Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : Windows

Converting Windows Error Codes To Something More Friendly

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:30:24 GMT

I can never remember how to do this, so I always end up looking it up. Therefore, I am posting it here partly for me as a reference, but also in case anyone else finds it useful :-)

Sometime the error codes that are returned by Microsoft Windows are accompanied by a rather cryptic message, or the message doesn’t quite offer enough information to be able to work out what has happened. Well, if you follow the steps below you can look up what the message means to Windows, based on the error code that was returned.

Make note of the last four numbers of the hexadecimal error code, in this example it is 2AFC.

Open the Windows Calculator (calc.exe) and switch it to the Scientific mode (or Programmer mode if you are using Windows 7). Select the Hex radio button, then enter the last four digits of the hexadecimal error number.

Select the Dec radio button, and you’ll see the hexadecimal number converted to a decimal one.

Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and type the following command: “NET HELPMSG ” followed by the decimal number that appears in the calculator. In this case, the command would be: “NET HELPMSG 11004”. You will then be returned what is hopefully a more friendly version of the error message.

Note that this will only work for Win32 error codes that originate from Microsoft Windows, the codes will often start with 8007 but not always. Also, if the net helpmsg command does not return a result it most likely means that the error either did not originate from Windows, or is not a valid Win32 process.

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/

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.

Laptop Hunters and Apple

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:25:00 GMT

I have to confess that I never got to see any of the advertisements that Microsoft has been running (I saw a couple on YouTube out of curiosity, but never on TV) where they give something like $1500 to a person and tell them to buy the best computer that they can with that money. The adverts take a dig at the colossal prices that Apple charges (dubbed the ‘Apple Tax’) for their computers because basically you can’t get an Apple computer for that same amount of money, but you can get a computer running Windows (and be a far better buy in my opinion).

Well, it seems that the advertisements irritated Apple somewhat because someone in their legal department called Microsoft complaining about them only two weeks after they started running. Basically they asked Microsoft to stop running the ads because they were no longer true, they had lowered their prices. All $100 of it…

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Kevin Turner, who received the call, said:

"Two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey -- this is a true story -- saying, Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I've ever taken in business."

If you don’t believe me, read it here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/elop/07-15-09WPC2009.mspx

Saving The World, Printer Ink First

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:08:00 GMT

Saving something seems to to be the big thing in I.T. at moment, which is never a bad thing. The current big thing is the Green Computing initiatives, particularly with the prominence now of virtual computing and power saving features in new operating systems (hint, hint: Windows Vista and Windows 7). Another very common one I see is the footer that a lot of people include on their emails, looks like this:

Well, a new one has appeared which on face value might seem a bit unbelievable, but the authors reckon that it actually really works. An open-source font has been created that looks like Swiss cheese!

The creators claim that, because the font is full of holes, you will save around 20% of the ink in your printer; thus saving money and resources. When I first saw it I was sceptical, but according to the website all those holes really do make a difference. I’ll give it a try to see how useful it is.

Note that, if your document has a lot of bold text then all those little holes will pretty much disappear, as you can see below:

Also, although it is called EcoFont, it doesn’t actually appear in your font list under that name which was a little confusing. It took me a while to find it (maybe this is in the documentation…) listed as Sprang eco sans.

You can get the font and read more about it here: http://www.ecofont.eu/splash_en_pro.html

Obviously, the better way to save ink in your printer (and paper as well) is to only print something when you absolutely have to. Countless times I have been onsite with clients and they have printed ALL of their documentation for me to read, which is such a waste as I could just as easily read it on screen if they simply email it to me. Also, when I submit documentation for review by customers, it is often printed out several times so people can go through it for reviewing; I know it is less comfortable to read off the computer screen, but still…

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.

Safely setting autologon for Windows

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:16:57 GMT

When configuring Microsoft Windows to auto-logon, most people just modify the following keys in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AutoAdminLogon
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultUserName
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultPassword
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultDomain

However, the problem with doing it that way is that the password for the user account is stored in the registry as unencrypted text, which means that anyone with enough rights to view the registry, be it locally or remotely, can view the password easily and potentially compromise the system. This also applies if the computer was infected with a virus or malware, which could also potentially read the configured auto-logon user credentials and then send them over the internet for future malicious use.

However, if you use the Sysinternals tool AutoLogons to configure the auto-logon then the password string value is stored encrypted in the registry as an LSA secret. Which means that, once the autologon is configured, the unencrypted version of the password used cannot be viewed by anyone/anything at all.

The tool couldn’t be simpler to use, and most importantly, it helps to maintain the security of your systems.

Yet Another Core Configurator

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:38:34 GMT

In the true spirit of Linux, it seems that everybody is re-inventing the wheel – because they can. So, just as your favourite Linux distro had 9,999 different versions of the same basic calculator tool (but all written by different people), it seems lately that everybody has written a graphical interface for Windows Server Core 2008. Although I may be coming across rather cynical, this tool is actually pretty good. For those of you who don’t want to use the command-line to administer Server Core, this tool might just be what you are looking for. Of course, any die-hard command prompt lovers which sneer at this tool!

By the way, I am not endorsing the tool so if it turns out that it breaks your system completely you might hear me give a ‘Nelson’ laugh in true ‘The Simpsons’ style (see below).

Network Issues prevent certain Installations (otherwise known as 0xc000000f)

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:28:17 GMT

I have recently been setting up a Hyper-V laboratory for a Windows 7 project. I had all the machines installed, and I was configuring them using an RDP connection rather than using VMConnect (the reason is that it is nice and easy to get access to files that are outside the VM this way, simply use \\tsclient\c (or any other drive letter) in order to get access to the C: drive of the local computer from the VM).

So, I popped the Microsoft Office 2007 DVD into the drive on my laptop in order to install it, but upon running setup.exe I was getting the below error:

As is sometimes the case, the error message was pretty useless. “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000000f)” doesn’t really mean that much to me, and my first thought was that it was a problem with a scratched or dirty DVD. However, when I then tried to install some anti-virus software, I got the same exact error message, but this time I had launched the setup file from my local C: drive, thus eliminated dodgy media as the cause. A search on the web turned up no results at all (it seems that when Windows Vista fails to boot right it also displays the error 0xc000000f) apart from non-related issues.

In the end, I worked out that it seemed to be a problem with running the install over the network, because by copying the files inside the VM, all the applications installed correctly with no further fuss. Now, there is normally no issue at all with running an installation over the network (think SMS/SCCM) so I suspect that this is something specific to using the \\tsclient paths from RDP inside a virtual machine – either that or I completely did something wrong – this is always a possibility :-(

Kicking the tyres

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:44:00 GMT

Want to try out Windows Server 2008? Or perhaps Exchange Server 2007? You can download complete virtual machine environments for a whole list of Microsoft products, free of charge. Check out the Test Drive program here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx for more information and the download links.

The best thing about it is that you can download an entire virtual machine with the software pre-configured and running correctly – so you don’t need to complete any additional tasks in order to start playing/testing/evaluating the products immediately in your own virtual environment.

Enjoy!

Just fix it for me please…

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:33:58 GMT

Articles on the Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) sometimes contain pretty straightforward solutions, such as changing a single value in the registry or running a simple command. They are often so simple that I always wondered why Windows could not just fix it for you, saving you the hassle of finding out what the solution is in the first place! Well, it seems that my thoughts are now being auto-magically implemented somewhat on select KB articles!

Just look for the “Fix it” badge on the article to see if there is an auto-fix available.

More details are on the blog: http://blogs.technet.com/fixit4me/default.aspx

I didn’t even know that this blog existed until I got an e-mail internally about it the other day. It is a great idea, and something that has always bugged me because it has always been such an obvious thing that Microsoft should be doing.

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:51:11 GMT

I came across the following document the other day that contains plenty of useful tuning parameters and settings that you can tweak in order to improve performance in Windows Server 2008. The nice thing is that each setting and its effect (or side-effect) are explained so that you can decide if you want to make the change or not, or whether it is even relevant to your particular system.

The document is especially useful if, like me, you run Windows Server 2008 on a laptop as your main, and only, operating system. I am still going through the document (it is rather large at 78 pages) so it will be a while before I make many changes to my system, but if I do find some gems that really are worth discussing then I’ll post them individually here!

The document can be found at this page: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx

Project Highlander

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:28:00 GMT

Having better ‘green credentials’ than your competitor seems to be the in thing at the moment. You’ll often see a company saying that they will plant X number of trees for each purchase you make, etc. Of course, this is always a good thing and anything that is done, no matter how small, to improve the environment benefits everyone.

Another hot topic at the moment is that of server virtualisation. Since Microsoft released Hyper-V, and since the Hyper-V/VMWare debate/war has been raging, I am nearly always asked about it when visiting clients. The questions always revolve around the same topics: what is needed to be able to start virtualising servers?, how reliable it is?, will users be able to detect a difference when using a virtual server?, by how much can the costs actually be reduced?, etc.

With regards to the last question above about calculating the cost-saving (and linking to the first paragraph), I was sent an email recently from a friend with a link for a website where you could ‘instantly calculate’ the cost-saving benefits you could achieve if you used virtualisation technologies. Admittedly I was pretty dubious at first as I believed that being able to put a number to this had to be rather tricky because there are, in my opinion, too many immeasurable factors to consider. However, after going through the site and reading about the calculations and how they are made, I have to say that it is pretty impressive. They take into account not just the monetary savings of not running the physical hardware when you virtualise a server, but also things like the reduction in energy usage, support requirements, downtime, air conditioning, CO2 output, etc.

www.hyper-green.com

The above screenshots I took from the site itself, you can see it here if you want to calculate your own cost-savings, and you really should go through regardless of whether you believe or not the results. Before dismissing the site as mere marketing propaganda by Microsoft, I should point out that although it is a Microsoft site, most of the information (including the calculations of cost-saving) has been provided by an independent body (Alinean) rather than Microsoft.

Oh, and why is this post titled “Project Highlander”? Well, quite a while ago I was working at a bank in London that was seriously investigating how many servers could be virtualised in order to save IT expenditure. Management wanted us to reduce the number of physical servers to an absolute minimum as the bank was going through rather a bad time financially and they needed to make massive expenditure cuts. During one of the kick-off meetings the managers asked for a name for the project (perhaps more important than the actual project…?) to which a colleague of mine quipped “That’s easy, ‘Project Highlander’; because ‘there can be only one’! ”. Although he said it jokingly, the name was approved immediately! However, we never actually got the number of physical servers down to 1, as it was deemed a little too risky.

P.S. Unless you’ve seen the excellent film “Highlander” you won’t understand the previous paragraph…

P.P.S For my Spanish readers, the film was called “Los Imortales”, rather than “Highlander” in Spain.

Windows Vista Service Pack 2

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:59:32 GMT

Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista (SP2) has been a hot topic recently. While Microsoft has not released an immense amount of information regarding this upcoming important update, some interesting stuff has appeared (here and here, for example).

As normal, the service pack will include all previously released updates since service pack 1 (SP1) was introduced, along with some additional new features:

Support for new types of Hardware and emerging standards, including Bluetooth 2.1, the ability to natively record data on Blu-Ray media, support for ICCD/CCID smart cards, and support for the new VIA 64-bit CPU
Wi-Fi setup and maintenance is simplified with the addition of Windows Connect Now (WCN)
The ex-FAT file system is enabled, supporting UTC timestamps to ensure correct file synchronization across time zones
Windows Search 4.0 is included, which provides users faster and more relevant results. Windows Search 4.0 also allows Group Policy integration, which provides administrative control over search parameters
End users should also experience improvements in resume performance when a Wi-Fi connection is no longer available

One important thing that you should be aware of though is that SP1 will be a prerequisite for installing SP2. This means that it will only install on computers that already have service pack 1 installed. This is important as it will need to be taken into account when you start planning the rollout of the update, as you might need to first deploy SP1 to the computers that don’t have it (none by now though hopefully) before being able to deploy SP2.

See this blog post for some more information.