full tear-down of electronic devices, gave it their worst repairability score ever: a 1 out of a possible 10.

In their disassembly notes, iFixit noted a large amount of adhesive involved in holding both the screen and the battery in place. “We don’t understand the point of heavily-glued batteries. That kind of planned obsolescence is completely unnecessary,” iFixit observed. They also encountered literally scores of screws holding the various parts of the  Surface Pro together – over 90 at final count, in fact. “Unless you perform the opening procedure 100 percent correctly, chances are you’ll shear one of the four cables surrounding the display perimeter,” the site states in its conclusion to the teardown.

The message here seems clear: if you’re looking for a laptop or tablet that’s easy to get into, either for repairs or upgrading, you should consider looking elsewhere. It could save you a lot of heartache down the road.

The second item concerns a very different piece of hardware: the Xbox 360. And it’s not the issue of at-home tinkering that’s taken up, but rather the whole paradigm of the device. Nat Brown, a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the original Xbox back in 1999, believes the company’s current console strategy is at best misguided, and at worst, has clearly lost its way. In a blog post on the topic, he describes it as “painful to watch.”

Brown’s complaint isn’t so much with where Microsoft was planning to go with the Xbox, but how they have been getting there in the past five years. “Coasting on past momentum. Failing to innovate and failing to capitalize on innovations like Kinect…A complete lack of tactical versus strategic understanding of the long game of the living room,” he blasts.

To be clear, Brown explains, “My gripe, my head-smack, is not that the broader content/entertainment business isn’t where you want to go with a living-room-connected device. It absolutely is…My gripe is that, as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.”

Brown goes on to say that the Xbox’s main problem is that it doesn’t have any way for small developers to sell non-disc-based content through to the device’s base of customers. “Why can’t I write a game for xBox tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home xBox or at my friends’ houses?” he demands to know. “Why can’t I then distribute it digitally in a decent online store, give up a 30% cut and strike it rich if it’s a great game, like I can for Android, for iPhone, or for iPad?” This failure to execute properly, according to Brown, has lost the software giant an entire generation of indie developers who will go on to building the next great thing for some other company’s devices.

Brown also blasts the user interface, showing screen shots of a number of annoying and confusing messages that users of the Xbox are likely to see. He also notes that users often must wait quite some time before they can play a game just for the content to load: “You don’t turn on your xBox to play a game quickly – it takes multiple minutes to load, flow through its splash screens, and then get you playing. It doesn’t surprise me that most people spend more time watching videos or listening to music on xBox, because it takes to long to…wait for games to load.”

These two stories taken together show that Microsoft is doing a disservice to a certain segment of their customer base: the do-it-yourselfers, the hardcore gamers, the indie game publishers. They may not be the vast majority, but they help with the “buzz” around any particular platform, adding independent innovation to the mix. Not playing to the spark of vitality they add to a platform leads to a dimmer future. With Microsoft facing real competition from Apple, Google, and others, the software giant should not be alienating this group.

To start with, nearly everyone points to the fact that Microsoft needs loyal PC makers to keep selling its software – not just the Windows operating system, of course, but Office as well. Few have been as loyal to Microsoft – or as stable – as Dell. But there’s a lot more going on here; indeed, a number of observers note that the stake has post-PC future written all over it.

Consider this: Dell today somewhat resembles what IBM was like back in the 1990s. Both companies were known for their hardware, with a big part of their business coming from, um, business – that is, companies that needed reliable computers. In IBM’s case, though, the market was changing drastically; as computers became more like simple commodity items (thanks in part to Dell), the profit margins on hardware tightened. In response, Big Blue began reinventing itself as a “services and solutions” company rather than a hardware company. The great milestone signaling that IBM completed its transition came at the end of 2004, when it sold its PC business to Lenovo.

I’m rehashing this history because a lot of it should sound very familiar in the case of Dell. What many people may not realize is that, like IBM, Dell has been busy trying to re-engineer itself. As Michael Endler noted in a story for Information Week, “The company spent billions over the last few years acquiring companies such as Quest Software, AppAssure and SonicWall, and it’s offerings now emphasize cloud computing, converged infrastructure data centers and management software as much as PCs.”

If this sounds a little like news to you, well, you’re not alone. Despite all those purchases and new offerings, Dell failed to shake its image as a PC company. Everyone knows that hardware still accounts for much of the firm’s revenue stream. Taking Dell private with this $24 billion deal will give Dell a chance to reorganize and reorient itself – as IBM did – as a services and solutions company, but without the harsh glare of shareholders watching Dell’s every move and impatiently going through every quarterly report.

By the time Dell comes out the other end, it will look rather different from the way it looks today. With its investment, Microsoft will be in a good position to take advantage of those changes and use them to suit its own ends. As Marty Wolf observed, “In Dell’s current business, it has a 5.74% operating margin. Microsoft has an operating margin of more than 36% – much of it through bundled software…Microsoft can influence more sales of its software through the Dell legacy business.” But going beyond computers, “Dell’s transition to services also creates other opportunities for Microsoft in the cloud, big data and virtualization – all areas that are part of Microsoft’s future in the enterprise space. Microsoft can theoretically end up with a services provider,” Wolf explained.

Does that kind of partnership make sense for Microsoft? You bet it does. As eWeek pointed out, “Enterprise software and services are among Microsoft’s strongest – and growing – business units.” If Dell successfully completes its transition from a PC vendor to a provider of enterprise IT services, the Microsoft-Dell partnership will grow even more beautiful – and profitable – for both of them.

Whether or not you consider Windows 8 to be a market success may depend, in part, on your definition of success. At the very least, there seem to be a few indications that Microsoft is just a touch ashamed of its Windows 8-based Surface tablet’s sales. The company refuses to reveal how many Surface units it has sold, which strikes a number of observers as highly unusual – and leaves them guessing.

It’s not just Surface sales that seem potentially disappointing, however. Other machines carrying the Windows 8 operating system fail to inspire, or so it appears. Acer president Jim Wong observed that “Windows 8 itself is still not successful…The whole market didn’t come back to growth after the Windows 8 launch, that’s a simple way to judge if it is successful or not.”

But is it, in fact, a fair way to judge success? While some users will buy the latest and greatest operating system as soon as it comes out, along with the hardware to match, I think many if not most of us stick with what we have for as long as we can. Indeed, last month Windows 8 ran less than two percent of the computers in use – but its predecessor, Windows 7, ran on 45 percent of them. As others have pointed out, Microsoft is often its own biggest rival.

Perhaps hardware companies need to look at themselves for not making their offerings compelling enough. Indeed, at the time Microsoft unveiled its Surface tablet, many said that software giant was trying to send exactly that message to its hardware partners. In other words, if Microsoft could make an interesting computing device, surely manufacturers, for whom this is their bread and butter, could do even better!

Certainly some have tried. Now one can find Windows 8 on a variety of form factors. But we need to look at the reason for this to better understand Acer’s – and possibly other hardware manufacturers’ – discontent with Windows 8.

Windows 8 development started in 2009. In April of 2010, Apple released its first iPad. This touch tablet form factor proved extremely popular – which is not too surprising if you think about it, since e-readers like the Amazon Kindle paved the way in 2007. The touch tablet wasn’t a guaranteed success, mind you; this form factor had failed multiple times. But with Apple’s success, Microsoft clearly needed to create an operating system that would work well on touch tablets, and apparently wanted to avoid creating different flavors of operating systems optimized for too many different device form factors. Hence Windows 8.

But what about those hardware manufacturers? Unlike Microsoft, they didn’t read the writing on the wall. They figured they could continue to churn out the same kinds of desktops and laptops because, by gosh, that’s what they’ve always done. They didn’t realize that Apple’s big splash with its iPad signaled the beginning of a structural change in the market, much as its iPod and iPhone signaled a change in what many users were willing to accept from music players and smartphones, respectively.

And what was the result of this? Larry Dignan notes that “Acer hasn’t quite nailed the tablet market and remains PC centric…one can conclude that Acer is still hoping for Microsoft Windows home runs to keep its business humming. Instead, Acer – like many PC makers – missed the curve.” Which leaves one to ask the inevitable question: how much of Windows 8′s success – or lack thereof – can be credited to Microsoft, and how much to the hardware manufacturers whose product comes with it preinstalled? That’s a good question, and sadly, there is no simple answer. But if the industry truly is facing a structural change in which PCs will fade in importance and tablets will begin to dominate, perhaps hardware makers should retool. After all, Windows 8 runs on desktops, laptops, tablets, hybrids, and everything in between.

The Guardian UK reported the painful numbers that seem to be inspiring this move: Dell saw the number of PCs it shipped to retailers fall by 12 percent last year, and its stock market value contracted by a third. Dell isn’t the only one in trouble, either; the newspaper notes that 2012 saw the first drop in PC shipments industry-wide since the end of the dot-com crash more than a decade ago.

Private equity group Silver Lake Management will lead the buyout, along with Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell. It is expected to be one of the larger leveraged buyouts in history, valued at around $22 billion. But Microsoft reportedly wants in on the action as well. CNBC reported that the software giant hopes to invest $1 billion to $3 billion in the LBO.

So why is Microsoft interested in the PC maker? It’s not too hard to figure out. Microsoft made its own hardware for a Windows 8 tablet recently, but the operating system sits on far more machines made by other companies. As a hardware manufacturer with strong sales to businesses and corporations, Dell has always supported Microsoft; the vast majority of its PCs run some version of the Windows operating system, to say nothing of the software giant’s business applications. On some level, Microsoft needs large hardware manufacturers like Dell to stay in business to keep selling its software products.

Both companies are refusing to comment on the complicated deal. Matt Egan  lays out some of the tricky issues. Michael Dell has a 16 percent stake in his own company. His involvement in the buyout effectively puts him on both sides of the deal, however. Egan notes that “On the one hand, Michael Dell has a duty to secure the best price for shareholders. On the other, too rich an offer could make it harder for the buying group, which he is an integral part of, to pay down debt and see a meaningful return on its investment.”

In a situation like this, one of the ways to protect shareholders involves enlisting the aid of an independent committee with its own team of experts (investment bankers and lawyers). That committee would get to have the final say on the transaction. These people should not have a significant ownership stake in the company. But where would Dell find such people? Egan notes that “everyone on Dell’s 12-member board other than Michael Dell is listed as an ‘independent’ director, including lead independent director Alex Mandi.” How many of these people are truly independent?

Microsoft’s involvement in the buyout isn’t without its own interesting PR risks. The software giant already upset several other PC makers by putting out its own tablet, the Surface. The move made the company seem more like a rival than a partner in the eyes of HP and other computer manufacturers. By investing such a significant sum into a leveraged buyout of Dell – even though the amount invested would only give Microsoft a minority interest – the operating system maker risks increasing friction between it and its long-time allies.

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft made a potentially controversial investment. Back in 1997, it invested $150 million in Apple, and engaged in patent and cross-licensing agreements with its rival. Had Microsoft held on to the 18.2 million Apple shares it gained  from that deal, they would be worth $9.18 billion today (given the stock’s current price of $504.77 per share).

Microsoft did sell the Apple shares at a profit quite a few years ago. With Dell hoping to make some major changes after the LBO, we’ll see what Microsoft gains from the deal. Whether the software giant actually invests or not, it is expected to close by the end of the week.

So what exactly is SignalR, and how can you use it in your work? Mike Brind, a Microsoft blogger, offers a very extensive explanation in a recent blog post, complete with a couple of full-fledged code tutorials that show you how to build useful applications with it. Basically, SignalR makes it easier for you to write programs that provide automatic data updates.

On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal, but real-time updates actually go against the typical way the web works. As Brind explains, what normally happens is that a browser (or other client or user agent) makes  a request, and a web server responds to that request. One request yields one response – and web servers won’t respond unless they’ve received a request. So how do you go about displaying real-time updates on your web page?

Brind lists a number of techniques developers use, such as repeatedly polling the server using AJAX to discover changes to data; keeping a persistent connection open between the client and the server by using Comet technology; and, courtesy of HTML 5, Server Sent Events and WebSockets. SignalR is Microsoft’s solution to this issue.

So what exactly is SignalR? According to Brind, “SignalR is a user-friendly wrapper around all these technologies that makes it a lot easier to create applications that require the real-time display of data. SignalR utilises HTML4 web Sockets API where it is available, and falls back onto other technologies where they are not – Server Sent Events, Forever Frames or Long Polling, the last two of which are Comet techniques.”

It makes perfect sense that Microsoft would add SignalR to ASP.NET as part of its overall updating of tools in the face of Windows 8. If you’ve ever used the new operating system, or even just seen it running, you know that it features lots of small applications that Microsoft intends for its users to keep discreetly open most of the time. These applications update in real time, allowing a user to notice instantly when they receive a new e-mail message, for example, or see which of their friends are online at any given time.

With the software giant banking so much on the success of Windows 8, it is also depending on developers to come through for it with real-time applications that work with the OS. The least the company can do is update its important tools and frameworks, like ASP.NET, to make it easy for programmers to include what Microsoft hopes will become a signature behavior of Windows 8: namely, real-time updates of applications via the web.

You can visit SignalR on Nuget  or on Github for updates and to download the release candidate. But check Brind’s post for his recommendations of how to obtain and install the this prerelease version of SignalR. He notes that “you can get it using Visual Studio (and Express For Web version, which is free) if you choose ‘Include Prerelease’ instead of the default ‘Stable Only’ option.” Since web applications updated in real time seem to be the wave of the future, you might as well get on board. Good luck!

Kevin Kline at SQL Server Pro supplies the details in his Tool Time blog. This tool checks the settings of your SQL Server 2012 instances, and compares them with best practices. When it finds any settings that don’t fall in line with those practices, the tool tells you how to change you settings so you won’t face certain issues later.

If you want to use the Best Practices Analyzer, you can download it from Microsoft’s Download Center. Supported operating systems include Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. In addition, to use the tool, you’ll need PowerShell V2.0 and Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer V2.0.

Once active, the BPA can assess your entire SQL Server stack in several ways. As Kline explains, “The tool performs its analysis not only on the relational database engine but also on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).” Replication and setup settings also fall under its purview. In total, the tool performs more than 100 checks to different parts of your MS SQL Server stack.

You may have wondered why the BPA requires you to have PowerShell installed. Well, you can use the capabilities of PowerShell combined with this tool to scan local and remote computers. You will need to change certain settings on your PowerShell, however, and explicit details on this topic are beyond the scope of this article. Microsoft helpfully provides an article on installation and configuration for Windows Remote Management .

Once you install the BPA, you can simply operate its graphical user interface to choose a target server and scan in its Home settings. Then, choose the parts of its SQL Server stack that you want examined. It’s literally a simple matter of going down a list and clicking the check boxes next to the relevant parts of the stack. You may want to do this if you want to exclude replication settings, for instance, and have the BPA focus on the other parts of your SQL Server stack.

When the BPA completes its scan of the areas you’ve indicated, it will deliver an analysis. You can look at either an overview or a detailed report. It’s just a matter of clicking the appropriate radio button. You can also take a closer look at the data the BPA collected. If you scanned a number of machines, you can even use the Filter option to examine detailed information about a particular computer.

Microsoft naturally assumes you’ll want to save the results, and they made it easy to do so by providing an Export Report option. You don’t need to export all of the results, however – and if there’s a lot, you may not want to. Once again, the Filter option comes to the rescue, allowing you to weed out certain parts of the results so you can focus on the areas of most concern.