Keith Combs' Blahg

SBS “Aurora” Beta – now available for download

Keith Combs — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:39:39 GMT

Help Protect Business Data

Computer Backups Perform an automatic daily backup of computers in the network and the server itself.
Simplified Recovery Restore individual files, folders, an entire PC, or the entire Windows Small Business Server with quick, easy- to-use disaster recovery tools.
Controlled Access Safeguard important data and decide who can create and access new shared folders of documents and/or multimedia files from any computer in the network.

Simplify Small Business IT

Flexible Storage Quickly increase storage capacity as business requirements change over time. Windows Small Business Server, Aurora provides your customers with increased reliability to protect against drive errors that could lead to data corruption.
Simplified Management From one administrative console, get a comprehensive view of the health and security of client computers and servers in the network, making it easier to manage common IT tasks and address technology issues before they occur.

Increase Business Productivity

Easy Manageability Take advantage of the familiar Windows-based experience and leverage your existing IT skills to effectively use the device right out of the box.
Run the Necessary Applications Have access to the large Windows Server 2008 R2 ecosystem of applications. Also, leverage the upcoming community of add-ins.
Connection to Online Services Easily extend your server’s functionality by quickly connecting to online services and applications
Work Virtually Anywhere, Anytime Access files and documents from inside and outside the office through any common web browser using Remote Web Access.
Better Together Get more done by smoothly running a small business IT with a server that works great together with Windows 7 and Office 2010.

Greater Business Insight

Information Organization Streamline document access and control information sharing using a centralized data repository that can be accessed from any computer on the network.
Enhanced Support for Line-of-Business Applications with Premium Add On Provides a powerful data management and analysis solution that makes it possible to use many server-based business applications or run a vast number of line-of-business applications on an additional server.

Go get the download @ http://connect.microsoft.com/sbs

Mirage?

Keith Combs — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:18:02 GMT

And by the way, the video above is an enthusiast video created for the London Secret Cinema “Lawrence of Arabia” event last week.

Windows Phone 7 - Release to Manufacturing !!!

Keith Combs — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:35:04 GMT

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we’re very excited to say that we’ve reached the biggest milestone for our internal team – the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7! While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners’ hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete.

See the full story at http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2010/09/01/windows-phone-7-released-to-manufacturing.aspx.

Monsters on Post-It Notes by John Kenn

Keith Combs — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:39:50 GMT

Important Update Released on 8/24 for you Hyper-V laptop users

Keith Combs — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:40:01 GMT

First things first. Hyper-V isn’t supported on laptops. However, a lot of you run a variety of products that work well enough. Windows Server 2008 R2 of course includes the Hyper-V role and I’ve been running this for years now on the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p.

For those of you that have moved to an Intel i5 or i7 based laptop, you may have encountered the CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT BSOD. A previous hotfix was available for manual download and installation.

Fortunately there is a new update rollup on the update.microsoft.com servers that will automatically flow to your servers if you let it. KB2264080 is now available and I plan to test it next week on a clean install with my Lenovo ThinkPad W510.

Lock and Load - It’s nearly Halo Reach time

Keith Combs — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:29:26 GMT

Bungie launches Halo Reach on XBOX 360 and XBOX Live September 14, 2010. Have you been practicing? Are you ready? Here’s a little video to get you properly focused. Enjoy the new wallpapers in the meantime. Makes for a nice Windows 7 theme.

IT Pro Interviewing - Level 100

Keith Combs — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:04:54 GMT

Once upon a time ago, Kai Axford an I were interviewing candidates for the Third Amigo. Kai and I looked down at the resume for the next person and it had Matt Hester's name on it. I looked at Kai and we both rolled our eyes. We knew disaster was about to strike. But we decided to give Matt a shot at joining the crew. We had high standards, at least at that point.

Matt was already in a interview room along the hallway with other finalist candidates. Kai and I walked in and shook Matt’s hand. We all sat down and got comfortable.

Microsoft has a reputation and history of having some interesting interview techniques. Problem solving skills are tested. Open ended questions might be asked. I dropped a bomb on Matt to see how he’d react. I said, “Matt, you know those interviews where they ask lots of questions with no particular right or wrong answer?” Matt answered, “Yes.” I replied back, “This is not one of those interviews.”

Matt kept his composure and didn’t wet himself. Matt, Kai and I joke about that interview off and on with nothing but affection for Matt. Grin. I couldn’t help but think of it when I watched the following.

In Matt Hester’s honor…

Original Sized screenshots with Windows Live Writer

Keith Combs — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:50:48 GMT

This particular blog post is the result of some testing using Windows Live Writer, and how it behaves for images that are pasted. In essence, I now have the default set to preserve the original image and upload it, but create a medium sized version for the blog post. That wasn’t the default.

How do you do that? Well, the key button is highlighted and selected below. Get a picture set the way you want it manually, then click the “Set to default” button. The next time you create a blog post and paste a picture in, it will apply those settings. It’s as if a macro runs when the paste happens.

In my case it becomes really obvious because I currently have my pics set to center alignment. When I paste the pic, it dances form left to center. Pretty cool looking and a nice visual that it’s working properly. This does not work if you are pasting from some sources where you’ve used the “keep formatting” paste option.

This feature is present in the current shipping version of Windows Live Writer. It is also present in the beta at http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Enjoy.

Exchange Server 2010 SP1 – now available for download

Keith Combs — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:01:05 GMT

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 helps IT Professionals achieve new levels of reliability with greater flexibility, enhanced user experiences, and increased protection for business communications.

Flexible and reliable - Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your company's unique needs and a simplified way to keep e-mail continuously available for your users.
Anywhere access - Exchange Server 2010 helps your users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all their communications - e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more - from virtually any platform, Web browser, or device.
Protection and compliance - Exchange Server 2010 delivers integrated information loss prevention, and compliance tools aimed at helping you simplify the process of protecting your company's communications and meeting regulatory requirements.

Get SP1 @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=50b32685-4356-49cc-8b37-d9c9d4ea3f5b.

Katrina Retrospective: 5 Years After the Storm

Keith Combs — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:46:18 GMT

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast. Five years later, NASA revisits the storm with a short video that shows Katrina as captured by satellites. Before and during the hurricane's landfall, NASA provided data gathered from a series of Earth observing satellites to help predict Katrina’s path and intensity. In its aftermath, NASA satellites also helped identify areas hardest hit.

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Silverlight player and Video (00:3:03.450) – the following video is a 720p HD video with a 4MB data rate. The actual video is 90MB in size and your internet connection will need to be fairly beefy to watch this with no buffering while the progressive download takes place. If you don’t have a fast connection, hit play then pause a few seconds later. The download should continue thus allowing smooth playback after it completes.

During playback, double click the video for a full screen view or use the full screen button on the player controls (far right button).

OSU Buckeyemobile goes fast, real fast

Keith Combs — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:37:18 GMT

Matt Hester is from Ohio and is of course a Buckeye football fan. What he probably didn’t know is that there’s more to life than football. It’s true, and some enterprising folks at the university just went 286 and 297 miles per hour in a battery powered “Bullet”.

See he full story at http://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/24/ohio-state-universitys-buckeye-bullet-claims-another-electric-s/.

Happy Anniversary Windows 95 !!!

Keith Combs — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:25:40 GMT

And just in case you forgot how to install it, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q151062/. And just in case you really can’t stand these new fangled graphical user interfaces, here’s how to make sure you can always boot to the command line. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q141721/. LOL.

Samsung Galaxy Tab revealed – here’s the teaser

Keith Combs — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:04:39 GMT

Texting World Record Broken Using Swype

Keith Combs — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:51:01 GMT

It hasn’t been “certified” yet, but it looks like Melissa Thompson, Samsung, Android, and Swype currently own the world texting record. See Tom’s article on the subject. I’ve heard good things about the Windows Phone 7 tech so maybe I’ll try and break the record when the devices come out.

Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on a HP Elitebook 8540w – the elusive smartcard driver location

Keith Combs — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:15:00 GMT

This week one of the Microsoft employees came to me and asked about using the HP Elitebook 8540w with Windows Server 2008 R2 as his production workstation environment. In our corporate environment, that means the machine must have a rather stringent set of requirements that must be met to connect to our network on a regular basis.

One of those requirements is the use of a smartcard. The HP 8540w has a built-in smartcard reader but if you go look at the hp.com driver download area, good luck finding it. It’s actually there but it’s so thoroughly buried you would have an extremely difficult time finding it.

So where is the elusive driver? It’s actually part of the install package for the media card reader driver. The media card and smartcard readers are apparently both made by Ricoh.

I can only assume someone decided it would be intuitive to slap both sets of drivers into one package and you would just use your Kreskin abilities to figure it out. We did, so you don’t need to.

And now due to the magic of Bing and Google, you can actually find the answer. The link above is a link to the landing page for the driver, not a link to the actual install package. On that page is the download button that will provide the sp46972.exe installation package. If you install that, you’ll magically get the drivers for both readers and they should start working properly with R2. When you insert your smartcard, make sure you have internet connectivity so the .Net driver will flow down off the update.microsoft.com servers.

[Note] It appears there is another later version of the package. The guy that came to me for help tested sp46972. This newer package coughs up sp46999.exe and is on the HP FTP server at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp46501-47000/sp46999.exe.

Honey, I just heard a Pop. Was that a bug hitting our grill?

Keith Combs — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:17:36 GMT

I’d hate to see a tangle between one of these (KIA Pop concept) and an Escalade.

Windows, TRIM and other SSD Mysteries

Keith Combs — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:43:00 GMT

The Lenovo ThinkPad T61p I am using to write the post has the second generation Intel 160GB SSD. I also used to have the first generation drive in the 80GB flavor but sold it for a couple of reasons. Capacity and TRIM support were the main reasons. The astute reader and knower of all laptop specs will be quick to point out that running a SSD drive in a T61p is a waste of money. That is partially right. We’ll talk about that later. Before we do, lets get some background information.

Background

I routinely clone disks with a variety of tools. Here lately I’ve been using Acronis TruImage Home 2010. I have been doing that for years and it is usually the result of moving to a new bigger hard drive. Moving from one rotational disk to another isn’t any big deal. But I was worried about the implications of moving a Windows 7 install from a rotational disk, to a SSD drive. Why? Because all sorts of stuff behaves slightly differently depending on the storage devices present in the machine.

Common sense tells you that cloning a hard disk and doing a restore to a SSD drive isn’t the preferred route to SSD goodness. But other factors can come into play. Like time. You know, the time it takes to install the OS, your apps and your data on a new drive. So cloning is fast, but how do you know if the new drive is being properly recognized by Windows 7?

I started exploring that very question about a year ago and have seen so many questions on the subject since then, I thought I would share some information on the subject. Before you do anything, you should read the article on the E7 blog about SSD support in Windows 7. Be sure to follow some of the links in that post for additional information.

GUI and Command Line Tools

There’s good news and bad news on the user interface and tool front. I’ll save some of the bad news for later. Let’s start with the easy stuff and work our way towards, well, stuff you might not like. Let’s start with some graphical tools.

One of the first things you should do to check and see if Windows 7 recognizes your SSD drive is to check and see what disk defrag thinks about the situation. You can launch the disk defrag application a couple of different ways. Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Disk Defragmenter is one way. Or the simpler way is Start | key in DFRGUI.EXE and hit Enter.

Once Disk Defragmenter is running, click the Configure Schedule button. After that, click the Select Disks button. I see the following on my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with the lone Intel SSD drive.

As you can see, the SSD is not scheduled to be defragmented which is good. This is a good first indicator Windows understands the drive isn’t a rotational disk so there’s no need to run the task against that drive.

Intel created a SSD toolbox that can be used to further inspect their drives, display information, perform maintenance, etc. Notice I said their drives. It’s my understanding it can’t be used on other SSD drives (officially). That’s a bummer because it does provide a nicely formatted display of some key information. You can find the toolbox several different ways at intel.com. It appears they have a vanity URL for the kit at http://www.intel.com/go/ssdtoolbox. It appears v1.3.0.000 from 3/22/2010 is still the most recent version.

When I run the toolbox app, I see the following:

I want to dump out the drive information and look a couple of specific words to see how Windows 7 is interpreting the drive. The first one I want to look at is Word 217. I want to look at Word 169 second. In order to do that, I need to click the View Drive Information button. It’ll dump a bunch of information to the drive info portion of the app. You’ll notice we can export this to .CSV format if we like.

Next, we scroll down to Word 217 – Nominal Media Rotation Rate. We should see a value of 1 for the SSD drive if it is being detected properly as far as the storage drivers are concerned. Here’s what I see for my drive:

Now it’s time to get down to business and see if the drive is supporting TRIM. Scroll up to Word 169 to see if the Data Set Management Support is set to 1. Here’s what I see:

At this point we can see that the storage drivers and Windows will detect and use the Intel SSD properly. There are other tools out on the internet that will display portions of this information in a GUI application. For now, we are going to jump into the command line and take a look at some other information.

Launch an elevated command console and run the command, “fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify”. This command line utility, syntax and results are documented at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785435(WS.10).aspx. Here’s the result I see for the Intel drive I have:

As you can see, the file system is notifying the storage device (my SSD), that clusters have been freed due to a file delete. This is a good thing and what you should expect to see from this command.

And lastly, the bad news. I have a nifty command line utility called atatool that dumps out the information in a formatted fashion. The info is very similar to what you see in the Intel Toolbox above but much more detailed. At the moment, this utility is internal only. If we manage to get this placed on the download center, I will let you know.

When I execute “atatool –identify 0”, it dumps the information to the command console. The zero is the number identifier for the drive we are working with and was obtained using the –list command line argument for the tool. After scrolling down to Word 169, I see the following:

And if we scroll down to Word 217, we see the following:

Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? Keep in mind when I did all of this a year ago, it was just before I bought the drive you see in all of the screenshots above so the values were different. My previous drive didn’t support TRIM so the drive was destined to degrade performance over time. With the new drive, it should keep it’s fresh out-of-the-box speed for quite some time.

As for the “waste of money” comment way above in the start of this post, let me clarify a couple of things. First of all, the Intel SSD drive I’m using is twice as fast as any 7200rpm drive you might stuff in the primary bay of the ThinkPad T61p. That’s actually a decent return on the investment. Just don’t go putting the SSD in the hard drive adaptor for the Ultrabay. The I/O drops off sharply there and considering a 500GB 7200rpm drive is well below $100 now, you are literally flushing money down the drain. Get a 320 or 500GB rotational hard drive instead and save your pennies for a new ThinkPad. Enjoy.

Windows Live Essentials – new beta now available for download

Keith Combs — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:37:16 GMT

Got get the new beta @ http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta.

Hardware Photo Contest Winners

Keith Combs — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:42:51 GMT

See the creativity at http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/19464.

The IT Investigators Interview Microsoft Corporate VP and CIO, Tony Scott

Keith Combs — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Matt Hester and I have a podcast show called the IT Investigators. We like to have fun interviewing a variety of guests on wide ranging topics and this episode is no exception. We reached out to Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Tony Scott.

The body of questions center around general information technology skills and how they are changing in various situations. Some of the answers will surprise you. They certainly did me.

Matt and I also wondered about Tony’s time at Walt Disney Company. I mean after all, it is the magic kingdom so Matt just couldn’t resist asking about casual Friday and exploring your inner self with the characters of Disney. Tony was a good sport about it and talks about his stint as a bear.

The podcast is right at twenty four minutes and although the cell phone gods intervened right at the end, we managed to get a number of questions answered. I think you’ll find it is a good listen. Hope you enjoy it.

The Changing Nature of IT Skills – Interview with Tony Scott (24:18)

Files for Download and Offline Play – please right mouse click the format you want and SAVE AS to your PC or Mac.

Windows Home Server (WHS) “Vail” Beta – now available

Keith Combs — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 01:45:47 GMT

Windows Home Server is part of a long-term vision by Microsoft to create a new platform for the home. Windows Home Server helps families and home-based businesses with multiple computers to organize, share, and automatically back up photos, videos, music, and other important documents. With over 130,000 registered Microsoft Connect users, there is a stong and vibrant community of enthusiasts helping to improve Windows Home Server software.

Windows Home Server code name "Vail" is the version 2 release of Windows Home Server, now based on Windows Server ® 2008 R2. There are some exciting new features that you can try out if you choose to join the Windows Home Server Connect program such as:

Extending media streaming outside the home or office
Improvements in multi-PC backup and restore
Simplified setup and user experience
Significantly expanded development and customization tools for partners
Much, much more!

"How will the iPhone compete with this?"

Keith Combs — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:58:28 GMT

Engadget.com has a great article on the coming game titles for Windows Phone 7 and the Xbox Live integration. Check it out at http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/16/xbox-live-launch-titles-for-windows-phone-7-finally-revealed-we/. I used one of the comments from the article for the title of my post. Seemed fitting to me.

See the press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/aug10/08-16winphonegames.mspx.

Toshiba Libretto W100 – now available for order

Keith Combs — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:30:43 GMT

I’m not sure why they still have the word concept in the video because this just went from concept to reality. Who’s ordering one?

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 – RC now available

Keith Combs — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:50:40 GMT

VMMSSP (also referred to as the self-service portal) is a fully supported, partner-extensible solution built on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and System Center VMM. You can use it to pool, allocate, and manage resources to offer infrastructure as a service and to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform inside your datacenter.

VMMSSP includes a pre-built web-based user interface that has sections for both the datacenter managers and the business unit IT consumers, with role-based access control. VMMSSP also includes a dynamic provisioning engine. VMMSSP reduces the time needed to provision infrastructures and their components by offering business unit “on-boarding,” infrastructure request and change management. The VMMSSP package also includes detailed guidance on how to implement VMMSSP inside your environment.

Important: VMMSSP is not an upgrade to the existing VMM 2008 R2 self-service portal. You can choose to deploy and use one or both self-service portals depending on your requirements.
The self-service portal provides the following features that are exposed through a web-based user interface:

Configuration and allocation of datacenter resources: Store management and configuration information related to compute, network and storage resources as assets in the VMMSSP database.
Customization of virtual machine actions: Provide a simple web-based interface to extend the default virtual machine actions; for example, you can add scripts that interact with Storage Area Networks for rapid deployment of virtual machines.
Business unit on-boarding: Standardized forms and a simple workflow for registering and approving or rejecting business units to enroll in the portal.
Infrastructure request and change management: Standardized forms and human-driven workflow that results in reducing the time needed to provision infrastructures in your environment.
Self-Service provisioning: Supports bulk creation of virtual machines on provisioned infrastructure through the web-based interface.Helps business units to manage their virtual machines based on delegated roles.

Go get it @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fef38539-ae5a-462b-b1c9-9a02238bb8a7&displaylang=en.

I Spy the Win7 and R2 Service Pack 1 Beta

Keith Combs — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:09:10 GMT

When we first made the SP1 Beta available a few weeks ago, it wasn’t particularly easy to discover and download. It’s a little easier now. Just head right on over to the Microsoft Download Center @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c3202ce6-4056-4059-8a1b-3a9b77cdfdda.

Keep in mind this beta is nearly required for the latest generation laptops running the Intel i7 proc and Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role.

In order to download and install the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta you must currently have a Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 already installed. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta is available for installation in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.