Some days ago, I reported that we were having problems activating KMS on a Windows Server 2003. It turned out that we accidently exceeded the number of possible KMS installations. You can only activate 6 KMS hosts with one KMS key, each with up to 9 reactivations. I was quite surprised to hear that we have already 6 KMS hosts installed. Actually, I thought my test system is the first one. So how did we get 6 KMS installations?

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Today, I read two [1] [2] interesting and alarming articles from Ed Bott where he describes several cases of Vista users having serious problems with Windows validation.

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Please note that the instructions here only contain the essentials of KMS (Key Management Service) installation. In uncommon network configurations, for example, if you can’t use DNS auto-discovery, you have to consult Microsoft’s documentation.

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Update: If you are interested in improving Vista’s performance you might be interested in this post, too: 50 ways to speed up Vista

SpeedyVista has a comprehensive list of Vista’s services accompained by some explanation regarding their purpose. The list distinguishes between the different Vista editions: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. You can use this list to disable unnecessary services to speed up Vista and, more importantly, as reference guide.

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The final of Network Monitor 3.0 has beend available at Microsoft Connect for sometime, already. I reviewed the beta version sometime ago. I liked it enough to install it today on my PC.

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VAMT is an important tool if you plan to activate Vista using MAK keys instead of working with KMS. I just saw it now, but it has been available for three days, already. The Windows Vista Hardware Assessment solution Accelerator is an inventory, assessment, and reporting tool which allows you to determine if the computers in your network are Vista-ready.

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I already reviewed Virtual PC 2007 beta sometime ago. My overall impression was not so positive at that time. Virtual PC 2007 RTM is available for download now. Today, I installed it again on a Vista machine.

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If you’re a Windows administrator, you would certainly know already that even business customers have to activate Windows Vista. There are several ways to do it, and KMS will probably be the one that most companies will use. Microsoft’s own documentation is a bit long winded because it also covers uncommon cases. In this post, I summarized the most important facts about KMS. It will help you get an overview of the activation procedure via KMS.

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Vista comes with a new indexing service which improves desktop search. It not only makes search faster, but also adds some nice features. The one I like most is that it allows you to search very fast for mails in Outlook. There are, however, cases where you might want to disable Vista’s search indexing.

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Some days ago, I was complaining that VMware Workstation 5.5 runs unstably on Vista and VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta is too slow. I suspected that the main reason for the latter is due to the fact that the beta runs in debug mode. When you boot-up a VM a pop-up message informs you that debug mode can’t be turned off. But a comment on 4sysops by Raj outlined an easy way to disable the debug mode.

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