A nice to have tool – Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool

If you have a Notebook and want to install a fresh Windows 7 you have a “small problem” – you probably won’t find a DVD. Another situation can be if you want to install Windows 2008 R2 on your server (it might be an older system with a CD). To fix this problem you need to create a USB disk to boot from. This can be done “manually", but now Microsoft released a tool that makes this a bit easier.

1. Download and install the tool from Microsoft
2. Download Windows 7/ Windows Server 2008 R2 as ISO
3. Start Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool and follow the wizard (in the example below I use the Windows 2008 R2 ISO)

Are you a Vista or Windows Server 2008 user, SP2 is now available for download

If you are running Vista or Windows Server 2008, you should now start to download the Service Pack 2  – As of now it is only available on MSDN and TechNet

UPDATE – Windows 7 RC1 Released (Now it is)

Today Microsoft has remove the information, someone was a bit to fast to publish it on the partner site:-)

Quote from the partner site:

We are pleased to announce that Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) is available. Windows 7 RC is the prerelease version of Windows 7. Since this is not the final release, your PC will gather and send information to Microsoft engineers to help them check the fixes and changes made based on testing of Windows 7 Beta. Test-drive Windows 7 RC today to see for yourself—and to show your colleagues and customers—how Windows 7 delivers improved management, security, reliability, and performance. Download Windows 7 RCPartners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now. Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009.

Apparently Windows 7 RC is not available yet. As of now (21:30 Swedish time) I’m still seeing the old beta version.

If you have an MSDN or Technet subscription you can now download Windows 7 RC

Microsoft – What were you thinking when you decided the different Vista versions?

Since I in the past weeks have had a couple of hardware failures on both my laptop and media center machines I wanted to make sure I had good backups of the machines. I’ve used the Vista Complete Backup on my laptop in the past, that time only to test a disk replacement. I really liked the feature so I thought this would be a good ”extra” backup of my media center computer (except for file backup).

The problem  – I couldn’t find it under ”Backup and Restore Center”. I did a web search and found out it wasn’t included in the Vista version I use (Vista Home Premium). How come a feature like this is removed from any version of Windows. If you do need to remove it, remove it from the enterprise versions, not for the home users that really need a feature like this. So I the took the decision to upgrade to Vista Ultimate, this is where I run into the next problem:-( I use Swedish version of Vista and the Vista Ultimate DVD I had was in English. I couldn’t see any problem with this since Vista is language natural but I was wrong. I couldn’t do an upgrade between languages so I had to download a Swedish version of Vista Ultimate and do the upgrade. The other part I don’t understand is why I need to do a full upgrade when I upgrade between Vista versions – I thought it would be easi to this since Vista is componentized.

Conclusion – I really hope Microsoft reduce the Windows 7 versions to 2, one for the home users and one for the enterprise and to include all type of applications that can help home users to secure there data.

How do you document your Active Directory and Exchange environment

Have you ever wanted to document your Active Directory and Exchange Environment? A couple of years ago, you could use Visio 2000 to do just this. The problem is that Microsoft removed that function from newer versions of Visio. Today I found a new cool application from Microsoft (and it’s free) that fixes this problem. You install the application and select what you want to document (see print screens below). When you have done your selections, just click ”Draw” and it will create Visio document.

Download The Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer from Microsoft 

Brief Description

The Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer reads an Active Directory configuration using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), and then automatically generates a Visio diagram of your Active Directory and /or your Exchange 200x Server topology. The diagrams include domains, sites, servers, administrative groups, routing groups and connectors and can be changed manually in Visio if needed.

Are you evaluation Windows Server 2008?

Are you evaluating Windows Server 2008? Then you probably seen the new function ”Granular Password policy”. The bad part of this function is the lack of a ”GUI” to create the policy. The good thing is that you can now download a free tool from one of our partner Special Operations Software to create them (and if you don’t like to use a GUI tool, you can use the PowerShell cmdlets).

Download Specops Password Policy Basic

Can't get enough of computers at home – Download Windows Home Server RC

Today, Microsoft released Windows Home Server RC. The RC (Release Candidate) release is a feature complete build of Windows Home Server and you can download it from Microsoft Connect!

Longhorn Beta 3 released

For all of you that want to start to test all the new functionality in the next server OS from Microsoft – Start downloading the beta 3 version!

You will be able to download it from both the connect.microsoft.com and the microsoft.com/downloads

What happened to the Microsoft Optimization Pack?

In October 2006 Microsoft announced that they will release a a new tool set for costumers with a Software Assurance. This toolset would include four products that Microsoft got from different acquisitions (Softricity, Winternals, DesktopStandard, and AssetMetrix)! The full package is still not ready yet, but you can download some of them now – the rest will be ready in may!

Read more about this at Microsoft!