If you get tasked to do some system troubleshooting and you just want to get as many information possible from a client, then have a look at the Microsoft Product Support Report Tool and the Product Support Reports Viewer.

The Microsoft Product Support Reports Viewer 2.0 can be downloaded from here and the Microsoft Product Support Reports from here

First launch the Microsoft Product Support Tool, which is a self-extracting executable (no installation needed). Once launched you can select the diagnostics you want to execute, then select Next to get the Diagnostic (Data Collection) started. Note that depending on the diagnostics selected, this process can take a while (up to 25 minutes).

Once the Diagnostic process has completed you can browse, e-mail or save the results. When saving the results, all data is stored in a single CAB file.

The Microsoft Product Support Report Viewer provides an interface to view the collected diagnostic data, which consists of several individual XML files.

While the diagnostic tool was running on my client, I copied the content of the temporary folder that the tool creates within the users TEMP folder into another folder. (if you have many folders in your TEMP folder just sort by date, and open the one with the newest date).

Within that folder you will find a Tools folder which contains all the executables and scripts used by the Diagnosis Tool.

So next time you get one of these famous calls to help solving a system problem, consider using this tool to gather detailed system information data.

Finally, after a long waiting time, VMware has released a release candidate for VMware Workstation 7.

• Aero support for Windows 7 and Vista Guests!
• Windows 7 support (as a Host and Guest OS)
• OpenGL and Shader Model 3.0 support for Windows guests
• Create guests with Multi-core or 4-way CPUs and up to 32GB of Memory
• Download VMware vSphere 4 and install ESX as a guest OS to try out the latest features.
• Dynamically Download the latest VMware Tools package only when you need it.
• Print from your VM without installing printer drivers. Virtual Printing courtesy of our friends at ThinPrint.
• Automatically create snapshots on scheduled intervals with AutoProtect.
• Secure your Virtual Machines with 256-bit encryption.
• Remote Replay Debugging and other advanced development features
• ALSA Sound support on Linux hosts enables multiple VMs to play "music" concurrently.
• Instantly pause a VM to free up system resources or dedicate horsepower to other running VMs.
• The Virtual Network Editor user interface has been redesigned for Windows users.

Download VMware Workstation Release Candidate – October 2009

Read VMware Workstation 7.0, VMware Player 3.0, and VMware ACE 2.6 Release Candidate Release Notes

HP has started publishing device drivers and software for Windows 7 for their desktops, notebooks and workstations. A complete overview of Windows 7 eligible models can be found here

Business Desktops

HP Compaq dc7900

HP Compaq dc7800

HP Compaq dc7700

HP Compaq dc5800

Business Workstations

HP Z400 Workstation

HP Z600 Workstation

HP Z800 Workstation

HP xw8600 Workstation

HP xw6600 Workstation

HP xw4600 Workstation

Business Notebooks

HP EliteBook 2730p Notebook PC

HP EliteBook 6930p Notebook PC

HP EliteBook 2530p Notebook PC

HP Compaq 6730b Notebook PC

HP EliteBook 8730w Mobile Workstation

HP EliteBook 8530p Notebook PC

Windows 7’s Mobile Broadband enhancements give people a more reliable way to connect to the Internet using a wireless modem. Taking advantage of this feature is just like connecting to any other wireless network, and is done using the View Available Networks feature.

This week there have been some questions around the use of mobile broadband with Windows 7, so I’ve started searching the web for information.  and came across the Mobile Broadband Team Blog.

If you plan to to use Windows 7 and mobile broadband, I strongly recommend having a look at the various posts on this blog. The blog contains detailed lists of devices that work and don’t work on both Windows 7 32 and 64 bit. You can also download this whitepaper which contains a lot of useful information.

Additional Information:

Mobile Broadband Stack Changes for Windows 7

New for Windows 7: Mobile Broadband Miniport Driver Documentation

Mobile Broadband Driver Development In Windows 7

SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. Michael Pietroforte author of the 4SysOps blog wrote a review of the SpeedFan utility. Read the entire article here

Anyone who uses Windows has seen at least once a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Even Bill Gates had to deal with it (watch this video). NirSoft has released a utility called BlueScreenView that scans all the minidump files that are being created when a BSOD occurs and displays all information about these crashes.

The utility is FREE and does not need to be installed. A detailed description of BlueScreenView can be found here

Captured this article on Twitter “Will my device work on Windows7 ?” It’s worth reading as it gives a good insight on the device related changes.

When it comes to OS deployment the size of the image to some extend does matter. Windows by default comes with a large set of plug and play device drivers that are included within the operating system installation sources.

Prestaged drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 are located under C:\Windows\system32\Driverstore.

If you run the following command against your mounted Windows 7 image file, you get a list of all PnPdrivers included within the Driverstore.

Dism /image:c:\mount /Get-Drivers /all

Now getting back to the image size. Looking at how we could eventually save image size space, I took a closer look at the Windows 7 Driverstore folder size, that on an installed system uses 624 MB. So that looked like a potential candidate to reduce image size.

As mentioned above 624 MB is what the Driverstore uses on an installed system, but how much does it consume within an image, taking into account that there the content is compressed.

Running the following command creates a separate WIM (image) file with just Driverstore content included.

Imagex /capture c:\temp\driverstore\ c:\temp\win7drv.wim “win7driverstore”

The result is that 624 MB Driverstore content now just uses 219 MB. If we add the /compress max option to the above Command brings the size even down to 197 MB. 

Conclusion: Beside the fact that officially the default driver store cannot be modified anyway (if I am wrong here let me know), I think that carrying those +- 220 MB don’t make much of a difference.

Within one of the projects I’m working on, there was a debate about installing the Intel Chipset software. It was requested not to install it. I could not agree with that, as it is a common known best practice to install the Intel Chipset update software unless the operating system can configure the Intel chipset natively.

A detailed table about when the Intel chipset software installation is needed can be found here:

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/inf/sb/CS-009270.htm

So what does it do ?

The Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility files inform the operating system how to properly configure the chipset for specific functionality, such as AGP, USB, Core PCI and ISA PnP services. In order to be able to install any chipset-related drivers (e.g. graphics, IDE, etc.), your operating system must first be able to recognize your chipset.

More on Intel’s page: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/inf/index.htm

Usually when you would need a specific driver you go up to the vendors website and search for the driver download area.

Since a while, HP provides a more convenient way to find latest drivers for your HP hardware. It’s called the HP Softpaq download manager.

The HP Softpaq download manager allows you to easilly navigate to your device and get a list of all availabble drivers and related software, view the release note, and with just one click, download the content that you need to your client.

You can download the HP Softpaq manager from the following website:
http://h20219.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/509658-0-0-225-121.html

It takes just a few seconds to install and of you go.