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Vista's Partition Magic

Did you know that Vista natively supports partition resizing in Windows Vista? If you go into Computer Management and navigate down to Storage, and then Disk Management in the right window pane you can select a volume, shrink that volume by right clicking on the volume and selecting Shrink Volume. This will open a dialog box to shrink the volume where you can configure how small you would like to make it, of course it cannot shrink it past the size of the data on the drive, if you want to completely...  ... Read the full post or  the 2 comments. Filed under: Tools, et. all, Vista, Hack

Booting Your Vista Box From A WIM File Stored Locally

Let me first say Happy Mothers Day to all the wonderful Mothers out there hopefully you are having/had a superb Mothers Day!!! Today is Mothers Day in the US if you hadn't guessed. This is just amazing, this is the third time today that I have found someone already had a solution to a question I was asked just this last week. This is one, managing SMS clients in both workgroup and a domain, and problems with WinPE and RealTek drivers. This is a very cool solution to someone asking me something...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Tools, Vista, Hack, OSD, WAIK, Windows PE, BDD

Windows Vista Hardware Assessment Beta Program Now Available for Download

If you are planning on deploying Vista this is a tool for you. If you are doing it in house or for a customer this tool will tell you if your hardware is Vista ready or not. It works without installing an agent and runs from a single, centralized server. It scans your network and evaluates the hardware for Vista readiness. For those computers that are on the network but are not Vista ready it recommends specific hardware upgrades that need to get them Vista ready. This is a beta, but it is a public...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Tools, Beta, Vista, News

ACT 5.0 Released

If you haven't used ACT (Application Compatibility Toolkit) what it allows you to do is first get a database of applications you have installed, be it on all computers or just a select few, but any that install the monitoring tool. Then compare that list (automatically if you like) to the Microsoft database of applications they and vendors have certified as well as feedback from those who use the tools, monitor applications for problems on the clients running the ACT tool and then you can mitigate...  ... Read the full post or  the first comment. Filed under: Tools, Vista, News

Use ImageX without installing WAIK

From Michael Greene’s TechNet blog. Source . Use ImageX without installing WAIK I've heard a few people actually say ImageX.exe is included with Vista. That's not technically accurate. ImageX is most certainly a value add to Vista but it is packaged separately in a download called "WAIK" or Windows Automated Installation Kit . So let's say you want to use ImageX but don't want to run the full WAIK install. You copy imagex to a separate machine and run it. Works, but certain things fail, why...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Tools, Vista

Building and Deploying Vista from an Image

Aaron has put together a great list of resources for building a Vista image. If you have not used Vista, or read about it, the install process as well as how the OS is built is different than XP and prior OS’s. In addition with the new OSD FP/USMT we move to .xml files, but probably the most interesting technology so far is WAIK. WAIK will allow you to edit an image without having to lay it down on a system and then recreate the image. You for got a driver, want to add that new company standard...  ... Read the full post or  the 3 comments. Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, Vista, SCCM 2007, OSD

Windows Easy Transfer Companion for Vista

The Windows Easy Transfer Companion transfers actual applications from your Windows XP PC to your new Windows Vista PC and will be made available as an extended public beta version to coincide with the launch of Windows Vista. It supports transfers via network connection or the Easy Transfer Cable and eliminates the need to manually reinstall programs when upgrading to a new PC. It will be freely available as a download for Genuine customers. Anthony Clendenen '> Listen to this article  ... Read the full post or  the 6 comments. Filed under: Tools, Vista

New Downloads From Microsoft - Vista AJAX and Active Directory

Microsoft ASP .NET AJAX v1 Beta ASP.NET AJAX is a set of technologies to add AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) support to ASP.NET. It consists of a client-side script framework, server controls, and more. AD Forest Recovery – Best practices white paper. This paper is a best-practice recommendation for recovering an Active Directory® directory service forest, if forest-wide failure has rendered all domain controllers in the forest incapable of functioning normally. Optimizing client...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Tools, Vista, Microsoft

Microsoft Announces Desktop Optimization Pack

Today it was officially announced that Microsoft will combine the recently acquired tools from Softricity, Winternals, and Desktop Standard into a single package that you can purchase for ~$50 per client. What this package gets you is SoftGrid application virtualization, group policy management/enhancement tools from DesktopStandard, and the remote repair tools from Wintenals. For this price you could not get even the tools from DesktopStandard, the backend for the SoftGrid used to run about $15...  ... Read the full post or  the 2 comments. Filed under: SMS 2003, Group Policy, Tools, Vista, News, Microsoft

Vista Preinstall Kit is Available for OEM's

While you can’t get this unless you are an OEM, this should give you some insight into what to expect with SCCM 2007 when you are making and prepping your images. You do use OSD right? Here are some of the new features of WinPE 2.0 Ability to boot WindowsPE into RAM from WIM Image Driver injection into WindowsPE Images "Hot" PnP Support for WindowsPE 32-MB RAM Drive (writable scratch space) New/additional optional components New Launch Tool Called Wpeinit New Build Tool Called PEImg New Image...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Tools, Vista

Two More Vista Tools - Group Policy Docs and Standard User Mode Testing Tool

Two revisions to some previous tools make the list of downloads today. The first one is the step-by-step Vista deployment guide. In this one they have added more group policy documentation, including some other new or revised docs. The second one is for testing applications in standard user mode, or non-admin. This tool will help you determine if an application is going to cause you headaches when the user is no longer running with admin rights, in Vista even the admin runs most things without admin...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Group Policy, Tools, Vista

Introducing - Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE)

Original source: Introducing Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) The Windows Recovery Environment (aka Windows RE aka WinRE) team would use this blog to share information, tricks and tips about WinRE with support professionals and end-users of Windows. We would also like to use this blog to get feedback from the community. So what is WinRE? Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is a recovery platform based on Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). WinRE provides two main functionalities: 1...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Tools, Vista, Microsoft