Category Archives: Microsoft Windows 7

Getting your Active Directory ready for Windows 7, Part 4

In the past three parts of this series, I already gave you some tips and tricks to tackle the problems you might encounter when introducing Windows 7 in your existing environment. We’ve already covered a schema update, when we looked at storing BitLocker and TPM recovery information in Active Directory. This post features another schema […]

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Getting Your Active Directory ready for Windows 7, Part 3

Deploying Windows XP is as easy as sysprep’ing a sample installation, throw in an answer file in the mix with a Volume License Key (VLK) and rolling out the newly created image with your preferred distribution method. A volume Windows XP product key is easily attained by buying a 5 PC equivalent Volume License and […]

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Getting your Active Directory ready for Windows 7, Part 2

Windows 7 is actively being deployed by companies, big and small. Some features in Windows 7 (especially features in Windows 7 Enterprise) require changes in the back ends of these environments. While some upgrades are evident, some may not. This series of posts details the changes wise to make to your Active Directory environment to […]

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Getting your Active Directory ready for Windows 7, Part 1

Change is upon us. Where many Active Directory administrators have stuck with Windows XP, because no valid alternatives (Windows Vista, *nix) were available, now the business wants to upgrade to Windows 7. Whatever the business reasons behind Windows 7, as an Active Directory administrator a couple of key elements should stand out: Windows 7 has […]

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Active Directory Feature Requirements

Microsoft has included numerous features in Active Directory the last couple of years. Also, more and more technologies in products like Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and the Windows client (Windows Vista, Windows 7) have an Active Directory opt-in to store information in Active Directory. All this bountiful integration, however, comes with a price. The price […]

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Windows 7 and SSDs, Part 2 (Tweaking the box)

As described in Part 1 of this series, Windows 7 has built-in optimizations for Solid State Disks (SSDs). To this purpose, Windows 7 will check random reads speeds of your disks, to determine whether the system is equipped with such a disk. These optimizations include disabling defragmentation on the SSD, and, when the disk is […]

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Windows 7 and SSDs, Part 1 (To clone Windows or reinstall?)

I’ve seen a couple of people stuffing their Windows 7 laptops with Solid State Disks (SSDs). I upgraded my Windows 7 demo laptop with an Intel X25-M G2 SSD (80GB) and this much improved performance, especially for virtualization purposes. A traditional Hard Disk Drive’s internals are platters. A read/write head on a boom looms over […]

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7 Things to look for in Windows 7 PC Hardware

With Windows Vista amounting to a 31% market share in enterprise environments, many big companies will be making to switch from Windows XP to Windows 7 directly. In the eight years between their respective launches, a lot has changed in the world. Not just in the world we know, but also in the world of […]

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Member of the Q&A Panel at NGNs Windows 7 Deployment Event

With the release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, The Dutch Network User Group (in Dutch: ‘Netwerk Gebruikersgroep Nederland’ or ‘NGN’ for short) organizes a Windows 7 Deployment event on Monday October 26th, 2009 in Ede, the Netherlands. The event will not be focusing on the cool new features of Windows 7, but […]

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Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 is here!

One of the reasons I held back on deploying Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 centrally is the lack of supported deployment solutions from Microsoft. I outlined my deployment checklist here. One of my major objections, however, just got solved; Microsoft has released the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 solution accelerator version 5.0.1641.0.

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