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January 2006 - Posts

System Centre Capacity Planner 2006

System Centre (center <g>) Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2006 is one of those tools I saw in early Beta a while back - looked very impressive at internal demos but it wasn't until yesterday something that I had really looked deeply. Well, good news for Read More
posted Tuesday, January 31, 2006 9:33 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Change default location of Virtual Machine creation in Virtual PC 2004

One of those little known things (and hence sadly most underused IMHO) about Virtual PC 2004 is the ability to redirect the location of where virtual machines are created by default. This is done through the "MYVIRTUALMACHINES" environment variable. Read More
posted Tuesday, January 31, 2006 8:58 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Windows Server 2003 R2 Availability

I thought this was a good time to remind you - if you've been waiting for Windows Server 2003 R2, there really isn't much longer to wait. From February, Windows Server 2003 R2 will be on the Volume Licence price list, in Select and MSDN disk shipments Read More
posted Monday, January 30, 2006 10:14 AM by jhoward | 7 Comments
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IT Forum Highlights in Reading

For those of you who were unable to attend IT Forum 2005 in November, a quick reminder that there are two full-day events re-running some of the most popular content. This will be held on the Microsoft Campus in Reading. The registration links Read More
posted Friday, January 27, 2006 2:58 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Intellimouse Magnify capability

A colleague mentioned this just before christmas but I hadn't got round to investigating further or blogging about it as the software didn't appear to be released for general public download at the time. Apparently from version 5.3 onwards of the Intellipoint Read More
posted Thursday, January 26, 2006 8:37 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Log Parser Utility

So today's exercise was to blow away Windows Server 2003 R2 on my relatively new Toshiba M3 laptop. I tried, but failed. A month of trouble, particularly with the power saver has simply worn me down. That and combined with 100% CPU when trying to demonstrate Read More
posted Wednesday, January 25, 2006 3:01 PM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Virus scanning and Virtual Machines

Questions frequently come up about what to do in terms of Virus scanning virtual machines. Having virus scanning software installed and active on the host does not mean that the guests are immune to viruses. You should always install virus scanning Read More
posted Tuesday, January 24, 2006 9:31 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Shadow Copies to the rescue - DFS-R killed my data

Yesterday, I finally got round to plugging the new disks I bought back from Seattle into one of my servers which is destined to become a main file server at home. I have one share containing around 60GB of data and used the new DFS-N and DFS-R capability Read More
posted Monday, January 23, 2006 9:27 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Windows Vista Sounds

I thought this was interesting - a Channel 9 video was posted up a few days ago giving an insight into how the startup sound in Windows Vista is being created. It runs for around 25 minutes and shows Robert Fripp in a recording studio at the Microsoft Read More
posted Friday, January 20, 2006 2:19 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Monad Beta 3

So on my evening trawls through a ton of emails I get daily and RSS feeds (I still have a huge backlog after being away last week), this one has to be one worth bookmarking for further investigation. The Windows Monad beta 3 release went live on Read More
posted Thursday, January 19, 2006 7:38 PM by jhoward | 3 Comments
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Multimedia Card drive icons in Window Explorer

Still jetlagged :( 2AM again. Maybe tomorrow night I'll get round to sleeping finally! So hands up everyone who's built their own MCE machine - particularly those who have MSDN, for example, and like to "test" :) And... for those MCE machines, keep your Read More
posted Wednesday, January 18, 2006 1:53 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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PlateSpin announcment - support for Virtual Server 2005 R2

Just spotted this announcement from last week - PlateSpin have announced the availability of PlateSpin PowerConvert 5.2 with enhanced support for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Read More
posted Tuesday, January 17, 2006 5:11 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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WSSRA Virtual Environments for Dev + Test Released

Just got back in the UK after being over in Seattle for 8 days for an internal Microsoft conference - not many blog posts last week as the Internet connection was a little flakey in the hotel. The jetlag is still in force - it's 2AM on Monday morning Read More
posted Monday, January 16, 2006 2:05 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) in Windows Server 2003 R2 FAQ

Thought this was worth sharing as it came up on an internal discussion a few days ago. To find out more about FSRM in Windows Server 2003 R2, take a look here. Questions were being asked like, if a user kicked of a robocopy, for example, copying Read More
posted Monday, January 09, 2006 3:34 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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RPC/HTTP and OWA through ISA Followup

If you've been watching the series on RPC/HTTP I recorded a little while back, you'll know that I did a "trick" to allow both OWA and RPC/HTTP connectivity through a single external IP Address under ISA Server 2004. There was an annoying flaw which although Read More
posted Saturday, January 07, 2006 2:50 PM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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Virtual Machine state not saved on host machine reboot

A common problem you may find under Virtual Server 2005 (including R2) is one which hit me over Christmas after rebuilding on of my Virtual Server hosts. An age old problem which I first encountered probably back in the early days of Exchange 2000 was Read More
posted Friday, January 06, 2006 9:27 AM by jhoward | 4 Comments
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ISA Server 2004 Port Scan alerts

I've been running ISA Server at home for a number of years now - first with ISA 2000, and more recently ISA Server 2004 SP1. I've realised over time that there are many false alerts of port scans, and know that most times, they are false. However, there's Read More
posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 2:17 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Cleartype Tuner

One of these always useful links to have - I just changed to a new laptop a couple of weeks before Christmas, and the default LCD display was somewhat fuzzy even with ClearType turned on. If you didn't know, you can use an online tool to optimise the Read More
posted Wednesday, January 04, 2006 8:27 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Examine ISO images quickly

I got reminded of this utility just before Christmas - unfortunately for me, running Windows Server 2003 as my primary laptop operating system, it doesn't work :(, but if you are running XP, here is a quick and easy (but unsupported by Microsoft PSS) Read More
posted Tuesday, January 03, 2006 9:25 AM by jhoward | 4 Comments
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