Thursday, August 27, 2009

Tip: Retrieving the Prodigal Window

Have you ever worked with an external monitor on your notebook, 2009-08-27_1357with the desktop and applications spread out across both monitors,  then undocked the notebook and half your apps are “off the screen”? You can’t move them back on the screen because you can’t see where to place the mouse cursor to drag the windows back to the visible desktop. And if you quit and re-launch them, they go right back to where they were! Very annoying.

I helped out a coworker with this tip today and thought I’d document it. It dates back to Windows 3.1 / 3.11, back when the menu in the upper-left corner of a window was used much more. It’s still there in Windows 7, but no one seems to know about it any more.

To move a window back to where you can see it:

  1. Use Alt-Tab to bring the wayward window into focus. (Even though you can’t see it, it’s still in focus.)
  2. Hit Alt-Space to activate the upper-left menu.
  3. Hit “m” to select the Move command. The cursor, if you could see it, turns into a four-way arrow.
  4. Using the cursor keys only, move the window back to where you can see it. Use any other key or mouse click to return the cursor to normal.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Active Directory Reference Posters

In trolling through Microsoft downloads for some upcoming presentations, I happened across an updated version of the original Windows 2003 Active Directory Component “Jigsaw” poster published by TechNet Magazine in their March-April 2006 issue. The updated version, published in July 2007, contains the various AD feature components available in Windows 2008:

  • AD Lightweight Directory Services (aka ADAM. Yes. Still.)
  • AD Federation Services (ADFS)
  • AD Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
  • Group Policy (not strictly a feature component, though the Group Policy Management Console – GPMC – is)
  • AD Management (sort of a grab bag of new AD features in W2K8, including fine-grained password policies, GlobalName zones, restartable AD, and auditing changes)
  • AD Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) – the most heavily promoted new AD feature in W2K8

If that’s not enough information to cram onto a 20” x 30” poster, one side has a list of acronyms and their translation while the other is a legend of all the pretty icons being used. This is a poster to put on the wall and stare intently at, for a while.

For you non-AD people that occasionally read this blog…yeah, it is complicated :).

TechNet Magazine Active Directory Component Jigsaw Poster

2009-08-24_2236

Windows Server 2008 Component Poster 

W2K8_AD_Components

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Upgrading Windows 7 RC to RTM

If you’re like me, when you had Windows 7 beta on your system, you more or less expected to have to rebuild to move to the080724_windows7[1] release candidate. With the release candidate, based on past history you fully expected to be able to upgrade from RC to RTM.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case. I don’t know the whys and wherefores of this decision, but I do know I don’t want to go through it. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to upgrade to Windows 7 RTM from RC, courtesy of Ron Schenone. Note that, strictly speaking, this scenario is not supported by Microsoft (though I highly doubt the question will ever come up). I’ll summarize the procedure here:

  1. Mount your legal copy of Windows 7, either with the physical DVD or by using MagicDisc to mount the ISO.
  2. Copy the contents to a writeable location (network file share, usb key / drive, etc.). I used a network file share that was available to all clients.
  3. Browse to the \support folder.
  4. Edit cversion.ini.
  5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the build you’re running. If you’re running the RC, lower the number from 7100 to 7000.
  6. Save the file.
  7. Run setup from this modified copy, and the version check will be bypassed.

A few other notes from my upgrade experience:

  • Log off all other users on the computer.
  • Deauthorize any iTunes accounts for the computer. You can easily re-auth them when the upgrade is complete.
  • I don’t know this last one for sure, but I believe the upgrade goes MUCH faster if you offload non-essential files from the system during the upgrade. When I upgraded my desktop computer that had a replicated file share with about 100 GB of data, the upgrade took forever. When on my second upgraded system I moved this kind of data off, it ran much faster. I do know that the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 upgrades are actually a sort of wipe-and-load upgrade compared to the previous overwrite-in-place upgrade method, so it’s plausible.
  • Use Treesize Free to compare (and clean up!) your disk space before and after the upgrade. You may find you’ve burned some space that can be reclaimed.
  • You can also reclaim space after a successful upgrade by going into Disk Cleanup for the system drive (Right-click on the drive letter in Windows Explorer, Properties, the Disk Cleanup button by the pie chart). The list of of items that can be cleaned up will include “Files discarded by Windows upgrade”, but it will NOT be checked. In my case it saved about 1.4 GB of space.
  • Before you copy all those files back (and you’re in the disk properties dialog anyway), go to the Tools property sheet and defrag your nice new upgraded system!

Friday, August 07, 2009

W2K8 Metadata Cleanup without NTDSUTIL

I just learned that when you aren’t able to normally demote a domain controller in Active Directory and have to perform a metadata cleanup, if you’re running Windows 2008 or R2 it’s become much easier.

The classic method for cleaning up the DC’s metadata in Active Directory has been to go into NTDSUTIL and running through a sequence of commands to point at the right computer object representing the domain controller, then removing it. What I just learned from one of the Microsoft directory services guys is that

…you can use Active Directory Users and Computers to clean up server metadata. In this procedure, deleting the computer object in the Domain Controllers organizational unit (OU) initiates the cleanup process, which proceeds automatically.

The only place so far I’ve found this documented are those two sentences in this TechNet article. Simple! Just delete the computer object! Now I need to go try it in my test lab…

Good Old Fashioned American Craftsmanship

A couple of years ago I sprung for a really nice bicycle floor pump, a professional tool made by Park Tool of St. Paul, Minnesota.

If you’ve ever been at all into bicycling and their maintenance, you’ve certainly seen Park tools at your local bike shop. Usually a bit pricier than the rest, the bright blue tools are almost without exception what the professional mechanics use. (One of the nice things about bicycling is that as a grownup you can afford The Best of some things. Unlike automobiles.) They’re running a “True Blue” ad campaign that points out, for example, that every single Park repair stand you’ve seen in every single bicycle shop in the United States for the last 29 years has been welded together by one manBradley Reid.

One morning the gauge on my pump stuck at 60 psi. Now I didn’t DSC_0417know if I could simply pump my tire up to 160 and get 100 psi, or if something very bad would happen. Since the tools have a limited lifetime warranty, I gave Park a call. For such a well-known presence in the cycling world, they’re actually quite a small company.

I explained my problem to the operator, who responded, “Oh, you want to talk to Mark.” Really? No phone menus? No overseas call centers? Nope. “Hi, this is Mark. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

Mark called back very shortly. Before I’d even finished explaining my problem he knew all about it. “The earlier pumps use brass gears with teeth as small as 1/4 mm. If it got knocked over too many times, sometimes it will skip a tooth or to and stay stuck there.” I hadn’t knocked it over, but I wasn’t going to point this out as he was going to send me an updated gauge. “Be sure to recycle that gauge; under the case it’s a solid brass body.” Really?? People still do that?

I just had to ask, having had so many dodos on the other end of the phone for some many years: Does the new gauge fit the old pump? 

There was a moment’s silent on the other end of the line. Then Mark said, in a slightly offended tone, “Of course it does. This is Park.” You’re right, and thanks for demonstrating it to me.

Mark mailed me a new gauge (and a little Park sticker) for no charge of course, which I easily swapped for the old one. I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of the old gauge though. Now I have a second paperweight, alongside my ‘70’s Campy Nuovo Record rear derailleur :).

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Tuesday, August 04, 2009

A Really Interesting Look at W2K8 R2 Seven Days Before Ship

Windows IT Pro has just aired an interesting interview (if you’re an IT pro that focuses on operating systems – aren’t we all?) of the daily “ship” meeting for Windows Server 2008 R2, a week before it went RTM (released to manufacturing). The overall program manager Brian McNeill is the main interviewee, and the always colorful Iain McDonald also has a cameo.

My colleague Karen Forster, who handled the project, has a good blog post about it.

For those of you that still have old doubts about how reliable the Windows server product is, check out these numbers:

Those reliability statistics McDonald was looking at were noteworthy. The Microsoft study shows that the new release significantly exceeds the reliability goal that was set for its predecessor Windows Server 2008 (WS08) at its RTM. As the graph in the video shows, WS08 R2 RC demonstrated availability of 99.9987 percent (~ 7 minutes of down time per year), which exceeds WS08’s RTM availability of 99.9978 percent (~12 minutes of down time per year)."

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/102593/exclusive-video-inside-the-windows-server-2008-r2-ship-room.html