I’ve been involved in Windows 7 deployments since the Beta came out in 2009 and before Windows 7 there was Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT and even Windows 3.11 and although over time the technology has changed the basic challenges of every migration remained the same. If today someone asks me what I consider [...]
Archive of posts tagged Windows 7
How to prevent pending updates from installing when shutting down Windows
The meeting should have finished since 10 minutes but they keep on talking, you look at your watch and notice that you only have a few minutes until you need to leave the office so that you catch your train. Finally the call ended and you shutdown your machine, but then you get that message [...]
Are my Windows Power Settings Energy Star compliant?
I am often asked by customers whether their Windows 7 Power Settings are Energy Star compliant. The recommendations for Windows clients are: Computers must enter system standby or hibernate after 30 to 60 minutes of inactivity. Monitors must enter sleep mode after 5 to 20 minutes of inactivity Windows 7 by default comes with 3 [...]
Collecting Internet Explorer Add-on information
The Windows 8 developer preview build installation media contains an executable called wicainventory.exe. Wicainventory tool collects application and device information. There is also a wica.ini file that contains 2 URLs. I assume that the Tool is used by Microsoft to collect telemetry data. While there are plenty of other methods to collect software and hardware [...]
Changing the Windows 7 Scheduled Defrag Task
As you probably know Windows 7 has a build-in scheduled task to run Defrag every Wednesday every week. One of my clients asked me to have the day changed from Wednesday to Thursday. Well, hat I thought would be done in a few minutes ended up in a little journey, but finally I got it [...]
ReadTip: Life After Windows XP: Windows Vista and Windows 7
A nice presentation highlighting the key technology and feature improvements from XP to Windows 7. Download the presentation from here
ReadTip: Resources for Windows and Office license activation with XenDesktop
Below just a few resources I have collected related to Windows and Office license activation with XenDesktop. Licensing is not an exciting topic but we have to deal with it anyway. KMS Configuration using Citrix Provisioning Services Citrix Managing Microsoft KMS Volume Licensing Citrix Configuring Microsoft MAK Volume Licensing Citrix XenDesktop 5 Support Statement for [...]
Taking Group Policy beyond what’s in the box – Part2
In my previous post I provided a brief overview of how PolicyPak can take you beyond default Group Policy management. In today’s post I am going to show you how easy it is to get PolicyPak up and running in your test environment. You can test PolicyPak on a local computer or within an Active [...]
The GatherNetworkinfo.vbs Script
I recently read the whitepaper“Using Windows Script Host and COM to Hack Windows” that is mentioning the GatherNetworkinfo.vbs script I hadn’t paid attention to yet. The gathernetworkinfo.vbs script comes by default with every Windows 7 installation and is located within the C:\Windows\System32\ folder. The script does collect various networking information about the Windows 7 system [...]
