calmcomputing

Although Windows Vista was released to manufacturing in November, the much needed deployment tools were not. Since then, things have been coming together, and and with last week’s release of the Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment 2007 (BDD 2007), the final piece is in place. Organizations now have everything they need to set about making Vista deployment plans in earnest.

I’ve been working with BDD for a while in beta and was anxious get the final release installed in my environment. After making a backup of my distributions share, I uninstalled the beta and manually deleted everything else. After a system restart, I began the process of putting it all back. From beginning to end, the process took about two hours.

The only issue that I experienced after the install was the inability to connect to my database. After entering the necessary information, I received a message stating “Unable to load SQL Server OLEDB provider resource DLL.” I never received this message running beta version of the BDD. I solved the problem by finding a copy of sqloledb.rll and copying it to C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Ole DB\Resources\1033.

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Often in the course of my work, I have the need to repartition drives on Windows XP systems. Typically this involves reducing the size of a large, single partition and creating a new, second partition in the free space. Partition Magic is my tool of choice because it allows the work to be done from within Windows and without data loss.

I was working with Vista RC1 this morning and discovered that the Disk Management features have been improved to offer this capability out of the box. Referred to as Shrink Volume, this command can be used to reduce the size of simple and spanned volumes. This morning I used it to reduce a single 80GB partition to 50GB and then created a new 30GB partition in the free space.

Here are the steps:

1. Open Computer Management (Start, right-click Computer, Manage) and click continue at the UAC prompt.
2. Click on Disk Management in the Storage section.
3. Right-click on a partition and Shrink Volume and will appear on the context menu.
4. After some checking, Windows will report the partitions current size, how much it can be “shrunk”, as well as the new size. You can go for the maximum “shrink” (default) or enter a smaller value.
5. When the values are set, click the Shrink button.
6. Unallocated space will appear which can be used to create a new partition.

Technorati Tags: windowsvista, vista, microsoft, beta

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Anxious to see the new Mobile Device Center, I connected a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5 to my Beta 2 machine with Office 2007 installed. I thought a test run would be good before connecting my Smartphone. The Pocket PC was recognized and Mobile Device Center came up. Right now all you can do is browse the file system of the mobile device and sync music, pictures, and video with Windows Media Player. Calendar, contacts, mail, and tasks will be added to the mix through an update scheduled to be available through Automatic Updates by the end of June. More information can be found on the Windows Vista Team Blog.

Technorati Tags: windowsvista, vista, microsoft, beta, mobile

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For a version 1 product, OneNote 2003 is a great. My notes are more organized than ever (and I’m not even using it on a tablet). One of the features I like best is the Note Flags Summary. This Task Pane view allows note flags to be summarized easily and can reflect the current section or the entire notebook. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it appear by default each time OneNote is launched (i.e. no persistence). I’ll keep looking. There must be a way.

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I haven’t had time to do a full review, but so far, it looks good. I installed it this morning and all my virtual machines have been running smoothly ever since. Get it here. The release notes state that experimental support for Longhorn has been added. I’ve been running the PDC build of Longhorn on VMware 4.0 for a while and haven’t had any problems…it’s just slow.

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