NZ Tekonverse

Last week I wrote a rant about the changes MS has made due to its security elevation model implemented in 2008/R2/Vista/7. The post covered what is effectively turning the domain administrators group into a lepers colony, by effectively implementing built in and irrevocable Deny permissions to the administrators group on a computer or server. Today…

This is a response to the above message which zillions of system administrators world wide hate seeing on their server console. These messages were introduced as a new “feature” of Windows Server 2008, along with the changes that cause them. Microsoft arbitrarily brought in different meanings of ownership in Vista/2008 that are different from XP/2003.…

Today’s Thin PC experience has been to set up a computer at work to see what I can do with it. I wrote a custom shell in Delphi 5 which has a very simple task of launching Remote Desktop Connection and passing a RDP file to it. This means the user doesn’t have to do…

Following on from today’s earlier post, I have found out that WTPC is supported by WAIK, which allows for a custom image in the same way as we would set one up with Windows 7 Enterprise. I also found out how to get Remote Desktop client to start automatically by replacing the shell. However I…

Recently I was logging into the MS VLSC and I noticed a MAK for Windows Thin PC. So naturally I wondered what this was and took a closer look. Windows Thin PC was put on general release on 1 July (five days ago) and it is essentially Windows Embedded Standard (2010) (i.e. Windows 7 SP1…

I have seen this particular error several times with Windows 7 and Vista and we are not helped by a lack of documentation from Microsoft for this problem. In my case the most recent instance of this occurred when I had to drop and recreate a user account. The first time I got the error…

The first thing to say is we are now moving to implement all of our deployments which have been in VHD, to physical i.e. V2P. This includes all computers such as desktops, although being networked with users’ personal files redirected to network shares, they are not as critical as laptops which all have users stuff…

Last time around I posted on the issue of native VHD data integrity considerations. Native VHD is a very fast to deploy imaging solution. However because having your whole hard drive in a single file increases your vulnerability to disk corruption which could make it much more difficult to recover data in case of bad…

There are a couple of important considerations with the use of native VHD based imaging. These are particularly necessary to think about when you are creating an imaging system that is based around the native VHD boot capability Firstly, computer hibernation is not supported. Microsoft hasn’t particularly provided us with any reason why this is…

If you have a subscription to the Volume Licensing Service Center, you may have noticed a MAK key for Windows Thin PC lately. WTPC is the replacement for Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and just as that was offered to NZ schools on the NZ MSA, it appears that WTPC will also be offered as…