NZ Tekonverse

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, I did some thinking about this overnight and have made enquiries on Technet as well. I think the best scenario for creating your own native boot VHDs using MDT is to deploy an OS to a VHD using a standard deploy sequence. You would then run a sysprep only task…

In my previous post I wrote about the development of the native boot VHD capability in Windows 7. As I noted, the specifics of this functionality is that a VHD can be copied to a destination computer’s hard disk and attached as a boot device. Windows can then be booted via the VHD file. There…

A while back I wrote about my experiments in using MDT to back up laptops. Some of my MDT shares got moved to a new server recently and the backup share had to be set up again from scratch, which for some reason proved exceptionally difficult but it has happened eventually. However while I was…

As a recent post noted, Offline Files is still a temperamental technology that I have decided is not worth the effort on Windows 7. So what other systems can you use? Take note of the following: By default, Windows 7 will create a restore point on the laptop’s hard drive every day. This can be…

One of the most distasteful features of using Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers in a domain environment is their tendency to freeze during the Group Policy application phase of user logon. Although it is known that there were some instances of this occurring with Windows XP as well, we never saw these happen in…

Well, Windows Live Essentials has been updated to the 2011 edition and they have, at last, gone back to proper toolbars with icons, replacing text labelled buttons in the last few editions. In fact, the WLE applications (I’m using Writer to post this) are now using the Ribbon like Office does, this is the first…

Offline Files is a technology that was introduced in Windows XP. We used it for a time then but found it troublesome. I have often wondered why Microsoft needed to use a special folder in the local computer instead of doing something like a straightforward automated sync between a visible local copy of the data…

Still can’t get over how quiet this thing is. From the next room you can’t hear it at all. Although the old one turned out to have quite a bit of dust blocking things up. I got a serial backplane connector from an Asus motherboard and am pleased to report it worked the first time…

Well, such a big project and now it’s over. Very pleased with the new box, just a few niggles of things maybe I should have checked over before I started. Mainly that this board has only got provision for 8 USB sockets, one of those is taken by the card reader and I wanted more…

As we saw in the last post, I started it on the old PC and finished it on the new one. About halfway through writing, I saved the draft on the old PC and shut it down. I then booted from a Windows PE CD and started up ImageX to capture the boot disk to…