Author: Andreas Stenhall

So in the jungle of desktop virtualization, which one are you gonna go with? VDI, App-V, MED-V and more, what are they all about and what are the pros and cons using either of these? These questions and many more is answered by Ian Moulster.

Ever tried logging in with a local user account to a Windows 7 machine wondering what the heck the computer name is? Simply type:

.\username

and the password to login. This will login you in with a local account to the machine. Simple as that! :)

I have experienced this problem a few times and there is now a hotfix for a problem with mapping and accessing DFS shares with Windows 7 clients. Hotfix can be requested from Microsoft Support. Basically you get “An unpexcted network error occured” or a couple of other issues and cannot access the DFS share. Patch and make the problem go away.

Being asked by Michael Pietroforte, the runner of 4sysops.com, I am joining about 15 other blogs around the globe in this Windows 8 poll.

First of all, I want to thank all who sent me ideas for this Windows 8 poll. Creating a wish list for Windows 8 was more difficult than I anticipated. Obviously, this 25-year-old operating system still has plenty of room for improvement. While all the suggestions I received certainly made sense, I had to reduce the number of options for this poll to a reasonable number. This is why I included only possible key improvements that would have a major impact on the majority of Windows users.

It is quite obvious that Microsoft won’t add all enhancements listed here, and for some features it is not very likely that they will consider them any time soon. But who knows, if those options receive enough votes, someone at Microsoft might get interested. The 15 blogs listed below will run this poll within the next days or so. The votes are automatically integrated in the cloud, so please vote only once. If you also want to run this poll on your blog, please contact me and I will send you the code to embed the widget in a post or on your sidebar.
– Michael Pietroforte

Read more about the poll at 4sysops.com.

These are the 15 blogs participating in this collaborative poll on Windows 8:  Demonic Talking Skull – I’M A UC BLOG – markwilson.it – msigeek – Standalone Sysadmin – Techinch – Teching It Easy: with Windows – The Experience Blog – The things that are better left unspoken – The Windows Club – WindowsObserver – WindowsPro – Within Windows – 7tutorials – 4sysops

If you are using roaming profiles in Windows 7, you should probably want to look at a new GPO setting named “Background upload of a roaming user profile’s registry while user is logged on” that (Computer\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles) which by an interval you specify upload the registry hive for the user logged into the machine. This is in particular good as users tend to become more and more mobile and just bringing the machine to sleep or hibernation. Normally the profile and the registry included are only copied to the network server at user logoff time. Making this settings hopefully keeps customizations done by your users stick, making the users a lot happier.

Even been in a scenario where users tend to put not only large files but also a large number of music and movie files in a folder which is redirected using folder redirection? Find relief in this new GPO setting which you can use to exclude certain file types from being cached on the client machines. You find the setting in Computer configuration > Administrative templates > Network > Offline files and the setting is called “Exclude files from being cached”. Now only the relevant files will be cached on the client machines, saving space and reducing network bandwidth.

Nowadays the only supported method of making changing to a user profile is to use an answer file to set the value CopyProfile to TRUE. The problem is that a lot of the documentation found is somewhat unclear on how to use this answer file. Fortunately Microsoft clears the confusion on this and I think this is worth mentioning to everybody as it has been causing a lot of confusion. They list scenarios for both MDT 2010 and ConfigMgr.

From time to time BitLocker enabled machines enter recovery mode, requiring an unlock to proceed. Sometimes this comes as a surprise to you as an administrator. An example of when BitLocker  unexpectedly enters recovery mode could be when installing a language pack as this modifies the boot configuration data (BCDEDIT) making BitLocker automatically go to recovery mode as it thinks this is an attack on the machine. Ask the Core team has created a list of the most common problems with BitLocker entering recovery mode.

Still on vacation for a few more days and just warming up the blog pen for the autumn and winter to come. What’s not better than to submit your best desktop background pictures with the theme “Swedish summer” and the chance to win Windows 7? The competition information is in Swedish but for those of you who wants to know how fabulous Sweden can look like (at least a couple of months every year) :) have a look at the competition gallery.

A couple of weeks ago I got the announcement that I have been re-awarded with the MVP award by Microsoft. Congratulations goes to all fellow MVP:s such which also got re-awarded, for example Joachim Nässlander, Magnus Björk and Martin Lidholm.