Posts from 2009

Disk I/O Performance Improvements from Partition Alignment

Disk or partition alignment is something new to me. I have heard of it before but I have never used nor understood it’s meaning until a colleague at work brought it to my attention for a customer we are trying to help out.

The information in this post is taken from a blog posting entitled Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server by Jimmy May and Denny Lee at Microsoft.

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Changes to the Blog

Being that I’ve been posting a bit lately with Windows Phone and other related things, I realised that the blog looked a bit dire.

I’ve re-coloured everything to white and it’s looking much nicer. All I need to do now is fix a couple of the Silverlight XAML elements from black to white to match the new colour but aside from that, it’s looking much better.

I hope you all like it.

Yes, Windows Server 2008 R2 is 64-bit Only

I got asked a question yesterday at work regarding the architecture of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Just for the record and to ensure anyone else to who may be interested knows, Windows Server 2008 R2 is available in two architectures:

  • 64-bit (x64)
  • Intel Itanium (ia64)

There is no 32-bit (x86) version of Windows Server 2008 R2, nor will there be 32-bit versions of any future Windows Server operating systems.

This move to a pure 64-bit architecture is also following suit in the server technologies and products including Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and more to come no doubt.

I would also anticipate that Windows 7 is the last client operating system to be available in 32-bit and I think that Windows 8 or however it manifests itself will also likely be a 64-bit only architecture operating system.

I don’t know what architect Microsoft Midori will be based on but that’s a totally different subject and one I don’t know anything about yet to comment on.

Windows Phone (Windows Mobile 6.5)

Windows Mobile 6.5, now called Windows Phone is the latest mobile OS revision from Microsoft, and it’s a vast improvement from 6.1

I’ve been using it in Beta form on my Touch HD for about six months courtesy of the folks on XDA-Developers and Miri’s WM6.5 ROM for the Touch HD.

The first thing you notice is the Today screen, now referred to as Titanium. This has been inspired by the Zune interface. The whole thing has designed to be finger friendly and require a stylus as little as possible.

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Sprawl of Windows Phone

Yesterday (if your American or today if your British) is the official launch of Windows Phone, Windows Phone Marketplace and Microsoft My Phone.

I’ve been using Windows Phone (Windows Mobile 6.5) and Microsoft My Phone for sometime now – Not the Marketplace though as this only opened today.

I’m going to review all three starting with Windows Mobile 6.5, then Marketplace and finally My Phone.

Enjoy x

The Myth of Leaving it Plugged In

The aged old myth of leaving your laptop plugged in forever and a day remains strong even today.

Many people claim that this is an old adage that doesn’t apply to modern Li-Ion (Lithium Ion) batteries, however there is just as many people who disagree. Even Apple agree with an official statement on their site about not leaving your laptops plugged in all of the time:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

However, an article on the Dell website doesn’t recommend the same thing – In actual fact it neglects to comment on what you should do once your notebook is fully charged. HP even circumvent the topic in their article.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/batteries_sitelet/en/replacement?c=us&cs=29&l=en&s=dhs
http://h20271.www2.hp.com/SMB-AP/cache/122140-0-0-155-121.html

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Sky+ HD Multi-Room Shared Planner

I got some anonymous information last night from a friend about a service Sky are considering introducing here in the UK.

The service looks as if it’s going to be called Sky+ HD Multi-Room Shared Planner – What a mouthful.

The premise of it is that you have multiple Sky+ HD boxes in your house, and you can share recorded TV amongst those boxes throughout your house. The service also touts that you will be able to connect to your Sky+ HD boxes via your PC and access that content also.

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Office 2010 WebApps Available to Everyone

Microsoft have been touting invitations to their Office 2010 WebApps for about a week now, and I was quite disappointed that I didn’t get one, namely because I get Technical Preview invitations to most things but I discovered this little flaw / opening in the system today.

Using your own Windows Live ID sign into login.live.com and then access SkyDrive using the link in the More menu. (PS: This will work with any account registered as a Windows Live ID, contrary to what other reports claim – I used my @baby-green.co.uk email address and it worked just fine).

Once you logged into SkyDrive upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.

Once you have the document uploaded you’ll find a notification waiting for you asking you to join Office WebApps Technical Preview.

Just remember that during Technical Preview, only PowerPoint and Excel have editing capability. Word is view only and OneNote is currently unavailable.

Managed Software Installation in Windows Vista and 7

In Windows XP, a domain client computer would display messages like “Installing Managed Software Windows Defender” “Apply Computer Settings”.

In Windows Vista all of this disappeared and was replaced with “Please Wait”. In my opinion this was a bad move because users can get anxious that something is wrong quickly and sitting with the Please Wait message is tempting users to hit the power button.

I noticed sometime ago that Windows Server 2008 displays the correct messages to the user at start-up such as “Applying Default Domain Policy” and “Installing Managed Software X”

I didn’t realise however that it was possible to get this functionality back in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Open your GPMC and navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System

In here you will find a policy named Verbose Vs Normal Status Messages. Enabling this policy has the following effects according to the GMPC information:

Directs the system to display highly detailed status messages.

If you enable this setting, the system displays status messages that reflect each step in the process of starting, shutting down, logging on, or logging off the system.

This setting is designed for sophisticated users that require this information.

Note: This setting is ignored if the “Remove Boot / Shutdown / Logon / Logoff status messages” setting is enabled.

Access Denied When Approving a Pending WDS Client

With WDS you can configure the server to automatically respond to known clients. You can additionally affect the behaviour for unknown clients.

In my environment I have it configured to answer the clients PXE boot request however they are not automatically served for two reasons:

  1. I may want to assign them to a different image or elect to manually install it without the unattended settings
  2. I may want the client to not automatically join the domain
  3. I want to name the something better than MININT-000000ABCDEF

When an unknown client connects to the WDS server the user is presented with a message to say that their request is pending administrative approval on the server.

Using the WDS console, you select the Pending Devices tree and select the option to Name and Approve a client, however doing so presents you with an Access Denied error.

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