Archive for Operating Systems

What’s new and shiny in Win 7 for IT Pros?

31 March, 2009 at 3:21 pm by Phil Wiffen · Filed under General IT, Windows

If, like me, you’re eagerly anticipating Win 7, you could do a lot worse than check out what’s new in Win 7 for IT Pros.

If you prefer video/speech to reading, there’s a very good video available for download as well :)

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Automatically install Windows Updates / Hotfixes when installing Vista

25 February, 2009 at 10:12 am by Phil Wiffen · Filed under Desktop Deployment, Windows

If, like us, you run a BDD or MDT setup in order to install your Operating Systems, this might be useful :)

If you’d like to pre-install Vista updates and hotfixes while Vista is installing:

  1. Go to your Distribution Share (C:\Distribution)
  2. Go into Operating Systems, then find your Vista OS (C:\Distribution\Operating Systems\Windows Vista Business SP1 – 32bit\)
  3. Create a new folder in this directory called “update”
  4. Copy all of your Vista Update files (.msu) into this directory
  5. That’s it :) The next time you run a Vista deployment, the updates will be pre-installed!
The same concept applies to installing from a Vista DVD.

Extra tip

If you’d like a list of updates released since Vista SP1, check out this site: http://aaron-kelley.net/downloads/hotfix/

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When was Windows installed?

12 February, 2009 at 10:17 am by Phil Wiffen · Filed under General IT, Windows

If you want to know when Windows was installed on a PC, try this from a command prompt:

systeminfo | find /i “install date”

Picked this one up from windowsnetworking.com :)

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DisplayLink MSI installer is here

27 January, 2009 at 11:57 pm by Phil Wiffen · Filed under DisplayLink, Windows

Following up from my previous post, DisplayLink have just announced availability of an MSI installer for DisplayLink Software.

Check out the Press Release, or skip straight to the Corporate Install download page if you know why you want it :)

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How to boot 64-bit Boot Image from WDS PXE when only 32-bit will show

9 January, 2009 at 3:55 pm by Phil Wiffen · Filed under Desktop Deployment, Windows

This is something that has beeen bugging me ever since I set up our BDD 2007 + WDS setup almost a year ago. Even though I was able to create a 64-bit WIM boot image via MDT and load it onto the WDS server, the 64-bit Boot Image was never shown to me when PXE booting from a 64-bit capable PC. All I could see and boot, was the 32-bit boot images. Argh!

After fruitless searching I resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to deploy Vista 64 I’d just burn an ISO of the 64-bit WinPE Boot Image and install from there. Fortunately, we rarely need to deploy 64-bit Vista, but this may change soon.

However, just now, I found the solution…

To enable 64-bit Boot Images via PXE with WDS, you need to run this command on the WDS Server:

wdsutil /set-server /architecturediscovery:yes

Why this was never mentioned in the Documentation that I read for MDT/BDD I’ll never know (maybe I just missed it), but finally I can boot to 64-bit WinPE and deploy 64-bit Vista from the network, hooray! :D

I found the answer on EggHeadCafe by searching for: “mdt 2008 deploy 64-bit vista pxe”. Roughly half way down the hard-to-read page was the nugget I needed.

For reference, there’s a proper Microsoft KB article explaining the solution.

Really hopes this helps someone out!

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