Category: Windows 7

A few weeks ago at the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 launch called “Day of Evidence” me and some fellow MVPs had a very spontaneous panel discussion on Windows 7 with Stephen Rose from Microsoft Corp in Redmond. Watch the 20 minutes disucssion at http://edge.technet.com/Media/Stephen-Rose-samtalar-med-fem-svenska-MVPer/ and note that although the text on this page is in Swedish the discussion is in English. Enjoy!

Liselotte Isascsson wrote a few lines about this together with a few words written by Stephen Rose about his trip around Europe. Don’t miss!

As discovered by a colleague some time ago there is a bug in Windows 7 where it takes 30 seconds+ to login when the background is set to a solid color. When having an image as a background the login is instant. The problem does not involve the first logon, but every logon after you have started the machine and logged in for the first time. Now, there is a fix for this interesting problem. Please see for http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;977346 more information and to download the hotfix.

At last the Microsoft  Certified Professional page show that I have passed both Windows 7 beta exams, named 71-685 Windows 7 Enterprise Desktop Support Technician and 71-686 Windows 7 Desktop Administration. These exams went live November 20th with the numbers 70-685 and 70-686 and if you have already taken 70-680 i recommend you look into these two new exams.

Previous information telled us that to become a MCITP for Windows 7 one would need to pass not only 70-680 and 70-686 but also an external test from a third party source. Now it seems that this has changed and to become “Enterprise Desktop Administrator 7” all you need is passing 70-680 and 70-686. At least that’s what it says on my transcript and the notes about the third party demand has been pulled from the leaning site. More information about the 70-686 and 70-685 exams!

So participating in the TechNet forums as well as my own forum there seems to be a significant amount of people having problems with Windows 7 going blue screening and freezing on them. Here is a list of troubleshooting:

• Faulty memory module. Blue screens if not caused by software are likely to be caused by bad memory. It is not unusual that a machine works perfect with Windows XP and then starts behaving badly when upgraded to Windows 7 due to changes in memory management. Use built in Windows Memory Diagnostics (on your Windows 7 machines press F8 before Windows starts to load and choose “Windows Memory Diagnostics”) to troubleshoot the memory modules.
• Driver. Bad drivers are without doubt the most common cause for blue screens. Therefore update your drivers either by going to Windows Update or the hardware manufacturer’s web site. If no Windows 7 driver exists for the hardware go with the Windows Vista driver as good as all Vista drivers work with Windows 7.
• BIOS. When having problems with hardware in any way and particularly blue screens I would strongly recommend a BIOS upgrade as that many times improve stability and compatibility. Also resetting the BIOS settings to the default is always a good idea.
• Bad hard drive. Bad hard drives are sometimes causing blue screens. I recommend using Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test, which can scan any brand of hard drives for errors. This tool can be found at http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Remember that you can always find out the reason for the blue screen by analyzing the memory dump file which is generated when the system crashes. Read the guide for analyzing the dump files yourself.

GUIDE: Troubleshooting and analyzing blue screens of death

In RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) version 7 a new feature is added that allows us to redirect the microphone to the remote machine and record the audio on the remote machine. This feature works only when connecting to Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and if you have a Remote Desktop Client 7.0 which is a part of Windows 7 and was release as a standalone update for Windows XP and Windows Vista recently.

Anyway, for the redirection of the microphone device from your local machine to the remote Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 machine you need to allow the redirection. In Windows Server 2008 R2 you make the setting for the RDP-tcp connection in TS or RDS host settings but in the Windows 7 client there is no GUI for enabling redirection of the microphone. So on the remote machine you must start regedit.exe and go to

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp

You need to make sure the value fDisableAudioCapture is set to 0 (1 is the default and means microphone redirection is disabled). Voila!

Windows 7 already contain RDC version 7.0 but now Microsoft has released the 7.0 client for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Some of the benefits of using the RDC 7.0 connecting from Windows XP or Windows Vista are:

• Windows Media Player Redirection.  This feature lets you play even a HD file on the remote machine without any lag as the video and audio is processed on the local machine.
• True multi monitor support!
• Performance improvements. This is alone a good reason to use the latest RDC 7.0 client.
• Many more new features and improvements, read more at RDS blog.

Note that the above features only work when you connect from Windows XP or Windows Vista with RDC 7.0 to a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 machine.

 Download and more information at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969084

The Infrastructure planning and design guide for DirectAccess has just been RTM:ed and can be downloaded from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=164151. If you’re planning on implementing DirectAccess read this document! ;)

Just a quickie about troubleshooting installation issues. You are not always stuck if the installation fails as you can always get to the log files if the setup for instance appear to have hung. Do this by pressing Shift + F10 to bring up the command prompt. Insert a USB memory stick and copy the log files from the hard drive to the USB memory stick and then analyze them on another machine! This KB article documents where you find the various setup log files.

There is an issue with using “previous versions” (shadow copies) in Windows 7 when using it on folders stored on a Small Business Server 2003. The issue is that you cannot get to the previous versions. Read more about the solution at the SBS blog.

Documentation from Microsoft regarding the new feature AppLocker in Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 R2) early stated that to be able to use AppLocker you must have a “Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controller to host the AppLocker rules”. I have seen this information several times since then and at a seminar I payed a quick visit to yesterday regarding Windows 7 this particular questions was raised.

Of course I had to make sure what’s really going on here and I have now verified that AppLocker works perfectly fine in environments where there are only Windows Server 2003 DCs or Windows Server 2008 DCs. I can see no reason what so ever for AppLocker to require a Windows Server 2008 R2 DC to function. The only requirement is that you’re running Windows 7 Enterprise or Windows 7 Ultimate edition to be able to use th powerful feature of AppLocker.