From the category archives:
Windows Client
Windows Client
A possible settings change to make your Surface even nicer ...
I've been awaiting my Microsoft Surface RT since preorders opened for Australia. It's been interesting ... it's certainly fair to say that Microsoft's online store has some way to go in terms of logistics. I've seen people cancel their preorders because of it ... not to mention the unfortunates whose orders were mistakenly cancelled!
But that's another story. I received mine yesterday afternoon, and have had a fun time playing with it so far. I wanted to drop a quick post about a small change that can be made to improve the overall responsiveness and performance - and probably battery life - of the Surface. I've seen some reviews around indicating the poor performance of the Surface. There aren't any hard and fast tests so far, but I found that while there was certainly some noticeable slowdown in various apps and games, it seemed to even out after a relatively short time.
Being the curious IT guy that I am, I did some poking around. At its heart, the Surface is still a Windows ma ...
It slices! It dices! It will clean as it blends! Or will it?
Windows was always going to head in the Metro / Modern UI direction. It's been coming for some time. I recall some early noises about this as the Zune evolved, but Wikipedia does a decent job of summarising the early history;
"Early uses of the Metro principles began as early as Microsoft Encarta 95 and MSN 2.0, and later evolved into Windows Media Center and Zune."
It's hardly the first significant change to Microsoft's user interface - think DOS to Windows and Windows 3 to Windows 95, as obvious examples. Microsoft evidently like to shake things up periodically. This is, though, undeniably a big change.
I have a Zune HD, and I love it (although of late, it's developed some increasingly odd quirks). It's a nice device, with a nice user interface/experience. Something I miss from later iterations of the UI is the idea that you can tap on the top 'heading' to go back a screen. Metro was always going to develop further, but in this early version, there was something simple and e ...
Get your KMS Server ready for your new Windows 8 clients and Server 2012 OS's!
Hi,
Now that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are out, any company that uses KMS keys needs to add the new ones from Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center https://www.microsoft.com/Licensing/servicecenter/Downloads/DownloadsAndKeys.aspx
First, there's a hotfix for your existing KMS server available here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2691586/EN-US
Once you request the hotfix, get the email and download it, and install. The install will require a reboot, so if you've got this on a critical server you're going to have to schedule a reboot.
A few change request forms and approval signatures later, you'll be finally ready to add your shiny new keys in.
Now, here's the installation instructions from the link above:
Installation instructions
If you have a KMS host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows 7 SP1, follow these steps to perform an upgrade: Install this update (KB2691586). Restart the computer when you are prompted. ...
System Center 2012 is here, and it brings new licensing! Here's what you need to know.
By now, you may have heard that System Center 2012 has reached GA (General Availability) stage. It's been available for download for a little while, but Microsoft naturally wanted to align the announcement with the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) that's happening this week.
System Center is, of course, Microsoft's integrated management platform for IT, and one of its fastest growing product lines in business terms. That's no accident, either - management is the single most consistent challenge across IT shops, regardless of size, technologies, and headcount. We've come a long way from the days where Systems Management Server (SMS) was the only Microsoft offering in this regard - and even since the introduction of Microsoft Operations Manager. These products were clunky and limited in contrast to their modern counterparts, System Center Configuration Manager and Operations Manager.
Times have moved on; now the System Center portfolio also covers backup, virtualisation, service ...
Geekin' Out At The Chalk - SMBiT Professionals Brisbane, in association with Alan Burchill and Bryce Telfer, present:
Sunday Spotlight Streaming Session 10:00 - 17:00, 23 October, 2011
G'day All (and anyone else listening in),
Just a heads up to let you know that SMBiT Professionals Brisbane is running a Spotlight Session this coming Sunday (2011-10-23) at the Chalk Hotel in Woolloongabba where we're delving into Group Policy with Alan Burchill and Remote Desktop Server with Bryce Telfer as related (in particular) to an SBS 2011 environment.
The event will be streamed live for financial SMBiT Professionals members in our SharePoint site, under the Brisbane sub-site.
For everyone else, the event will be streamed free (of cost, password, however not advertisements) at:
http://www.justin.tv/hiltont
http://www.Ustream.tv/channel/SMBiTPro-Brisbane
So, feel free to get your geek on with us this weekend - the show starts around 10:00 AM and will be over just in time for us to watch the Rugby Union final! :)
...
One IT Pro's travels in the world of Pre-Beta...
I am LIKING Windows 8 - everything I love about using Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, except all bright, shiny and new-like.
I'm also liking that the skillz are instantly transferrable, even with the pre-beta. So, I've been tooling around with a couple of IT Pro-related tasks, specifically deployment and virtualisation, and here are my shameless cross-posts to what I've found so far:
Sysprep/OOBE experience in Windows 8 Server
Deploy Windows 8 with SCCM 2012
As ever, there's more to come :-)
...
Windows 8 Developer preview has been released. Let's have a look at what's new, whats improved, and what needs to happen to make this new Windows OS a game changer.
Yesterday, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview to the general public - Microsoft's first public release of their new Windows operating system. We have seen hints of the new OS in screenshots leaked and posted on their blog, so naturally plenty of people jumped at the chance to grab a functional copy of the new Windows operating system. You can grab yours from here.
Lots has been made of Microsoft's new OS, including what it needs to do to stay competitive against Apple's OS's in both the desktop and mobile space. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will be the same platform across x86/64 desktop devices and ARM-based mobile devices - importantly, tablets and mobile phones, which Microsoft entered recently with the Windows Phone 7 operating system.
There's plenty to remember when reviewing any software that is essentially still in Alpha, or brand new Beta. Importantly, it's not complete software. Many people often review software at this stage as completed software, wh ...
The Cloud - Monkey (from Monkey Magic) had one, should you use it too?
Has your CIO/CEO/IT Manager done this?
Do you trust the cloud?
I would be surprised if you whole-heartedly said 'yes'. Firstly because you're talking back to a blog post which is quite strange behaviour, but secondly because there's a lot of media attention going on in this space.
Just to rehash the last week, there were two major events, one from Google and the other Microsoft.
Google:
Wednesday 8th September (ish, it's hard to gather what timezone they're all talking about) saw a Google Docs outage. The outage lasted 52 minutes: 23 minutes from being alerted to kick off a rollback proccess which then took 24 minutes to do. Add an extra 5 minutes - the time it took for "the additional capacity restored normal function".
The cause was due to a change they had implemented to improve real time collaboration, but the heavy load of the real world exposed a memory management bug.
Micr ...
A quick tip on reclaiming disk space with Win7 and Win2k8 R2!
So you've applied Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 SP1. You're probably happy with it. You're not likely to go back.
Why then, does your disk space continue to be kept hostage by old files?
The answer is the winsxs folder, referred to as the component store. It's taken a larger role from Windows Vista and Windows 2008 onward. Microsoft use it as a way to escape DLL hell, apparently, although I can't vouch for its efficacy.
In pre-Vista days, we had the $NtServicePackUninstall$ folder, along with $NtUninstallKBxxxxxx$, in C:\Windows that you could delete to reclaim space. Nowadays it seems that these backups have merged into winsxs, along with key components for your system to operate.
Legend has it that in Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 2008 SP1 days, there was a tool included calld vsp1cln.exe that would clean out the old superseded files from before the service pack. I've not personally used that one, but I know it certainly doesn't exist on Windows 7 and Win2k8 R2 systems. So ...
Want to know how long it takes all of your users to log on to your domain systems? With some PowerShell you'll be able to get all that information so that your users (and management) will love you, love you, love you...
Bit of a cross-post from my own blog here. I recently had to come up with a method of accurately measuring the time it takes each user to logon, from the time they enter their credentials to the time the desktop actually becomes usable (which is the user-centric true metric of when a logon has completed).
My approach uses a combination of BAT, PowerShell and GPO to create and measure the appropriate metrics, and then writes all the data back to a central SQL database for easy data collection and reporting.
Full details right here.
...
How do you know if one Group Policy Preference occurs before another?
Hi again everyone,
Today I'm sharing something that I have just found out about, thanks to the very helpful Alan Burchill (Twitter) who is a MVP in Group Policy. Thanks Alan!
So, I've talked about Group Policy Preferences before - wonderful, and not widely used enough yet - but they'll do pretty much anything you could do with a login script with the added benefits of high granularity, GUID and targeting based on almost any criteria you can think of rather than writing complex scripts and error reporting in event viewer.
I came into a scenario where I needed to delete all of the files in a directory, then copy several files back into that same directory. As I created this, I then wondered how I'd make sure that the delete occured before the copy. If it happened the other way around, the end result would be an empty directory!
If you're doing multiple settings of the same type, then they get an Order number as per the screenshot below. You can move the ord ...
Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) for Internet Explorer 8 & how to set your default search engine.
Hello again,
Today I thought it would be worth having a look at this utility!
For starters, here's where you can download it: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/bb219517
Why download it? What does it do?
The IEAK is used for settings in Internet Explorer 8, and can either be as part of the IE8 deployment, or after initial deployment. If you're on Windows 7 then you'd really need to use it after since it's built into the OS already. There are some painful ways to do a lot of this with importing registry keys etc, so this is a much neater and nicer way. There are 100's of settings in Group Policy and Group Policy preferences for IE8, but IEAK is better for the newer features. Here's what IEAK does (shamelessly stolen from Microsoft here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/cc889351.aspx).:
Accelerators. You can include custom defaults for Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8.
Web Slices. You can add Web Slices to your custo ...
Welcome to the first video in the Talking IT with James Bannan series, where I catch up with various movers and shakers in the IT industry and talk about geek stuff for a while.
This video is with John Pritchard, Optimised Desktop Specialist with Microsoft Australia. John ran the Perth and Adelaide sessions of Microsoft latest round of free workshops for IT professionals. The first round occurred earlier this year and revolved around Microsoft's virtualisation technologies - specifically Hyper-V and SCVMM. The latest round is all about Application Compatibility.
Microsoft are seeing customers expressing plenty of reservations about their existing suite of applications which need to be supported on Windows 7, and are looking for as many resources and as much guidance as possible to overcome and lingering issues and migrate to Windows 7.
There are two sessions left - one in Melbourne and the other in Canberra. Jeff Alexander has blogged about the details, and you use the details on his site to register. For any IT professional involved in deploying Windows 7, these workshops are a great resource and well worth the time (especially as they don't cost anything!).
Found a way to resolve Configuration Manager 2007 update issues reliably under Windows 2008, which may be of assistance to others.
Lately, we've encountered a number of problems with software updates on Windows 2008 R2. With Windows 2008 and Vista, Microsoft changed Windows and Microsoft Update so that it's very deeply embedded in the OS - more so than before. This can make it quite difficult to fix issues, since some of the old ways don't work quite the same.
As I've previously written, we use ConfigMgr Software Updates to manage our WSUS infrastructure and deliver a sustainable update methodology. It works well, but SCCM can add an additional layer of complexity in cases like this.
The problems we have noticed is servers ceasing to apply updates properly - whether that's hanging on install of an update or worse still, rolling updates back after a restart. This is quite messy, and isn't down to a particular subsystem or software - it triggers more or less at random, but will consistently occur for the same update thereafter. You can even manually deselect that update, and install all others, ...
Two lucky AuTechHeads members have already won TechNet Professional subscriptions - will you be next?
Thanks to the guys at Microsoft, we've already given away two TechNet Professional subscriptions to a couple of lucky AuTechHeads members!
All they had to do was turn up to the most excellent 1st birthday party on the Gold Coast, enjoy some drinks and walk away with the prizes, but to win the next two subscriptions, you have to do a little bit more work :-)
As September is Windows 7 Deployment month for Microsoft Australia, the TechNet Professional subscriptions will be awarded to the IT professionals who provide us with the best short posts about their Windows 7 deployment efforts so far. You can write about your current plans to deploy Windows 7, experiences if you have already deployed it, tips and tricks based on real-life scenarios, feedback from customers, anything you like. All the entries will be judged and the best two will win!
Of course, there are rules, but not too many:
Please submit your entry as a response to this blog ...
Episode 14 of Coalface Tech is online! Windows 7 deployment, mobility and cloud (and prizes!)
Episode 14 of the Coalface Tech podcast is now online at AuTechHeads.
In this episode, I caught up with Jeff Alexander, IT Pro Evangelist with Microsoft Australia at TechEd 2010 to discuss what's going on in September 2010, which is Deployment Month. Windows 7 has been out for a year now, and many businesses have their deployment plans underway. Microsoft are keen to make sure that everyone has a smooth upgrade path, and in addition to the range of free tools and online resources, will be running Deployment labs (like the free Virtualisation labs run earlier this year).
There's also a mention of more TechNet Professional subscriptions to be won!
I also had a chat with Roger Lawrence, previously head of the Developer Platform Evangelist group at Microsoft Australia, and now Product Marketing Manager with Readify. We had a wide-ranging discussion covering the business impact of mobility and how it is influencing infrastructure specialists, how the cloud is making ...
It would stand to reason that I would have observed substantial improvements in the approach to security, and especially malware prevention, over my years in IT. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. It seems people are still falling for the same old traps.
If you'd asked me 10 years ago what the most common attack vectors were for malware, I'd have answered email and removable media.
If you ask me today, you'll get the same answer. Why is that the case? Because it still succeeds - and I would argue, more so than any other - so there's no real imperative to find alernative vectors. A lot of attention is given to self-replicating worms that exploit weaknesses, like Conficker and older worms; and arguably they do have quite a good success rate. But the real business still seems to be in email and removable media.
You might dispute that - but think about phishing (or spearphishing) attacks. Something which tends to actively require the victim's participation, and which is primarily initiated via email. They don't even send any malware in the email - they could well download malware to your computer as part of the attack, but it's not a pre-requisite to succeed. They're typically looking to dupe users of their password, bank details, an ...
Over the past 8 months or so I have been doing a bit of work with Microsoft Online’s Business Productivity Online Services or BPOS offering. For those not familiar with it, it is essentially a hosted Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Live Meeting solution that customers can buy on a per user basis for either $10usd or $16.95AUD per month.
For small businesses, this means that all the normal maintenance and support tasks like back ...
Over the past 8 months or so I have been doing a bit of work with Microsoft Online’s Business Productivity Online Services or BPOS offering. For those not familiar with it, it is essentially a hosted Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Live Meeting solution that customers can buy on a per user basis for either $10usd or $16.95AUD per month.
For small businesses, this means that all the normal maintenance and support tasks like backup and patching are taken care of, and all they need to worry about is setting up user accounts, managing passwords and keeping their internet connection up.
The piece that is overlooked though is the basic need for file and print sharing that most offices have. Sure, hosted sharepoint provides some great collaboration features, but doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to things like roaming user profiles, home folders, or even redirected folders.
To leverage that, what you ide ...
<** Disclaimer **> I am not going to be describing how the technologies discussed here operate at a high level. Some prior knowledge of deployment will be required. </** Disclaimer **>
I’ve been working with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit in a lab recently to start testing some image deployment options. I was running Oracle Virtual Box but found that the boot.sdi (the initial download from WDS during deployment) was taking up to 8 or 9 minutes to download and it’s only ...
<** Disclaimer **> I am not going to be describing how the technologies discussed here operate at a high level. Some prior knowledge of deployment will be required. </** Disclaimer **>
I’ve been working with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit in a lab recently to start testing some image deployment options. I was running Oracle Virtual Box but found that the boot.sdi (the initial download from WDS during deployment) was taking up to 8 or 9 minutes to download and it’s only about 3MB.
I decided that I would switch to VMWare Workstation. I am unable to use Virtual PC as I need x64 guests. The boot.sdi was download in < 3 seconds and the boot.wim also with speed.
To take a step back the environment I am running is very simple. A single deployment server running Windows Server 2008 R2. This server hosts DNS, ADDS, DHCP, WDS and has the WAIK and MDT 2010 U1 installed.
Once I had rebuilt the server in VMware Workstatio ...
DPM End User Recovery - it's powerful and I love it. But it does have its dangers too! Let's take a look.
One of my favourite features with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 and 2010 is the End User Recovery (EUR) feature. This feature, available on Windows XP SP2 / Windows Server 2003 pre-SP1 and up (with appropriate hotfixes), extends the functionality of a Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) feature called "Previous Versions", which you may have seen before in file or folder properties. It affects only file-based backups, but DPM 2010 now also have functionality for SQL End User Recovery (which this post doesn't cover).
While in practice, my end users rarely use this feature, I do know that my IT staff do love and use the feature. It's one of the biggest timesavers for them - rather than having to Remote Desktop to the DPM server and navigate through the somewhat clunky Recovery features (sorry, but it's true!), they just map the relevant drive, browse to the appropriate file or folder, bring up its Properties, and look at Previous Versions.
With a 30 day retention, ...