It’s official. Windows 7 has released to manufacturing. http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-22Windows7RTMPR.mspx   It’s official. Windows Server 2008 R2 has released to Manufacturing http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx It’s...

The last post I made talked about customizing windows image (.WIM) files, and the post before that talked about creating Virtual hard disk (.VHD) files. So the last step is to look at putting an image onto a VHD and making it bootable So the steps are Identify your WIM file and if it has multiple images...

In the initial release of Windows Server 2008 one of the the questions which always came up was “how do I add X” – the answer was we had tools named OCSETUP and OCLIST. These have been superseded in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 with the new Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool (DISM.EXE). The...

Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files have been given greater importance in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. They’ve always been used for hosting virtual machines (from the earliest Virtual PC through to Hyper-V) , and in Vista the complete image backup began to use VHD format, the iSCSI target software in Storage...

In my post a couple of days ago I talked about configuring my servers from the command line and one of my interests at the moment is finishing off some powershell tools to handle the configuration of Server Core and Hyper-V server. I mentioned in passing that I was going to do something to wrap round...

I’ve been updating two of my machines from the Beta to the RC of Server 2008 R2. It’s been quite a learning experience, and I’ve put together a video to show some of the things that Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 can do with VHDs which should be posted soon. Along the way I’ve found some of the pitfalls...

Do you have lots of icons on your windows desktop ? I do. And sometimes when I’m giving a presentation I think not only do they look untidy, there might be something given away by the icon and file name. The fix for that is to create a folder named “my stuff” or “everything else” and drag everything...

A few of people have noticed that I’m running Windows 7 with a customized logon screen, and a couple of them asked me if I used “logon studio” which (as I understand it) rummages round inside some of the image resources buried in DLL files. In Windows 7 we have provided a registry key for OEMS to turn...

I don’t normally cut and paste things from mail straight to my blog but this arrived in ready to read format so here it is The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) is now available to download for everyone , and is available until June 2009 to download. Download the RC So what’s new in the RC?   Check...

ComputerWorld have an interesting piece up about XP Mode for Windows 7. Saying that it “could create support nightmares, analysts said today” They quote Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft as saying “I think that this will help the uptake for Windows 7, because it removes one more ...

Someone gave me a definition of insanity as “trying the same thing over and over again expecting different results”.  I guess trying something you expect to fail is somewhere between insanity and scientific thoroughness. Anyhow, that’s how I came to be trying the test you see below. I didn’t expect...

Windows Virtual PC is on Technet for people to download, the Windows Virtual PC  page says it will be available to everyone on May 5th, but the  evaluation guide is available already I’ve installed it and started to play. I’ve only got one application which won’t work under 64 bit (Vista /...

Someone from the office (no names, no pack drill) told me they had read my post from yesterday where I mentioned Windows Easy Transfer.  They felt that it might not be quite the done thing for a technical person to use it but since I was using it , then it was probably OK.  I’ve now switched...

There is an interview with Scott Woodgate,  published as  press release on press pass   entitled Helping Small Businesses With Windows 7 Professional and Windows XP Mode. After starting to speculate about this a little too soon, I want to clarify what the bits are. Because XP mode allows...

Hopefully the title is self evident. The servers are taking a real pasting right now, so you might find it best to give it a little while for things to calm down Now if you want to install machines quickly you can copy the contents of the DVD to a BOOTABLE USB stick (disks should work too) and I posted...

One of the paint point of running any Beta OS (including windows 7) is that one or two drivers can be a bit … flakey. With Vista I blamed a lot of trouble on Nvidia’s drivers during the beta and they only seemed to come right just after release. By comparison their drivers for Windows 7 are an order...

Though the beta of Windows 7 we have been telling people that if something could be made to work on Vista, expect it to work on 7. Obviously this is not a guarantee – some things break with service packs never mind version changes, but as an expectation its a good one; and as rule of thumb it works both...

I blogged a few weeks back that you could check on the state of your battery from the command line in Win7… And I said “I pinched this battery out of another laptop because when the original was 14 months old, and was getting about 30 minutes run time” My laptop has had to have its motherboard replaced...

My job as an evangelist focuses on Windows platform (client and Server OS), including management (i.e. PowerShell) and Virtualization. But there are other Microsoft products which from my day to day use of them I feel evangelical about. One is Windows Live Writer which is the best tool for composing...

If there was one single feature about Windows Vista which made me say “I’m never ever going back to Windows XP” it was search and the way search was integrated everywhere. True you can download Microsoft Search for Windows XP (and , as they say other kinds of desktop search are available) but it doesn...

A few days back I wrote about acceleators in IE 8 and talked about how search box had been streamlined as well. I knew we’d re-worked how tabs worked but my first reaction was “yeah … but so what”. I’m a big fan of tabs: IE 7 changed my experience of the internet. I guess other tabbed browsers did the...

When I first started using Windows Vista it was the better experience for photographers which really hooked me in. Most common image formats use the EXIF standard for embedding data about the picture (everything from the camera model and settings, to the title, keywords and so on. XP lets you look at...

Somewhere in the queue of things to post is the remainder of my PowerShell configurator for Windows Server 2008 R2 Core and Hyper-VS Server R2. If you’re building a cluster the PowerShell CMDlets for clustering make that a breeze. Of course a cluster often calls for iSCSI and setting that up from the...

Internet Explorer 8 seems to be guided by the same “many little improvements” philosophy that has driven Windows 7 – or put another way it’s not packed with radical new features , and in some cases I find it hard to be sure if something really wasn’t there before: I think the “Privacy Policy” is new...

I was a little surprised to find it was nearly 3 years ago that I first wrote about Open Search… So first off… Open search provides a specification for XML to describe search services. It’s easy to build this XML, and there’s a Microsoft Page which builds it for you , so here’s an example for IMDB, which...