Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : Windows 7

Ooops, that’s not right…

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:51:06 GMT

I have been asked twice this week if this is possible and if so how to do it, so I guess either the information is not readily available on the Internet, or the two people who asked me just couldn’t be bothered to look it up...!

I’m sure you’ve seen the below screen appear during the first boot of your computer or server after you have installed any updates in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s the screen that says “Completing stage X of Y”.

It is during this phase that, amongst other tasks, any files that were in use while the update was being applied are now copied into their right place and updated once the computer was rebooted. On very rare occasions you might one day see that the computer has gotten stuck at the above screen, and the configuring of the update(s) never completes. This creates a dilemma because you want to get access to the console so that you can work out what went wrong, but this will require a hard reset of the computer. However, on the screen in clear text it is telling you not to turn off your computer.

This issue might occur for several different reasons, which are way outside my field of expertise so I won’t try to explain them here. Thankfully, there is a solution for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that permits you to rollback the changes made by all the updates you applied during the last update. Simply use the below steps to recover your non-booting system:

Boot the computer into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) by either using the installation media or pressing F8 during boot (WinRE is built in to OS installations now).
Open a command prompt.
Navigate to the \Windows folder that you wish to repair.
Run the command: DISM /image:DRIVE LETTER OF WINDOWS DRIVE\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

An example of this command might be: DISM /image:C:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

A message should then appear saying

Reverting pending actions from the image....

The operation completed. Any revert of pending actions will be attempted after reboot.”

When you restart the computer you will now see a different screen, this time saying "Reverting pending actions". Once this process has completed, any changes that the previous update(s) made should now be reversed and you should be able to log on correctly.

Wallpapering your Windows 7 computer

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:28:10 GMT

As some of you may know, certain countries have personalisation packs for Windows 7 that are activated on during the installation of the operating system, depending on the regional settings you first set. So, if you tell Windows 7 setup that you are in the United Kingdom, one of the wallpapers that will be available to you is a photo of Stonehenge. But what if you want to see all the other wallpapers that are available in other regions? Well, you can either go fetch them out of the Windows installation folder, or follow the below steps to make them appear in the desktop personalisation section of Control Panel!

Open Control Panel
Click Clock, Language, and Region
Click Region and Language
Click on the Location tab
Select the following locations, pressing Apply after each one:
- Australia
- Canada
- South Africa
- Spain
- United Kingdom
- United States
Reset the location back to the correct one, and press OK.

Now you can right click on the desktop and choose Personalise from the menu. In the Desktop Backgrounds section, you’ll see some new backgrounds! Note that not all countries have their own personalisation packs, the only ones I know of are the ones listed above.

Anti-Virus Software, That's Free!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:27:00 GMT

I am probably the last Microsoft blogger to actually get round to writing something about this… but hey, I have been busy!

Microsoft recently released to the public their free anti-virus solution, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). I had been trialling the beta versions for a few months on a Windows 7 computer and I was really pleased with it, so the fact that it has now been released as a final product is great! Bizarrely, it even got the stamp of approval from my Anti-MS brother who told me that it consumes much less CPU and memory on his computer, and he has now gotten rid of his McAfee software completely (even though his paid for subscription has not expired). Of course, then he finished the sentence with the usual “but it is from Microsoft so is bound to be full of security holes” nonsense he actually believes.

The virus signature updates are automatically downloaded via the Windows Update service, so it is important that you have this feature enabled. MSE is available in 32 or 64 bit and will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, so go get it now! There really is no excuse not to run an antivirus product on all your computers, especially because it is completely free – you just need to have a genuine license of Windows in order to be able to install it… :-)

The download and more information is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Best Practices for Windows 7 Migrations Using Microsoft Application Virtualization

Daniel Oxley — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:56:06 GMT

There is a webcast this month that should be of interest to anyone interested in using application virtualisation, particularly if you are migrating to Windows 7. The date of the webcast is Monday the 26th of October 2009 at 12pm, but be aware that the time zone is GMT-5. To join the event, just click here. And now here’s the blurb for the webcast!

Best Practices for Windows 7 Migrations Using Microsoft Application Virtualization

Many companies need to increase the manageability of their IT infrastructure and reduce help desk costs while boosting employee productivity. CDW, a leading provider of technology solutions for business, government and education, faced these challenges in their organization and evaluated Windows 7 and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) as a way to solve these problems.
In this interactive one-hour video webcast, you'll hear about how CDW evaluated Windows 7 and found compelling reasons to upgrade their OS from Windows Vista. CDW also deployed Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V), part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) to simplify the deployment of key applications. In addition, CDW will discuss:

Using Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) allowed them to separate applications from the OS and deliver new versions of applications quickly, without conflicts with other applications

Saving time on application testing, packaging, deployment using App-V enabled CDW to allocate resources to higher priority projects

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Centre Configuration Manager allowed CDW to deploy new desktops 25% faster with 70% in cost savings due to the fact that Windows 7 runs on pre-existing hardware

Join the Event

Benchmarking Windows 7

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:36:20 GMT

A very common request that clients make when starting a Windows deployment project is that we must reliably and accurately demonstrate that Windows Vista or Windows 7 is worth upgrading to from Windows XP, especially if the purchase of new hardware is not part of the project; often, and logically, clients will try to re-use their existing hardware platform whenever possible in order to save money. Consequently, I am regularly asked to prove that the newer version of Windows will run equally as well as Windows XP on the same hardware. Their reasoning being is that they won’t upgrade the operating system on the existing hardware if the end-user experience is worse in terms of performance – regardless of how good the new features of the operating system are. The problem with this is two-fold, one is a technical issue and the other is pure fantasy...

Attempting to benchmark and compare two different operating systems (yes, I know that each version of Windows is an evolution of the previous one, but it is still complicated) and providing accurate results is an extremely complicated task. Unless done right, the results can be often speculative and can be turned upside down purely on your point of view. It is also dodgy territory to get into because of the sheer number of factors that need to be taken into account in order for the test to be of any value, and then trying to explain the results to a lay person can be even more tricky. This is because benchmarking a computer is not simply about measuring the raw speed of the CPU, in the same way that the horsepower alone of a car cannot be used to gauge if one car is quicker than another – you need to consider other factors such as the weight, ratios of the gearbox and torque.

There are plenty of free tools that you can find on the Internet that will measure your computers speed, but more than a few are totally useless because they are simply measuring individual parameters such as CPU speed and RAM read/writes. To benchmark a computer properly you need something that will measure hundreds of different aspects of the computer’s hardware and the operating system installed onto it, in order to produce an reliable result; even things such as the BIOS software can have a profound effect on the results from the benchmarking tests.

Because this is such a hot topic, and given that Windows 7 is around the corner, Microsoft published some benchmarking guides so that you can start measuring right now the performance of your systems with Windows 7. I have included the link for the Windows 7 guide below, along with the (now defunct) Windows XP guide. The Windows XP guide is there because, after all, the only real way to gauge the performance of your system is when you compare it to a different operating system running on the exact same hardware.

Benchmarking on Windows XP: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/benchmark.mspx

Performance Testing Guide for Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Win7Perf.mspx

Oh, and the “pure fantasy” I mentioned earlier... Well, Windows Vista has had a somewhat “turbulent” life in terms of public perception. I have always honestly told clients that my personal experiences with Windows Vista have been excellent, and it has always been fast for me. Likewise, when I have worked on Windows Vista deployment projects this has also always been the case, the deployed computers always performed better than clients expectations. However, often when clients talked about benchmarking Windows Vista they were very dubious of the results and tended to disregard them purely because they had it in their head that Windows Vista was/is a terribly slow beast. Overcoming their personal views was actually extremely hard to do, regardless of how well benchmarking facts and statistics actually were.

Application Compatibility List for Windows 7

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:29:00 GMT

A very common misconception that I am hearing regarding Windows 7 is that Microsoft has removed all of the problems that Windows Vista had caused with application compatibility. While it is true that certain features of Windows 7 have been improved/tweaked, such as User Access Control (UAC), there will still be many applications that worked without problems on Windows XP but will experience issues when executed on Windows 7.

The difference between Windows XP and Windows Vista was huge, and since the release of Windows Vista some three years have passed; Windows 7 has evolved even further and incorporated many more changes. A good portion of the compatibility problems can be fixed using various methods, but the fact remains that migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 will not be a walk in the park.

Microsoft has up on its website a list of applications, along with their exact version numbers, that have been approved (by the developers, not Microsoft) for running correctly and as expected on Windows 7, check it out here: https://winqual.microsoft.com/member/SoftwareLogo/windows7list.aspx

If you are planning on migrating to Windows 7 then the best thing you can do right now is to consult the list and start talking to your application vendors in order to find out which of your applications are going to have problems when run on Windows 7. Something I often saw when Windows Vista migration projects were planned is that application compatibility testing was often started too late in the project, or was not assigned enough resources simply because the problem was underestimated. This caused delays, sometimes substantial, in the deployment of the operating system.

Quicker Access to Windows 7 Virtual PC settings

Daniel Oxley — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:10:00 GMT

To edit the settings of a virtual computer using Virtual PC in Windows 7 requires the opening of the Virtual PC console, selecting the virtual machine you wish to edit, and then pressing the ‘Settings’ button, as shown in the screenshot below.

In order to reduce the number of required steps to do this (and assuming you know which file it is), you can edit a key in the registry that will add a new item to the Windows Explorer context menu that appears when right clicking on a file. If you make the changes detailed below, you will be able to right click on the settings file for a virtual machine (files with the .vmc extension) and access directly the settings window, as shown below.

Copy and paste the text between the lines below into a text file, but save it with the .reg file extension. Then double click on it to import it into the registry.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Windows.VirtualPC.VMC\shell\Settings]
@=hex(2):40,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,56,00,\
4d,00,43,00,50,00,72,00,6f,00,70,00,65,00,72,00,74,00,79,00,48,00,61,00,6e,\
00,64,00,6c,00,65,00,72,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,2c,00,2d,00,31,00,31,00,\
30,00,00,00
"Icon"=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,56,00,\
4d,00,43,00,50,00,72,00,6f,00,70,00,65,00,72,00,74,00,79,00,48,00,61,00,6e,\
00,64,00,6c,00,65,00,72,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,2c,00,2d,00,31,00,30,00,\
30,00,39,00,00,00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Windows.VirtualPC.VMC\shell\Settings\command]
@="vpcsettings.exe \"%1\""

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As always, edit the registry at your own risk. I can’t be responsible for anything…

Application Installs, be gone!

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:00:26 GMT

As a follow up to my earlier post about modularising my computer, I wanted to add a couple of points which I either missed out, or did not explain so well :-S

The first, which is a common question, is how to install Windows 7 into a VHD file without having to first install Window Server 2008 with Hyper-V onto a computer. You can read the details on how to do this with this blog post by Keith Combs; he has even created a webcast showing how it is done!

I mentioned that I try not to install applications into the operating system anymore, instead using App-V. What I forgot to mention is that, whenever possible, I try to use PortableApps as replacement for applications that I previously had to install. While not a perfect substitute, often these alternative applications give me all the functionality (and sometimes more) that I need. Also, by placing all these applications into a folder that I keep in Live Mesh, they are automatically copied down to my computer when it is reinstalled. It also allows me to share the application files between the two operating systems I have in a dual-boot setup without any duplication of files as they go into a separate partition and require no install process. Couldn’t be simpler!

This works both ways, an example of a good replacement is that of VLC Player replacing Windows Media Player. VLC has all the codecs you could ever imagine built into it, and offers pretty much the same functionality as Windows Media Player. However, trying to find a good replacement for Windows Live Messenger is pretty much impossible; the closest I have found so far is Pidgin, but it lacks an awful lot of functionality that Windows Live Messenger has.

IKEA-fying my computer

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:50:00 GMT

I have had this blog post in the pipeline for a while now, but I have been waiting until all the pieces fell into place, to make it something actually worthwhile to read! Be warned though, this is a rather long blog post – but please stay awake!

Having access to earlier builds of Microsoft operating systems is great (and pretty important for my job given that I specialise in deploying them!) as I get to play with new technologies long before everyone else :-). The only downside to this though is that, seeing as I only have one company laptop, it means that every few months I am constantly formatting and reinstalling my computer. This is a task that everyone knows is painful; no matter how great the setup process of Microsoft Windows and then all the applications, it is still a couple of days work afterwards getting everything just right. Also, it is not as simple as just reinstalling Windows and applications as I always had to realise the following process:

Back up user data
Back up Outlook PST files
Back up Internet Favourites
Export all certificates for my user account
Export Bitlocker recovery keys
Burn DVD with latest version of Microsoft Windows
Format hard drive
Install operating system
Join computer to domain
Install all patches
Activate license for Windows
Install all applications, i.e. Office, FOXIT PDF, Anti-Virus, Visual Studio, Visio etc. etc.
Install more patches
Move user data, favourites, Outlook files, certificates and everything else back to internal laptop hard drive
Activate Bitlocker on hard drive (and re-encrypt C: partition)

It is such a tedious task that it would often put me off of changing the OS, particularly if I was away from the office travelling or did not have the time to do all of the above at home. And, after I had a Homer Simpson moment, I became paranoid that my backups were safe, so sometimes I made two copies of everything! What I wanted/needed was something a bit more ‘IKEA’-like; something modular that would allow me to swap pieces in and out easily without affecting the rest...

One day, on the way home from Barcelona on the train (trains are incredible in Spain by the way. From Madrid to Barcelona at 300 km/h without even noticing it) when I realised that, with a new feature in Windows 7 this was now possible! I have now been playing around the idea for a while and I wanted to blog about it, not so much that someone else might follow the steps (because it is far from painless at the moment, improving though) but because it shows the potential of what can be done right now with Windows 7 and existing software, and it might also be a common configuration one day in the future, who knows?

With Windows 7 a computer can boot using an operating system that is installed inside a VHD file, but the operating system is using the physical hardware of the computer – this feature is called “Boot from VHD” and has nothing to do with virtualisation apart from that it uses the VHD disk file format. What this means is that you can prepare a Windows 7 virtual machine in Hyper-V, execute sysprep and then copy the VHD file to a different computer and configure it to boot. The operating system inside the VHD file runs using all the physical hardware of the computer, but all operating system data remains inside the VHD file (think: container file, nothing more). Now, if my operating system is all contained inside a single file on the disk, here is the first step to making it modular; to change the operating system, I just need to copy a new VHD file to my hard drive and delete the unwanted VHD file or make it dual-boot.

This leaves me then with the problem of having to back up all user data before changing the operating system, and then restoring the data afterwards. But what if I configured Live Mesh to maintain a copy of my data in the cloud? By doing this, all I have to do is change the operating system, install the Live Mesh client agent and then sit back while all my user data reappears on my computer from the cloud. I won’t have had to make any backups, nor recover any files. My data is pulled down automatically from the online backup that Live Mesh maintains for me automatically and I can eliminate this pain from the process as well.

Now then, what about the reinstalling all of the applications every time? This is an easy one: if I package all of my applications into App-V “bubbles”, then I no longer need to reinstall any applications at all, all I do is just launch the application inside it’s bubble and I am up and running – no more application reinstalls and no need to worry about compatibility issues with a new operating system

In figure 1, I have represented the idea with a diagram. Every piece of the problem is contained inside it’s own module and can be swapped out easily, without affecting any other module – I can even change the underlying hardware, i.e. move to a new physical computer, with minimal effort now :-)

Figure 1: Welcome to the Oxley-verse

In figure 2 I show my drive partition schema, so that you can see that I have no operating system actually installed, it is all inside a VHD file (note the blue colour for icon on disk 1). Disk 0 has 2 partitions, excluding the initial RAW partition, the first (the D: drive) is the partition that holds the VHD file. It is not a bootable partition, and contains only a single file, the VHD file. In the M: drive partition on disk 0 I have all of my user data, application files, etc. This is important as, in order for this to work, the VHD must only contain the operating system and nothing else.

Disk 1 is the VHD file that is mounted at boot time, containing only my Windows 7 install.

Figure 2: Drive schema

Finally, by redirecting my entire user profile to the M: drive, I am not using the C: for anything other than the operating system. All of the user data, such as Favourites, documents, even temp files, etc. are redirected to M:. I have it all working great now, but it took an awful lot of work to get there. However, now that it is done, I can change my operating system (simply swapping out the VHD, fixing a few registry keys etc.) and be working with everything again within a couple of hours, as opposed to a couple of days. Beat that for efficiency!

Lessons learned:

As with all experimenting I learnt plenty of lessons, the hard way. Also, it is not totally modular yet, as certain pieces can’t be abstracted from the operating system; an example of this is the anti-virus software that still needs to be installed inside the VHD file and certain applications insist on writing to C:\Users\USERNAME. Below, I have listed the biggest problems that I came experienced, as well as some issues that need to be considered. The biggest issue I have seen though is not actually a technical one; some of the configurations are very very very likely to be unsupported by Microsoft and/or third party vendors. This doesn’t concern me too much because I am my own helpdesk, but it may be an issue in different environments.

Microsoft company policy states that any disk partition that contains confidential information must be protected with Bitlocker. As you can see in the drive schema above, M: is encrypted, and so is C:, which is inside the VHD file. Unless things change between now and the release of Windows 7, a Bitlocker’d “Boot from VHD” file is an unsupported configuration.
Likewise, I am pretty certain that Windows 7 in VHD on a computer that has no operating system installed ‘normally’ (i.e. the files on the disk rather than wrapped up in a VHD file) is also an unsupported configuration.
There is no 64 bit App-V client available yet.
Sequencing applications in App-V can be a fiddly job, and also not all applications can be sequenced.
There is allegedly a very slight loss of performance for Windows 7 running inside a VHD file when compared to a ‘normally installed’ Windows 7 computer. I would argue this point because, in my opinion, any performance degradation is either negligible or unnoticeable – but I am not refuting what Microsoft has published regarding this issue.
By default, the installation of Windows 7 will not create a paging file if it detects that a VHD file is being used to boot. It took me a while to work out why I couldn’t start any virtual machines on my computer due to lack of memory because of this. You can create a paging yourself, but you’ll need to create it on a partition outside the VHD file, in my case it is on the D: drive as it is the only partition not encrypted with Bitlocker.
Using standalone App-V packages requires a hefty amount of disk space because the packages are often larger than the space that a normal installation of the application would consume. Also, by carving up the local disk into partitions, I limited myself to the amount of space available.
App-V applications can take a little longer to start (unless caching is used) compared to an installed application.

After reading this, the obvious questions is “why not just put the OS into a different partition?”. My answer to this though is simple; doing it this way I can prepare the VHD file using Hyper-V at leisure without loosing access to everything else while I am doing it. If it takes 3 weeks, then that is no problem! Also, and importantly, I can put all the operating systems I want to boot into VHD files that all reside on the same partition. I am currently running a dual-boot configuration with Windows 7 in one VHD file, and Window Server 2008 R2 (with Hyper-V enabled of course) in another VHD file, with both VHD files on the same partition (D:).

If you try any of this on your computer, please don’t later on phone Microsoft support for help. Not unless they publish a support statement clarifying that the configuration is a supported one! This is simply an experiment I have been working on that works extremely well for me as I often reinstall my computer.

p.s. for those that don't know. IKEA is a mega super store that sells modular furniture that you take home and try to build yourself.

Yes, I am still alive...!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

I know posts here have been sparse recently but I haven't neglected the blog, honest! Firstly, I was in the Canary Islands for a week’s holiday and since then I have been swamped with preparation work for the upcoming release of Windows 7. Consequently, I will have some great Windows 7 topics to blog about, as well as plenty of other things.

In the meantime, you can check out some of the shoddy marketing attempts that VMWare is using to try and discredit Hyper-V R2. Frankly, for a billion dollar company like VMWare, they should be able to do better than this. Anyway, the responses from Jeff Woolsey (Microsoft) should help to dispel some of the baseless fud that my anti-Microsoft VMware-obsessed brother has had drilled into him by his VMWare sales rep.

Get the full story here: http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/hyper-v-winning-daily-vmware-fud-reaching-new-heights.aspx

If this is the best that VMWare can do, and if this is their latest hard thought out Hyper-V killer strategy then they are clearly worried about what Hyper-V R2 will do to their marketshare.

Stay tuned...

Faster Creation of Virtual Machines

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:55:49 GMT

I recently noticed a blog post on TechNet about a new tool that was released on CodePlex. WIM2VHD is a command-line tool allows you to create sysprepped VHD images from any Windows 7 installation source (and I suspect Windows Server 2008 R2 as well) that work with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Windows 7's new Native VHD-Boot functionality. Basically, you can create an entire virtual machine VHD file in minutes without have to go through the whole setup process of Windows. It is nice and simple to use, and after a brief moment of confusion I had it working fine :-)

To create my first VHD file, I ran the command: cscript.exe C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\WIM2VHD.wsf /wim:e:\sources\install.wim /sku:Ultimate /vhd:U:\Hyper-V\Win7.vhd /size:12000 /disktype:Dynamic

However, this failed (as shown below) with the error “Error: 0: No filePath was specified”. After fiddling around with the command line to make sure that I was specifying the relevant paths, I realised that WIM2VHD was failing because it was unable to mount the WIM file from the Windows 7 DVD.

In order to mount WIM files, you first need to have installed the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which you can get here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4AD85860-D1F4-42A1-A46C-E039E3D0DB5D&displaylang=en. One thing to note is that I installed the beta version that was released for Windows 7. I do not actually know if the current 1.1 version will work with WIM2VHD, I imagine so. The 1.1 version can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=94BB6E34-D890-4932-81A5-5B50C657DE08&displaylang=en

Once that was installed, I simply re-ran the previous command and, as you can see, had much more success!

This really is a great tool, as you can create virtual machines extremely quickly. And, the possibilities are endless because you could incorporate WIM2VHD into existing processes so that you could provision new computers easily and quickly on-the-fly using scripts.

Pink computing

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:49:43 GMT

Last weekend I bought my wife one of those handbag sized netbook computers, an Acer Aspire 1 – 150, in a bright shiny pink case. The guy in the shop tried to convince me to get the one that had Linux preinstalled on it because “it just works, and is really user-friendly” – yeah, right. The hardware characteristics are really good considering I only paid €300 for it; an Intel Atom 1.6Ghz CPU, 1Gb of RAM, 160Gb internal hard drive and built in wireless. The screen takes a bit of getting used to because it is only about 9” diagonal – but isn’t the whole point of netbooks that they are really small?

Anyway, before I even let her get her hands on the machine, I wiped the existing OEM install of Windows XP and installed the current beta version of Windows 7 along with a copy of Office 2007 Ultimate. Install of the OS only took 15 minutes from boot to final desktop, which is pretty impressive. However, getting the computer to boot the setup for Windows in the first place was a bit of a task, mostly because the computer has no CD/DVD drive, and my copy of Windows 7 is on a DVD. Thankfully, this is easy to solve with Windows 7 as it allows you to create a bootable USB drive that does the same job as the bootable DVD.

After install, everything was working perfectly except for the wireless adaptor, it seems there are no native Windows 7 drivers available (yet?). A quick search on the internet found a page from someone describing the same problem and where they sourced the drivers from. The file you need to search for and download is called “atheros_v7.6.1.194.exe”, and then force the install of the driver (using the ‘Have disk’ option in Device Manager).

The trickiest part of the install though was creating the bootable USB drive, so I thought I’d share the required steps here. All these commands you need to run from a Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer with your 4Gb (or bigger) pen drive plugged in.

First of all, you need to set up the USB drive, and make it bootable. Be aware that this process is destructive, so any existing data on the USB drive will be lost. The tool to use is diskpart.exe, so just run the following commands:

diskpart.exe
list volume
select volume n (where n is the volume number for your USB drive that is shown in the table)
clean
create partition primary
assign letter U:
active
exit
format U: /fs:NTFS /q
bootsect /nt60 U: (the file bootsect.exe is on your Windows 7 DVD if you don’t already have it)

Next you just copy over all the files from your Windows 7 DVD onto the USB drive. Once this is done, you can plug the USB drive into your netbook and reboot. Make sure that you have either configured the boot order in the BIOS to boot from the USB drive first, or that you press F12 during the BIOS initialisation stage in order to open the one-time boot menu.

Just in case you are still unsure about the above commands, I have included a screen shot of what it should look like below. One thing to note is that I needed to convert the file system to NTFS in order for it to boot, so I used the convert.exe commands that you can see below.

Although I am not sure that she is totally won over with Windows 7/Office 2007 yet (her computer at work still uses Windows 2000/Office 2000 if you can actually believe that), I put it down to the major overhaul that happened to Windows someone along the road between Windows 2000 and Windows 7... The strange thing is though that our home computer runs Windows Vista/Office 2007 and I think she really likes it!

Not quite a perfect install of Win2K8 R2

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:28:12 GMT

The beta releases of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (WIN2K8R2) have really been the hot topics of the last month or so, as you’ve probably seen if you read various blogs on TechNet/MSDN or other IT news sources. I’ve avoided commenting on how great they are, especially Windows 7, simply because pretty much everybody else has been doing it. Instead, I thought I’d blog on how I fixed a pretty common problem that people are having with Windows Server 2008 R2 on laptops, that of driver support.

My work laptop (a Dell Latitude D820 – not a bad machine, although I wish I had the D830 for full x64 memory support) runs Windows 7 x64 dual-booting with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64. Windows 7 picked up all of my hardware and installed all the necessary drivers without any additional actions required, other than running Windows Update to get the graphics card driver. My next step was to install Windows Server 2008 R2. After the final reboot, I went to Device Manager to see what state I was in regarding missing drivers; everything looked pretty good apart from 2 devices (see below picture) that did not have any drivers installed. Running Windows Update didn’t solve the driver issue either so I was stuck.

The above picture shows how Device Manager looked after final reboot during the installation of the OS. It looked like I was stuck, but after playing around a bit I actually managed to advance a bit further! The following process below might help to get it (most of it anyway) resolved for your computer as well.

Right-click on the unknown device and choose “Update Driver”.
In the path, select the Windows folder from your previously installed Windows 7 partition. Obviously this only works if you have Windows 7 installed, dual-booting. I expect that this would work though if you could get access to the Windows folder of a Windows 7 installation from another machine. Make sure the check box “Include Subfolders” is checked, and press Next.
Windows will now look for any drivers in the specified directory.
And as if by magic, drivers are being installed! :-)
Returning to Device Manager, one of the devices was now installed correctly. Unfortunately, when I repeated the above steps for the remaining device it did not work. Looking at the PnPID of it suggests that it is the Bluetooth radio, something I can do without in my Windows Server 2008 R2 installation.

Of course, this ‘fix’ is most likely to break any chance of getting support from Microsoft, and may even introduce system instabilities. But, if you are just testing out the new OS then this might be a good option for you to get all (or almost all) of your hardware installed correctly!

Restarting the Microsoft File Transfer Manager

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:58:05 GMT

Unless you have been hiding under a rock this week you’ll no doubt be aware that the beta versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 both were released on TechNet and MSDN. If you’ve tried downloading them as well then you’ll know that they will take a while as each one requires a download of about 2.8 Gb.

As I am using a rather slow network connection to download them, it is going to take a while to get them both and will also mean that my computer will be switched off and on a couple of times before they finish. So, how do you continue the downloads without having to go back to the TechNet/MSDN page each time? Easy, just open the options on the Microsoft File Transfer Manager application (the one that you can see in the image below) and tick the “Place application shortcut on the desktop” option that is on the “General” tab. This will place an icon on your desktop that allows you to run the download manager application directly whenever you want. You can then move this icon into your Start Menu or Quick Launch bar for instant access.

Another option is to copy the file “C:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe” to a different location via the command prompt, and then launch this .exe file.