There’s a lot of talk about Windows 95 in these days as it’s 15 years ago when Windows 95 was launched. Well if all are so much in “Operating System Birthday” celebration mode, then let’s not forget that soon it will be 25 years ago since Microsoft released the very first version of Windows 1.0.

More Windows Desktop OS History can be found here. What happened in 1985 here and in 1995 here.

And believe it or not, Windows 1.0 still runs

If you are planning deploying Office 2010 throughout an enterprise read this.

Ruben Spruijt has published an updated whitepaper “VDI Smackdown” which provides you with an overview of today’s VDI solutions. More details here

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.

Today I was asked whether Windows 7 Ultimate can be activated through KMS, since we’re primarily busy with Windows 7 Enterprise I couldn’t instantly provide an answer (I prefer to first check out things instead of providing an incorrect answer). So unless I have overlooked something…… only Windows 7 Professional and Enterprise can be activated using a KMS Infrastructure.

Source: Windows Partner Activation Guide

A good FAQ about Microsoft Volume licensing. Details here

I’m just about to expand my knowledge a bit around App-V. I haven’t done any hands-on yet, because I usually first focus on gathering all the useful resources available on the net, and then start reading these. By doing so, I found these fantastic videos on The Blogcast Repository.

Deployment Scenarios with App-V 4.5
Planning Considerations before Implementing App-V 4.5
The App-V Client (part 1)
The App-V Client Part 2- Deep Dive

By the way, if you are not familiar with The Blogcast Repository but like video based trainings, have a look at the Repository, there is lots of other Microsoft related Technology training material there.

Knowing what products are being used within your IT environment is key. From a technology planning point of view its also important to understand the entire product lifecycle of a given product, especially when the it’s being used by a large amount of users or if its use is business critical.

For Microsoft products, the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search site can help you creating your technology roadmaps.

Simply choose one of the options and select the timeframe. The example below shows all Microsoft products that will go out of extended support within the next 12 months.