Another one of these really useful utilities which I could have done with it when I was posting another entry on my blog this morning. Adding 8 shouldn't be taxing, although it can be depending on how tired you feel (London is 8 hours ahead of Seattle...

If you want to find out how, take an hour out online on Tuesday 17th May at 4PM UK time . Learn how Microsoft's own IT organization manages Group Policies across Microsoft Corporation's own internal Active Directory Forest. In this webcast IT professionals...

I work with Virtual PC and Virtual Server all the time, but am continually astonished by some of the problems I see people having with Virtual machine technology. Here's one of the most common problems I see, and it frequently seems to catch out so many...

Sometimes the most blindingly obvious and simple utility become a weapon of choice in your toolbox arsenal. Here's one such example I stumbled across a few days ago and am now wondering how I ever coped before. Over on longhornblogs.com, Robert (who I...

Just to show that I'm not completely biased towards Microsoft Technology (although I do passionately believe most of it is really great), here's a blog entry which may possible raise some eyebrows. With the huge talk around the future of virtualisation...

I am currently updating my slidedeck for the webcast I'm doing this Friday on Virtual Server bringing it up to date in terms of the recent MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) announcements. I got to the slides comparing the differences between the Virtual...

I got hit by a problem on a freshly installed virtual machine using a slipstreamed SP1 installation and promoted to a domain controller. Two events were appearing in the event log which were unexpected. Source: MSDTC Event ID: 4143 Information MS...

Many people get caught out with group policy - I stand up and tell people all about some of the gotchas on a regular basis. You know, things like making sure you understand the double negatives such as Disabling "Do not keep history of recently opened...

Do you ever have one of those evening where you dig yourself a deeper and deeper hole, and end up going to bed hoping the problem will sort itself out on a reboot in the morning and thinking about avoiding a re-install? Well, the morning is now here for...

If you want to make a difference, now is your chance. Just launched at the WinHEC (Windows Hardware & Engineering) conference is a competition running until October this year open to design teams, students and individual designers alike, to envision...

I was playing this weekend trying to get the VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) size down to the barest minimum. I thought I did OK - WS2003 SP1 with Support Tools, Admin Pack, Group Policy Management Console, Small Office 2003 installation running Word+Excel patched...

I was setting up a new virtual machine (for playing with Windows Server 2003 R2 as it happens, but that's for another day) this morning and getting frustrated when you double-click files which have no application associated with them. On most machines...

Following the HUGE Virtual Server announcements made by Steve Ballmer a couple of days ago at the MMS conference, if you want to here what Steve had to say first hand, click here to hear his keynote speech streamed directly over the Internet. On that...

Small Business Server (SBS2003) is a really great product for (unsurprisingly) small and medium businesses to operate a one-stop server shop comprising most of the major server components from Microsoft. For example, email, firewall, remote access, collaboration...

The Windows Server 2003 resource kit will be hitting the streets next month. This is a fabulous resource to have to hand, and is now a full seven volumes covering the entire Windows Server family. The good news for UK people is that by pre-ordering now...

To participate in the beta program, you need to: Go to http://beta.microsoft.com . (Note: You need a Passport account to sign in. If you don’t have one, BetaPlace will help you create one.) Once logged into Beta Place with a Passport account...

The second of my blog entries about the MMS announcements made only minutes ago by Steve Ballmer relate to the longer term strategy for Virtualisation within Microsoft. You can see my commentary highlighting the shorter term vision for Virtual Server...

I've just been listening to Steve Ballmer give his keynote session at the MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) and in particular wanted to tell you about some really significant changes to Virtual Server and Virtualisation in general which are happening...

This was an interesting problem I was discussing with a customer today. The customer had a concerning looking error appearing periodically in the event log: Event ID: 40961 Source: LSASRV Version: 5.2 Symbolic Name: NEGOTIATE_INVALID_SERVER Message...

A new self-paced on-line course (also available offline) is now available entitled "Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005". The course takes around 5 hours to complete and prepares students to migrate legacy applications and consolidate server functions...

Following my blogcast in February and subsequently posting the markShareforABDE tool for download a few days later, the official download is now available. There's a GUI thrown in as well for good measure for those who try to steer clear of the command...

Part of the ongoing saga with my backup solution (see earlier posts today) was a seemingly fantasic way of ensuring that out on the road, should my laptop hard-disk fail, I'd still be able to continue working. The theory was simple. Install a base copy...

Something which cropped up internally over the past couple of days has been a discussion about how many people at Microsoft must have moved on beyond using the standard HTML interface to their blog engine for posting. I kept quiet at this point once discussions...

A significant press release was made this morning regarding WS-ReliableMessaging or WS-RM moving one step closer to being an industry standard. WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM) is the first specification to pass through the full WS-* Workshop Process and...

So what else good has come out of my "downtime" (yes, the restore is still running - 13% and counting slowly so far). Well, one thing which I really recommend you take a look at is the Solution Accelerator for Consolidating and Migrating LOB Applications...