As a followup to my post over the summer, the Bitlocker tools which were not working with SP2 have been updated. They are NOT on the Download Center as of yet and are only available internally right now. They will be released on the Download Center sometime...

The CheckSUR utility is now available for Windows 7 and 2008 R2 clients. It can be downloaded from here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/947821 Update: Just a quick note on this because I have had a couple of people ask. This update...

I wanted to mention something that came up the other day here at work that might prove informative to some of you. With the Windows 7 release, we've seen a pretty good increase in the number of Bitlocker calls we are seeing. Most seem to be regarding...

I wanted to make everyone aware of this via a link to my team's blog site. Our top Win 7 issue right now is related to properly activating Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 clients and servers. This is somewhat a servicing issue but somewhat a volume license...

Sorry I havent posted in a bit, I was on vacation. One of the new things I am working on for our guys in support is training on Virtual PC 7. It does have a little to do with servicing in that the installation for Virtual PC 7 will be shipped as an...

I've noticed we've had a couple of calls lately with customers having issues getting SP2 installed for Windows Server 2008. Typically the error seen is: "You need to install Windows Server Service Pack 1 before continuing. After you install Windows...

Very cool news last night that we officially RTM'd with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. For information specific to when builds will be available, please see the official team blogs for the Windows team. Client: http://windowsteamblog.com/ Server...

One of the other cool new logs, as it relates to servicing, is the new sessions.xml log. Located in the \Windows\servicing\sessions directory, its a log of all of the different transactions that happen on the machine from a servicing perspective. A small...

First, I appreciate all of you who actually take the time to read my blog. Secondly, my last post generated some interesting comments that I thought would make a pretty cool post in itself, so I thought I would answer some of them here. 1. In general...

Since I spoke about DISM in the last post, I wanted to highlight my personal favorite new DISM command. DISM.exe /Image:C:\test\offline /Cleanup-Image /RevertPendingActions Where this is handy is in situations where you have installed an update...

Because I wanted to keep a lot of these blog posts relevant to servicing the operating system, I thought I would talk a little about the changes to how we service the operating system in Windows 7. The first concept I wanted to cover was the idea of...

There are always requests here at Microsoft for reducing the footprint that the component store takes up (\Windows\winsxs). Applying a service pack to Windows Vista or Windows 2008 will increase the size of the store even more to allow for the staging...

Just heard about this last night so I wanted to put this out there. We're aware of an issue with the Bitlocker Drive Prep tool ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=320b9aa9-47e8-44f9-b8d0-4d7d6a75add0&displaylang=en ) on Windows...

I wanted to let everyone know that we're aware of an issue with running the CheckSUR utility on systems that have Service Pack 2 installed on them. When you attempt to run CheckSUR on these systems you will get the error below. We're working on...

We frequently get cases where customers have issues with installing updates or service packs. With the release of Service Pack 2 recently for Windows Vista and Windows 2008, I thought it might be a good idea with what would be good to collect before you...

I wanted to put some sort of content on here quickly, so here is a link to my teams blog which I wrote last year about a common question asked when it comes to servicing the operating system. "Why is the \Windows\winsxs directory so large?" The short...

Hello. My name is Joseph Conway and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer on the Windows CORE team. What that fancy title means in laymans terms is that I am one of the guys on the other end of the phone when you call into Microsoft support. The group...