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Much has been made about how Windows 7 is so good that it will help Microsoft overcome the bad PR image it developed with Windows Vista. But while everyone is busy patting themselves on the back for "knowing" how poorly Vista is doing, the reality is somewhat less exciting. In fact, Vista is selling better in businesses than Windows XP was at the same point in its lifecycle. Lest we forget that inconvenient truth, Microsoft this week decided to remind everyone. Again. "Adoption and deployment of Windows Vista has been slightly ahead of where we had been with XP," Tami Reller, Microsoft corporate vice-president and Windows Business division CFO, said this week. "We also have a number of enterprises that are mid-cycle [in Vista deployments], that are doing a tremendous amount of testing, planning, and training, and getting ready for Vista." Much has been made about the declining fortunes of Windows lately, but let's not forget that the entire economy is tanking in nearly historic proportions. The Windows division generated $2.5 billion in income in the most recent quarter. That's not chump change, sorry, and it's double the amount of money that all of Apple—Mac, iPhone, and iPod combined—earned in the same time period. I'm pretty sure most of the tech press did nothing but celebrate that figure and Apple's various blockbuster products. Let's not let the angst get ahead of reality here.

Source : Paul Thurrott’s WinInfo Short Takes : Week of June 1

Knowing that deleted Active Directory objects are not erased immediately, but only after 60 (Windows 2000/2003) or 180 days (Windows 2003 SP1/2008), can save your day if you accidentally delete user, computer or container objects. …

… A downside of tombstone reanimation is that by default, important attributes are stripped from AD objects when they are deleted. For example, user objects’ last and first name attributes are not saved in tombstone objects. …

… The good news is that you can configure the Active Directory schema to store additional attributes in tombstone objects. The bad news is that the procedure is a bit complicated.

Source : 4sysops

How often has it occurred that you were working on something and suddenly your computer became slow? You opened task manager to find out the culprit that is hogging your systems CPU cycles. You sorted the processes according to CPU usage and saw WMIprvse.exe happily sitting at the top.

Before putting the blame on WMIprvse.exe have you ever wondered that it can be that some other application contracted the WMIprvse.exe to create havoc on your computer? Here’s how you can find the culprit which is using WMIprvse.exe to eat up your system resources.

Source : Windows Management Infrastructure Blog

I am very pleased to announce that WSUS 3.0 SP2 RC will be available to the general public today, May 26, via the Connect Site.

All you have to do is sign in to your Connect account or sign up now in order to participate in the RC program.
This program is available to all registered and authenticated users of Connect.

New Windows Server and Client Version Support

Integration with Windows Server® 2008 R2

Support for the BranchCache feature on Windows Server 2008 R2

Support for Windows 7 client

Source : WSUS Product Team Blog

Look at this great video !

The Microsoft Office 2010 IT Blog

"This blog is being created by the Office team to help our IT professionals and enthusiasts get a better idea of what we are building with Office 2010 and discuss the key issues that matter to you. We are all incredibly excited to start talking about the new version of Office and hope you will participate here."

Source : Bink.nu, blogs.technet.com/office2010/

Disk partition alignment is a powerful tool for improving SQL Server performance. Configuring optimal disk performance is often viewed as much art as science. A best practice that is essential yet often overlooked is disk partition alignment. Windows Server 2008 attempts to align new partitions out-of-the-box, yet disk partition alignment remains a relevant technology for partitions created on prior versions of Windows.

This paper documents performance for aligned and nonaligned storage and why nonaligned partitions can negatively impact I/O performance; it explains disk partition alignment for storage configured on Windows Server 2003, including analysis, diagnosis, and remediation; and it describes how Windows Server 2008 attempts to remedy challenges related to partition alignment for new partitions yet does not correct the configuration of preexisting partitions.

For more information, please refer to the Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server whitepaper

Source : Bink.nu

I’ve never really understood why uninstalling programs in Safe Mode isn’t officially supported in Windows. The main purpose of Safe Mode is to troubleshoot Windows, and what usually causes the trouble? Right, misbehaving programs.

Excellent post of Michael Pietroforte explaning how to uninstall a program in safe mode by allowing the Windows Installer Service to start in safe mode.

Source : 4sysops

The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides customers with the latest updates to the 2007 Office suite (the products that are affected by this update are listed below). This download includes two types of fixes:

Previously unreleased fixes that were made specifically for this service pack.

In addition to general product fixes, this includes improvements in stability, performance, and security.

You can find out more information in Knowledge Base Article 953195, where product-specific changes are described.

All of the Public Updates, Security Updates, Cumulative Updates, and Hotfixes released through February 2009.

Before installing this service pack, you are strongly encouraged to read 953195, which describes some big improvements introduced by SP2, and also calls out some important information that you should be aware of before installing.
Download http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5

Source : Bink.nu

This is the VHD tool’s usage description:

VhdTool.exe /create <FileName> <Size> [/quiet]
VhdTool.exe /convert <FileName> [/quiet]
VhdTool.exe /extend <FileName> <NewSize> [/quiet]

Create: Creates a new fixed format VHD of size <Size>.

Convert: Converts an existing file to a fixed-format VHD.
The existing file length, rounded up, will contain block data
A VHD footer is appended to the current end of file.

Extend: Extends an existing fixed format VHD to a larger size <Size>.

VHD tool

Source : 4sysops

We’re happy to announce that Windows Live Hotmail is integrating instant messaging capabilities within its web interface. With this functionality, you can get your email and IM all in one place! This feature lets you IM your Windows Live Messenger contacts from within your Hotmail inbox or People page without having to switch over to the Messenger client.

Source : Your mail is here, come and get it!

Greg Shields published an interesting article that explains the difference between the hypervisors of Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX. It is a response to a widespread misunderstanding. VMware supporters tend to believe that VMware ESX has a bare metal hypervisor, whereas Hyper-V runs like Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on top of Windows. Greg explains in detail in what sense both virtualization solutions are Type 1 hypervisors contrary to Virtual Server and VMware Server, which use Type 2 hypervisors. A Type 2 hypervisor is installed on top of the administrative OS, whereas a Type 1 hypervisor runs on bare metal, a layer below the administrative OS (Windows Server 2008 in the case of Hyper-V and Red Hat in the case of ESX).

However, there are also important differences between Hyper-V’s and ESX’s hypervisors. Greg makes things absolutely clear: Hyper-V has a far more advanced hypervisor because it is microkernalized, whereas ESX has a monolithic hypervisor. Among other things this means that Hyper-V uses synthetic device drivers, which are just pointers to the real device drivers into the primary partition’s administrative OS (Windows Server 2008). ESX’s device drivers exist within its hypervisor.

Source : 4sysops

Starting on or about the third week of April, users still running IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 will get will get a notification through Automatic Update about IE8. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over time to the entire user base. On Windows XP and Server 2003, the update will be High-Priority. On Windows Vista and Server 2008 it will be Important.

IE8 will not automatically install on machines. Users must opt-in to install IE8. Users will see a Welcome screen that offers choices: Ask later, install now, or don’t install.

Source : IEBlog

Excellent post to learn how to create a Generic Application Resource in a Windows 2008 Cluster.

Windows Server 2008 (and R2) Failover Clustering supports virtually every workload which comes with Windows Server, however there are many custom and 3^rd party applications which take advantage of our infrastructure to provide high-availability. Additionally there are some applications which were not originally designed to run in a failover cluster. These can be created, managed by and integrated with Failover Clustering using a generic container, with applications using the Generic Application resource type. For more information about cluster-unaware applications, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa369166(VS.85).aspx.

Source : Clustering and High Availability

Office Service Pack team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 would be available on April 28th. It provides many fixes and performance improvements, as well as some new features. Also with the new service pack, Internet Explorer 8 will be added into browser support matrix as level one, and Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 as level two. We recommend every customer to start planning their patch window to apply this service pack. Please look out for more details on the 28^th.

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

Source : Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

Rack Server Virtualization Add-in provides the capability to pull the rack-server data either from an Excel spread sheet or from the user and render the Visio diagram.

This amazing Add-in from Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 Professional helps you plan virtualization.

With over 70% of server hardware being under-utilized, this very valuable tool can draw a clear picture of your hardware utilization. This tool auto-generates the diagram of your rack and provides clear server details from a linked Excel template. Analyze your racks and servers using WMI or get the utilization data over time using the Operations Manager connection.
Use the virtualization button to see the before and after detailed diagram of your racks. See clearly where you have the opportunity to save on space and power.
See the power of Data Visualization at work with this Add-in For Visio 2007

Download

Source : Bink.nu

Since IE8 shipped last week, I've read two criticisms repeatedly: One is the burning question of whether IE8 is faster or slower than its competitors; the other is whether it makes reasonable use of system resources. In this post, I explain why some people are seeing performance issues (and share an obscure system tweak that might just cure IE8 performance and stability problems). I also take a closer look at why you might prefer a browser that uses more memory than others.

Source : Ed Bott's Microsoft Report

The hysteria over the Conficker worm is reaching a fever pitch, with mainstream media doing their bit to whip Windows users into an unjustified panic. The trouble with virus scares in general is that they do a wonderful job of driving people directly into the arms of rogue security vendors. So what's a confused consumer to do when one of the largest security companies in the world creates a website filled with sloppy mistakes that make it look exactly like a rogue vendor?

Source : Ed Bott's Microsoft Report

Learn more about Internet Explorer compatibility, check out new tips and tricks, and find tools to help you get the job done.

Source : MSDN: U.S. Local Highlights

I’ve blogged about the Compatibility View features included in Internet Explorer 8 a few times during the Beta 2 and Release Candidate milestones. Now that Internet Explorer 8 has released, I wanted to follow-up with a quick post highlighting the content that’s been created on MSDN regarding the Compatibility View List.

Coinciding with the release of Internet Explorer 8, we’ve created a content store on MSDN that discusses the finer-grain details of the Compatibility View List.

Source : IEBlog

Jean-Pierre Paradis's Blog

New Windows Server and Client Version Support

VHD tool

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