After months of silence (last post was on August 10, 2009) a new blog post was added on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Looks like there is something to say about Batteries. Read the full story about “Windows 7 Battery Notification Messages” here
Today Hypervisors are classified into two types. Type 1 is the so-called native bare metal hypervisor and type 2 the hosted hypervisor. Within the server based computing world there are various products available based on Type 1 (VMWare ESX Server, Citrix XEN Server) or Type 2 (Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare Server).
Within the Desktop computing space most of us have rather been using Type2 based solutions such as VMWare Workstation or Microsoft VirtualPC.
With Citrix XenClient we will soon get a Type1 Hypervisor for client systems. So what is this good for? Well let’s assume you have a need to run two different versions of Windows on your laptop. You can either install both OS on the system and use a dual boot scenario, or what most of us do in these days, install one OS on the physical hardware and virtualize the second one on top of the primary OS using a desktop virtualization solution such as VMWare Workstation, Windows Virtual PC or Sun’s VirtualBox.
The downside of these approaches are that you can either only run one operating system at a time (Dual Boot option) or that running the Virtualized OS requires that you first boot the primary OS that hosts the Virtualization Software.
With the XenClient you can actually run both (or more) operating systems in parallel right on top of a Type1 Hypervisor. Once you have the Operating systems installed you can easily switch between desktops with a single keyboard shortcut, but you can also share applications between the two operating system sessions.
So who is going to use this ? Well I can think of various use cases. Imagine the Application developer who has one or more operating system installed with all his development tools and most likely prefers to delete these periodically depending on what he is working on. But then he also requires access to his company’s business applications that are managed and brought to his client by the companies IT department. With XenClient, the developer can have full control over his own managed operating systems but also benefit from having a corporate managed standard desktop environment.
At the end of last year I had the pleasure to get my hands on the XenClient Beta and although I could not spend as much time with it as I wanted to, I can say, that it all looks very promising. Unfortunately I have no information about when Citrix is going to release the XenClient but assume it will be sometimes in 2010.
When installing Applications or operating system hotfixes the installation process sometimes requires replacing or deleting files that are in use, if that is the case these files can only be replaced or deleted during the next system reboot.
When you plan to install multiple applications in a row you can run into the situation where an application cannot be installed due to a pending FileRename operation from a previous application installation. So if you plan to install several applications in a row without a reboot, it’s highly recommended to check if a given application does actually require a reboot or not. If you launch the installation process manually you will most likely get a “Reboot required” prompt at the end of the installation. But if you run your installation packages in silent mode with the REBOOT=ReallySuppress option you will not notice if a reboot is required or not.
The information for Pending FileRename Operations is stored within the Windows Registry under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ under the key PendingFileRenameOperations if this key does not exist there are no Pending FileRename Operations, if the key does exist the key value data contains the files that need to be replaced or deleted.
Mark Russinovich provides two useful utilities that deal with Pending FileRename Operations PendMoves.exe and MoveFile.exe. PendMoves.exe allows you to list any pending filemoves and FileMove.exe allows you to configure the system to replace or delete a file during the next system reboot. The tools can be downloaded from here and for more information you might also want to read this article. For those that are looking for a script based solution have a look at the WMI script from Tom Mills which does the same as PendMoves.exe.
Since the Adobe Reader has become the de facto standard for reading PDF files, most people don’t spend any thoughts on replacing it by another software product. Personally I don’t have much of an issue with the desktop shortcut it creates (Justin does..), but I have always been wondering why the Adobe Reader has such a large footprint. A fresh install of the Adobe Reader 9.03 takes approx. 213 MB, when removing the Setup Files which are left in the application installation folder, the Reader still consumes 99 MB. To install Adobe Reader you must first download the Adobe Reader installer which is 27 MB.
To Install the Foxit Reader you must download the Setup package which is only 5.3 MB and once installed the Foxit Reader only uses 9.6 MB. In all fairness I did not look at the functionality differences of the two tools, well possible that the Adobe Reader does provide more functionality and therefore requires a larger footprint. However most of us use the Adobe Reader just to read PDF files and that is what the Foxit Reader allows you to do as well, with just a much smaller application footprint.
The Foxit Reader can be downloaded from here and a feature overview can be found here. The Foxit Reader is available for Windows, Linux, and Windows Mobile.
When opening the “Change Desktop Background” Control Panel Windows by default uses the “Windows Desktop Backgrounds” picture location which is the content stored under C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper
In addition to the Windows Desktop Backgrounds location Windows also let you choose a Wallpaper from other locations such as the Picture Library, Top Rated Photos, Solid Colors or you can simply browse and select a Wallpaper that is stored anywhere on your computer.
But there is another option, that I figured out today and wanted to share with you. To demonstrate this I have created the following folders and copied a wallpaper file in each of the folders.
Now we have to tell Windows that we want to include these 2 folders into the “Windows Desktop Backgrounds” listing. To do that, we have to modify the Windows Registry. Open the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) and navigate to the following key:
Now create a new String or Multi String value for each folders that you want to include. Note that if you use variables in the folder name, you must create a Multi String Value (REG_EXPAND_SZ) otherwise a String Value (REG_SZ) is enough.
The Result. When opening the “Change Desktop Background” Control Panel the Wallpapers from all the 3 different Wallpaper folders are being displayed.
Just going through an AGPM Installation (Advanced Group Policy Management) where I had to choose an Account for the AGPM Service which can be the Local System Account or a domain user account. Instead of just clicking next next…. I found some good guidance in the Ask the Directory Services Team blog – AGPM Least Privilege Scenario article. Also read Locking down AGPM fit for least privilege.
Never heard of AGPM before ? Then watch this 4-5 minute Tour on Advanced Group Policy Management. And finally here’s a video provided by Kurt Roggen showing how to install the AGPM Server.
The term App-V is often being brought in conjunction with Application Compatibility as some might believe that App-V is the general purpose OS compatibility solution. The App-V team clarifies this here
I am currently doing some training on App-V and for the sequencing of Applications there is a requirement to have 2 Partitions running on the system on which you sequence the application. Unfortunately I had setup my Windows 7 lab PC with only one partition. A couple of years ago you would have ended up using some 3rd party tools to repartition your system but nowadays (actually since Windows Vista) this is something that takes no more than 10 minutes.
If you are doing this on your primary system (the one you use at home or at work) I recommend that you make a backup of your critical data anyway. When you’re ready to go, open Disk Management and right click on the disk you want to shrink, select the “Shrink Volume ” option. The system will now analyze your local disk, this can take a while.
As a next step you can specify the amount of MB to shrink.
In my case I shrinked the volume by 10 GB. After a while you will see the new available space in Disk Manager. Then select Unallocated data and format it.
Having trouble with a client not getting updates from your Windows Update Services Server ? Then have a look at the WSUS Client Diagnostics Tool. The tool performs various system checks and tests the communication between your client and the WSUS server.
I’m currently busy with integrating the Symantec Endpoint Protection software into a Windows 7 build for one of our customers. I wondered if the Security team had really provided me with the latest and greatest version and ended up searching for that information on the Symantec web site where I came across a post mentioning the Symantec Endpoint Protection Support Tool.
For those that have a SEP 11 version prior RU5 the tool can be downloaded from here and as of RU5 (11.0.5002.333) the tool can also be downloaded from within the Symantec Endpoint Protection client by opening the Client user interface and selecting Help & Support > Download Support Tool.
when completed all results are listed in categories.
and for my case, answering my question whether I am using the latest and greatest version.
The tool provides much more information than just the current version, so if you are a Security Professional (then you probably know this tool already) or an IT Pro this is a must have for SEP troubleshooting or information gathering.
In an earlier post Using BITS for file downloads I wrote about how to use BITS for file transfers. Today I had a BITS related topic at work, so needed a brief refresher and found some additional interesting things.
First I came across a TechNet Utility Spotlight article Scripting Trouble-Free downloads with BITS. If you are interested in creating your own BITS based download scripts, read this article and download the provided bitsjob.vbs and bitsjob.cmd files. Note that the article is dated back from 2006, so no mention about Windows 7 here, but no worries bitsadmin.exe is included in Vista and Windows 7 already.
But then a few clicks later I came across this awesome nice FREE Tool called Bits GUI Admin. The tool provides a detailed view on all running BITS processes on your machine, so useful for troubleshooting as well. Note that the utility download does include a (old) bitsadmin.exe as well, but if you are running Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008(R2), I recommend that you overwrite that with the version of the OS. If you are running Windows XP or Server 2003, use the latest version which is available in the Service Pack 2 SP2 support tools.
The tool does not require installation, so just extract the files, update if the bitsadmin.exe if you like and launch the bitsguiadmin.exe as Administrator. If you don’t see any existing processes running, simply go to Windows Update and select an available optional or security update to be installed or run a bitsadmin.exe command as described in one of my previous posts.
Assume you are at a client site and plan to deploy a Windows Server (2008 / 2008-R2) or Windows Clients (Windows Vista / Windows 7) and want to check if they do already have KMS Services running on their network.
It’s very simple. Just open a command prompt and type the following command:
nslookup -type=srv _vlmcs._tcp
If KMS Services are present on the network the results will be listed as shown in the picture below.
Since yesterday there have been a lot of tweets and e-mails about the so-called Windows 7 God Mode, which in fact was available in Vista already. In short the Windows 7 God mode can be considered as an extended Control Panel.
No need to re-write what has been written already, so for more details and how-to’s read the articles listed below.
