I've been running Windows 7 at home for a while now, and have been very pleased with it - on a decent spec machine (Quad core, 4Gb RAM, lots of SATA-II disk etc), it absolutely flies. As did Vista before it, if truth be told. When I got this machine, I had it set up to dual boot between Windows Vista...

SMSE – pronounced (in the UK at least) as ‘Smuzzy’, short for Server Management Suite Enterprise – is a licensing package from Microsoft, which can be an amazingly effective way to buy systems management software for your Windows server estate. If you’re planning to virtualise your Windows server world...

It's been very quiet here on the Electric Wand for the last month or so: I took a new job in December which means things have been pretty hectic at work. I'm now managing a new group, and lots of time spent building up a great team. Just back from Seattle from a week's Microsoft internal technical conference...

Like many people who demo software technologies or who need to perform testing on multi-machine environments, I've been using Virtual PC and Virtual Server for years (and VMWare before that). If you're unfamiliar with these two Microsoft products, both are free and can be used to conduct lab tests, play...

The Virtual PC team released the latest version to the web the other day, and it's available for free , downloadable from here . Headline changes over previous versions are the ability to be run on Windows Vista, and to have Vista as a guest OS within VPC as well as miriad performance improvements. I...

I came across a problem recently when a colleague was building a virtual Windows Server environment, and was reminded of it the other night when on a webcast with Exchange MVPs, when one of the attendees said he was hitting issues with Exchange 2007 servers not finding the Active Directory properly....