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Windows 8 dev preview BSOD in VMware and VirtualPC

14 Sep
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Yesterday it was come alive, Windows 8 Developer preview is released, you can find more information and the download on dev.windows.com. Get your hands-on before the beta release :)

The Windows Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. These downloads include prerelease software that may change without notice. The software is provided as is, and you bear the risk of using it. It may not be stable, operate correctly or work the way the final version of the software will. It should not be used in a production environment. The features and functionality in the prerelease software may not appear in the final version. Some product features and functionality may require advanced or additional hardware, or installation of other software.

But I was trying to install in on VMware Workstation 7.1.4, but was getting the probally new BSOD.

Windows 8 Developer preview BSOD

It says:

:(

Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t
handle, and now it needs to restart.

You can search for the error online: HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

The same screen came when i tried to install it in VirtualPC. Searching on the internet delivers no solution, probally the search engines databases aren’t updated yet. So next try was in Oracle VM VirtualBox. With succes, the setup is running.

Windows 8 Developer preview setup in VirtualBox

So, now waiting for the setup is ready, to play abit around with the tiles :)

Update: more solutions, boot it from VHD, more info about VirtualBox settings. Windows Developer Preview: General OS questions.

 
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Posted in Windows 8

 

Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8

09 Sep
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Yesterday, Steven Sinofsky, write a post on his blog about the boot time of Windows 8 and it’s quite impressive.

When it comes to talking about “fundamentals” we want to start with boot time – no feature gets talked about and measured more. We designed Windows 8 so that you shouldn’t have to boot all that often (and we are always going to work on reducing the number of required restarts due to patching running code). But when you do boot we want it to be as fast as possible. This is a very deep topic and we have a lot of folks focused on it. We made a bigger leap in this area with Windows 8 than we have in a long time due in no small part to cooperation across the whole ecosystem. Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows, authored this post (a first in what will be a series of posts on fundamentals).
–Steven

This new fast startup mode will yield benefits on almost all systems, whether they have a spinning HDD or a solid state drive (SSD), but for newer systems with fast SSDs it is downright amazing. Check out the video below to see for yourself:

 

You can find the full blog about it here.

 
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Posted in Windows 8

 

E-mail disclaimer examples

21 Jul
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Some companies ask me for disclaimer examples for use in their outgoing e-mails. So after some searching on the web I found this: (the 5 examples are in Dutch/English)

Example 1
Dit e-mailbericht is uitsluitend bestemd voor de geadresseerde. Als dit bericht niet voor u bestemd is, wordt u vriendelijk verzocht dit aan de afzender te melden. [Bedrijf] staat door de elektronische verzending van dit bericht niet in voor de juiste en volledige overbrenging van de inhoud, noch voor tijdige ontvangst daarvan. Voor informatie over [Bedrijf] raadpleegt u [website].

English
This e-mail is intended for the addressee’s eyes only. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby kindly requested to inform the sender of this. In view of the electronic nature of this communication, [Company] is neither liable for the proper and complete transmission of the information contained therein nor for any delay in its receipt. For information about [Company], direct your browser to [website].

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in E-mail

 

How do I disable the Office 2010 Welcome Screen?

07 Jun
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One of the most annoying things i’ve come across while deploy networks with Office 2010 is the Welcome Screen that popup every time an user opens an Office application on a computer.

By registry:

  • Open registry and navigate to HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice14.0CommonGeneral
  • Add a new Dword (32-bit) Value, type ShownFirstRunOptin as the name modify the value to 0×00000001.

Disable Office 2010 Welcome screen by regedit

or by GPO:

Note: the registry key in Office 2007 is called ShownOptIn and you can find it in HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0CommonGeneral.

 
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Posted in Office 2010

 

Exchange 2010 SP1 Network Port Reference

17 May
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M. de Rooij made a nice diagram of the ports used by Exchange 2010 SP1. Maybe you’ve searched for this allready and find the reference on TechNet. The diagram is nice in discussions with the security administrators or to be included in design documents of a network.

As always, the picture says more then words to make things more transparant.

Credits to: M. de Rooij

 
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Posted in Exchange 2010

 

Microsoft WDS is eating my network bandwidth

19 Apr
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So, you’ve rolled out your Windows Deployment Services in your production network. But when you are deploying images to computers or servers the network bandwidth to all other clients on the network becomes very low or even the clients are losing the network connection.

In my environment I was using a HP ProCurve switch with Multicast Filtering (IGMP) enabled. But I noticed that the Multicast Filtering wasn’t working. The default WDS multicast range is from 239.0.0.1 to 239.0.0.254. But if you look at the manual of the HP ProCurve switch, you’ll see they excluded this range from filtering.

So with this in mind, you go to the WDS Server properties and change the multicast range from 239.0.1.1 to 239.0.1.254, so it wouldn’t be excluded anymore on the switch IGMP filtering. So after testing this, the WDS server stopped DDoS my clients (: For the ones who don’t want to search for this setting on their environment, I’ve made a movie, also available in HD, where you can find this setting (sorry, no mic, so it’s a very quiet movie).

Also, if you like,  you can throttle the bandwidth used by WDS with a registry key. In the registry, browse to HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesWDSServerProvidersWDSMCProfilesCustom and set the TpMaxBandwidth setting to something less than 100. It’s the percentage of available bandwidth that the server uses.

Tested with:
Server OS: Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Switch: HP ProCurve 2810-48G (J9022A)

 
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Posted in Microsoft, WDS