Category: NZTekonverse -> Uncategorised

  • VHD Resize [2]

    A couple of posts back I wrote about getting a native VHD down to a smaller size to use on a system with a smaller HDD than what it was originally built on. That time I just used standard defrag along with shrinking in Disk Management. This time around that wasn’t going to get the…

  • Messy Imaging

    There are some scenarios that DISM doesn’t work in as you would expect. When I set up a reference image for a new platform, because of my imaging topology I have images that are pre-sysprep, post-sysprep and post-dism. Generally I would choose a pre-sysprep image, but then it has to be mucked around with and…

  • Resetting a bootable VHD for another hardware architecture

    Today I tried putting a laptop bootable VHD image onto a different laptop. I had tried this before and it wouldn’t boot. There are two problems actually: The VHD file when expanded to its full size (126 GB) which happens at boot time, was then too big to fit on the available space of the…

  • Don’t get burned by Trademe’s restrictive shipping fees policy

    I’ve operated a personal Trademe account for a couple of years. I only traded a small amount of stuff and haven’t had to ship anything that I can remember. Earlier this year I opened a work account and started to sell surplus computer equipment that we had had, which has brought in a small but…

  • Google targets enterprise with Chrome MSI

    Last time I wrote about the difficulties we had experienced with the standalone Google Chrome installer that is supposed to install for all users. Although I was not able to get support in the Chrome forum, I have discovered today that Google is producing Chrome in an enterprise edition. As the article I was reading…

  • 64 bit Native VHD Deployment [3]

    I have just completed making our laptop image (also 64 bit) and that is to be tested shortly. I used MDT to make the previous deploy but now I am switching to native VHD as well. It looks like the laptop VHD is OK and there are no problems. So this means we can ditch…

  • 64 bit Native VHD deployment [2], etc

    Having completed the deployment of computers for student use the next task is to create the image for staff laptops. At this point we need a boot media for Windows PE x64 and traditionally I would have created a boot CD. But the Windows PE walkthroughs create one that seems to be a waste of…

  • 64 bit Native VHD deployment [1]

    This is my first post since the big earthquake hit Christchurch on 22nd February. I’m not going to write here on the earthquake itself except to say that we have been closed for the past 14 days and will reopen next week. At the moment I am just picking up where things have been 14…

  • The nasty Sysprep Rearm 3-step limit and working around it.

    If you haven’t heard of Rearm (or SkipRearm before) then this is a tricky little thing that Microsoft has introduced into Windows Vista and Windows 7, as part of the more complex activation thingys. And it is an annoying thing. Any one image can only be sysprepped three times before you get this thing kicking…

  • Don’t use 32 bit Windows with more than 3 GB of memory

    Well the subject of this post is that everyone should be getting used to 64 bit operating systems and migrating to them. Today I saw a laptop that had 4 GB of RAM, the very latest HP that we can lease for a school in the TELA scheme. With the 32 bit edition of Windows…