Author: Andreas Stenhall

… my mother who took her last breadth and fell into eternal sleep early Saturday morning. Though being sick for some time I did not expect your 53 year old life to end so soon. Will always remember you and will always love you.

This week has been really intensive with a 5 day course on depoying Windows 7, including the MAP (Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit). As always there were a lot of interesting discussions related to Internet Explorer, which many times casues problems when migrating to a later operating system. One of the major problems with IE migrations are that we have little control and historically had problems assessing the current IE, web apps or web browser status. The answer came a couple of nights ago, in the latest beta MAP.

MAP 5.5 beta brings the possibility to inventory for which IE and third party browsers that are used in your organization, which default browsers are set but you will also see all activex controls and browser helper objects are being used, including a count number ith how many times for instance a particular activex control has been used. This is some really great information that will for sure help us in the migrating process when deploying Windows 7.

Get your hands on the beta from Microsoft Connect.

On November 25 me and some colleagues from Knowledge Factory as well as Specops Software and AddSkills will be hosting a Windows 7 deployment day. Johan Arwirdmark gives a short teaser…

Not long ago I posted about the interesting issue of Windows Deployment Server services not starting when having more than 20 logical processors on the machine. Now Microsoft have published the KB article for the problem regarding Windows Deployment Server service but  it also seems to affect ntdsutil as well. Again, running a deployment server or a domain controller on a server which has more than 20 logical processors is not very likely but still it’s kind of an interesting issue.

When running Windows clients in the “cloud”, i.e. virtual Windows clients, there are several things to note and to take into considerations. For instance what will happen every wednesday night at 01:00 when all your X number of Windows clients will start defragmenting their virtual disks? Probably this scenario will significantly impact performance negatively on your virtual cluster disks.

There are many more actions you can take to optimize your clients in a VDI scenario and thanks to Jonathan Bennett this action is very smooth. Run the tool VDI Optimizer and choose what you want to be turned off and out comes a VBscript that you can run for instance at deploy time.

By default when you search using the search box in the start menu in Windows 7, it only returns indexed content. This is by design. However there might be scenarios where you might want to also search libraries which are not indexed and for this scenario there is a hotfix that enables a registry settings that controls this behavior. It is documented in Microsoft KB article 2268596.

Just a quick tip that you do not need to have your entire RDS environment at the Windows Server 2008 R2 level to be able to utilize the nice integration features of RemoteApps in Windows 7. I am referring to the feature of subscribing to a feed of applications and thereby have a dynamic publishing of RemoteApps for the ends users, in the users start menu.

To get this working all you need is a Windows Server 2008 R2 to host the RDS Web Access role, which then can include and publish RemoteApp sources that are based on Windows Server 2008 hosts (no R2 requirements there).

It’s been around for some time and if you did not already know about it Microsoft provide the free tool called Security Compliance Manager. You can use it to very easily manage and export a set of pre-configured (or settings that you configure on your own) settings that improve security. You can then export these settings to for instance a group policy and import it into your domain.

There are templates with pre-configured security lockdowns for Windows XP, Windows Vista and of course also Windows 7. The tool works great for creating a security baseline for your client machines but the only downside is that you cannot import nor in a convenient way compare the settings in the templates with what you currently have.

So to end the pain of handling duplicate drivers in System Center Configuration Manager there has been a hotfix released that resolves the issue with “The selected driver has already been imported at this site”, at least partly, depening on what method your are using to apply drivers. Read more about the affected scenarios at the Mike Niehaus blog and download the hotfix from Microsoft.

There a number of group policies that can interfere when you are deploying Windows 7 machines, one of them being the “Admin approval mode for the built-in local administrator account” which if set to enabled breaks deployment using the Lite Touch scenario using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

My fellow MVP and now also colleague Johan Arwidmark has a blog post on two methods for handling problems related to group policies when dpeloying machines, either by settings filters on your group policies or postponing the domain join process.