January 2009 - Posts
Not that I would ever, EVER go see something like this. Really. There’s no time during MMS for frivolity.
Finally received official approval to attend MMS 2009, and immediately went online and booked the hotel and registration.
If you've not been, MMS is THE place to cram more knowledge into your head about Microsoft Management products in one week than you will the rest of the year. It's THE place to be to learn what's new, and to speak with vendors about how they're leveraging (or competing with) the toolset.
The invaluable part of the event is peer interaction. I've met more folks and learned more from them at MMS than anywhere else. Everyone you run into is willing to talk and learn, and some of the folks have been instrumental to me at various stages of solving problems and getting things going here on the home front.
You know who you are.
The sessions and breakouts are great - the conversations when you
grab an MVP in the hallway or after a session are invaluable.
If you need justification for the bean counters, take a look at
this document and see if you can modify it to fit your needs.
Now we play the waiting game until the session schedule comes out, then frantically sign up for the sessions to attend before they fill up.
Hope to see you there!
Tim Sneath, “Client Platform Guy”, has posted a list of 30 Windows 7 Tips and Tricks. His blog is a definite add to your favorite RSS aggregator.
Some of my favorite tips:
3. Cut Out The Clutter. Working on a document in a window and want to get rid of all the extraneous background noise? Simply hit Win+Home to minimize all the non-active background windows, keeping the window you’re using in its current position. When you’re ready, simply press Win+Home again to restore the background windows to their original locations.
5. Command Junkies Only. One of the most popular power toys in Windows XP was “Open Command Prompt Here”, which enabled you to use the graphical shell to browse around the file system and then use the context menu to open a command prompt at the current working directory. In Windows 7 (and in Windows Vista, incidentally – although not many folk knew about it), you can simply hold the Shift key down while selecting the context menu to get exactly the same effect. If the current working directory is a network location, it will automatically map a drive letter for you.
11.
Rearranging the Furniture. Unless you’ve seen it demonstrated, you may not know that the icons in the new taskbar aren’t fixed in-place. You can reorder them to suit your needs, whether they’re pinned shortcuts or running applications. What’s particularly nice is that once they’re reordered, you can start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1, Win+2, Win+3 etc. I love that I can quickly fire up a Notepad2 instance on my machine with a simple Win+5 keystroke, for instance.
What’s less well-known is that you can similarly drag the system tray icons around to rearrange their order, or move them in and out of the hidden icon list. It’s an easy way to customize your system to show the things you want, where you want them.
26.
ISO Burning. Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it: you can double-click on any DVD or CD .ISO image and you’ll see a helpful little applet that will enable you to burn the image to a blank disc. No more grappling for shareware utilities of questionable parentage!
Check the blog links for more!
Finally, posting this from Windows 7 with Windows Live Writer 9.
Experience so far : good to great. Install of Windows 7 was a snap. Auto-detected everything on my NC6320, including Bluetooth and wireless.
Boot times are quite a bit faster than my comparative Vista machine, but since this is a ‘clean’ install and my Vista machine is loaded with all kinds of crap, I can’t give that a whole lot of weight.
I’m using AVG for virus scan, which was actually one of the suggestions during the install process. Installed without so much as a single bark. As did Google Chrome, my current browser of choice (for non-Microsoft web sites, of course).
Installing Live Writer took a bit longer, and three passes. It failed completely the first time but invited me to try again, whereupon it went and got a pre-requisite I was missing, then failed again. Third try finally loaded everything I was looking to get. Odd way to go about the process, but I suppose ultimate success is nothing to complain about.
Things noticed :
Right-click on the desktop takes you quickly to Screen Resolution, and even Gadgets. Finally!
Wordpad and Paint have been updated to use the Ribbon interface. Still trying to decide if this is an improvement. Notepad still it’s same old minimal self. I’ve never figured out why Microsoft doesn’t include the functionality of Notepad++ or Crimson Editor in their Notepad.
Under ‘Accessories’ they’ve added ‘Sticky Notes’, which lets you have virtual Post-Its (tm) on your desktop. Not a bad feature for a home user, corporate users likely have something in place for note-taking.
Powershell comes pre-loaded as well.
Note that the beta version identifies itself as “ultimate”, so some things may not make the final cut to whatever version of Windows 7 we end up using. I doubt I’ll be putting this particular version through any paces with SCCM or SCOM in the lab, but that will likely change.
What’s your Win 7 experience been like?
That involves singing.
http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/c162e520-9f8b-452e-9c12-7e07e0c1d392
Granted, Microsoft does make it easy to learn (materials readily available), but that video is hard to watch.
Microsoft has over 150 FREE Windows XP, Windows Vista & Office Programs available for download -- finding them all is extremely difficult . . . until now.
Click Here for a terrific list of free tools and utils. I knew about some of this stuff, but not nearly everything.