Category: Windows Desktop

I’m not much of a gamer.  I used to be and preferred things like strategy games (Rome: Total War), Simulations from the likes of Microprose (blast from the past) like M1A1 Tank Platoon, and sports (Madden Football).  Mostly I play games on the XBox 360 but it’s not really suited to strategy games due to the lack of a mouse and keyboard.  There I play things like UFC Undisputed, etc.

I’ve a few old PC games lying around.  Yesterday afternoon was the first time I’ve had to just do nothing in an age.  After wrapping up some editing review work I decided to install Rise of Nations on my PC.  It’s a 2004 game designed for Windows XP.  I’m running Windows 7 so I wasn’t sure this would work at all.

So with some doubt I progressed with inserting the first CD (yes, not DVD but 2 CD’s) and ran the install.  No problems at all.  I saw some DivX stuff happening but no warnings or alarms.  I started it up.  No problems there.  I played it for 5 or 6 hours.  No problems there (other than my lack of gaming skills).  The game ran perfectly.

So why is it that the game developers who wrote this game (with lots of in depth system calls) got it right and application developers can’t, e.g. many XP applications won’t work on anything later than XP without being shimmed.  It’s because the game developers followed guidance from Microsoft.  Simple.

It’s nice to see the back catalogue can run as along as the developers followed the rules.  I’ll probably end up having a go at Rome Total War and Full Spectrum Warrior at some point.

“This step-by-step guide explains how to install a custom image by using an operating system image that includes your customizations and applications. The guidance is designed specifically for small and medium business that may not have prior experience with Windows deployment or do not have an enterprise deployment infrastructure.”

Microsoft announced the RTM of Windows XP Mode for Windows 7.  It’s already available in MSDN and TechNet.  It will be generally available on October 22nd.

During the demo preparation for the Windows 7 launch events I found a bug in the LTIApply script in MDT 2010.  That script is responsible for downloading a Windows PE image during an upgrade deployment and using BCDEDIT to configure the PC to boot from it instead of the onboard OS. 

My upgrade tests on XP were fine.  But when I upgraded from Vista Ultimate I got this: “The Apply PE step (ZTIAPPLY) is failing with a hex error of 0x80070070”.  I thought over it for a weekend.  I suspected an issue with the hidden 100MB partition that you get with Vista and Windows 7.  I posted on the Minasi Forum and Rhonda Layfield (deployment MVP) emailed me with a suggestion.  That sort of error code usually refers to a space availability issue.  Ah!

I dug into the script in question.  I found the issue.  The script determines if the 100MB partition is present or not.  If it is, it downloads the WinPE image into the 100MB partition.  That’s a problem: My unmodified MDT WinPE image with just a handful of drivers was 140MB.  140MB does not fit into 100MB.  There’s a destination location variable in the script that I hacked out and replaced with C:.  My solution was to download the WinPE image to C: instead of the 100MB hidden partition.  I tested it and it works.

I have no idea how this one got past MS and the beta testers.  Maybe they did just like what I did: tested with XP upgrades.  I know that the original Vista build I was given to work with had no 100MB partition and the upgrade worked fine.  But a later Vista Ultimate SP2 image with the 100MB partition messed it up.  Only my hack got it to work.

My suggestion to the MS folks: Make a simple change to the logic of the script so the download does not use the 100MB partition.

The folks behind the Windows Virtual PC Blog asked me to help spread awareness of its existence: so here you go!  On there they talk about the desktop virtualisation product and XP Mode.  I talked about XP Mode in the blog before.  It’s a free XP SP3 VM that you can run on the professional, ultimate and enterprise editions of Windows 7 for application compatibility when things like the ACT 5.5 kit won’t work or aren’t suitable.  You install your legacy application into the XP VM and you run it from your Windows 7 interface.  When the application starts up it runs in a seamless window, hiding the presence of the VM.  A feature added since I talked about it (or I didn’t notice it) is something people have been begging for in Hyper-V but don’t have yet: support for USB devices.  I showed that in action at the MS Ireland comunity launch event in Cork where I plugged in a BitLocker-To-Go protected USB stick into the XP Mode VM and accessed the secure contents.

You still need to treat the VM like a typical hardware machine on you network, e.g. domain membership, antivirus, patching, etc.  Larger organisations with Software Assurance might want to look at the paid for per desktop MDOP which includes MED-V, a way to centrally manage and configure the VM images on the desktop network.

One of the cool things we got to see at the MS Ireland community launch of Windows 7 was the EDC guys’ presentation on Windows 7 themes.  MS are putting together region sensitive themes, e.g. you’re in Ireland you get Irish wallpapers, in India you get Indian wallpapers, in South Africa you get South African wallpapers.  Very cool.  We all like to have wallpapers of our own so you can build your own theme.  Some businesses want to deploy corporate themes; you can do that do.

Creating the theme is easy.  Get your images together and size them appropriately, e.g. 1920 * 1280 pixels at 96DPI, 24Bit Depth JPG’s.  You then need to customise your theme.  I set the wallpapers to fit and to randomly change every 15 minutes.  Once you’re done, right click on the theme and save it for sharing.  That creates a file that you can share with friends or install on other machines.  It contains all of the sounds and wallpapers you’ve specified.

I’ve created and shared a theme based on my wildlife photography.  Tip: turn on the sound before you log out 🙂

Microsoft has released a set of tutorials and videos to show you the ropes of using the Application Compatibility Toolkit.  When moving from a legacy OS like XP to Windows 7 then application compatibility is your big worry.  You’ve a few alternatives:

• Get the vendor to upgrade the app: *ROTFLMAO* Yeah, like they’ll do that!
• Side by side legacy machine: Yuk!
• Legacy OS terminal servers: Double yuk!
• XP Mode: Fine for small organisations.
• XP Mode with MED-V management: The choice for larger organisations that can afford Software Assurance and the MDOP licensing
• Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)

ACT allows you to create “shims” to simulate your legacy OS.  This fools the application into working.  There’s a huge library of these for applications out there that you can reuse.  You can also create your own for apps not already in the library.

This document was published by MS yesterday:

“This document provides guidance to help organizations understand and manage the security of the Microsoft® BranchCache™ feature introduced in Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows® 7. BranchCache is a wide area network (WAN) bandwidth optimization technology. To optimize WAN bandwidth, BranchCache copies content from your main office content servers and caches the content at branch office locations, allowing client computers at branch offices to access the content locally rather than over the WAN.“

MDT 2010 has been released overnight.  This is the free OS image deployment product that will find its way onto a lot of networks to help people migrate to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  You can also deploy older operating systems.  It uses task sequences to allow you to graphically program the process of not only deploying an operating system but also drivers, patches, applications, etc.  Out of the box, the sequence templates are very powerful, e.g. you can migrate from XP to Windows 7 while restoring data, you can do clean builds and you can capture sysprepped builds.

I’ve done some documentation on MDT 2010 to help you get started.

According to the Springboard blog:

“Michael Niehaus did a great series of blog posts on most of the new features of MDT 2010.  You can review those posts here.

Please make sure you review the release notes for instructions on how to upgrade from MDT 2008 or one of the beta releases of MDT 2010 here”.

Stephen Rose has announced a highly desired trial program where you can get your hands on a 90 day evaluation copy of Windows 7 Enterprise.  This means you can check out the really uber-cool features that are only found in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions.  Enterprise is only available to those who have software assurance for the desktop (or MSDN/TechNet) so it’s been a bit of a chicken and egg situation on getting to play with it.  Thanks to Springboard, you get it for free and can use that trial in your decision making process on Software Assurance.

And it’s going to be really handy for anyone doing certification who doesn’t have TechNet or MSDN.

Please read the full post by Stephen.  There will be only so many downloads.  The eval lasts for 90 days.  You will have to wipe the system at the end of the 90 days.  Please only use this eval in a lab environment.