• Windows 7 Release Candidate Now Available For TechNet & MDSN Subscribers
• Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC Available on TechNet
• Some More Windows Virtual PC Screens
• Windows Virtual PC Evaluation Guide
• Finally, Microsoft Admits to 2009 Delivery for Windows 7
• Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7 RC and Windows Server 2008 R2 RC available on TechNet and MSDN
• Windows Vista SP2 RTM Available to TechNet and MSDN Subscribers
• Release Documents for Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2
• Release Notes for Windows Vista with Service Pack 2
• Microsoft ADMX Migrator 1.2 – Simplifies converting Group Policy ADM templates to the new ADMX format
• Microsoft unveils its first online management service

Edison PC Power Management Software is a free tool from Verdiem that is endorsed by Microsoft. This simple but useful tool allows you to schedule power management settings and calculates the money, energy, and CO₂ saved.

Scheduling is fairly simple. Edison distinguishes between the times that you are working and the times that you are not working. For each day of the week you can configure at what times you are usually at work. You then simply tell the tool how strict you want to be with regard to power management at this times.

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• Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 will be released in Q2 2009 – Vista SP1 Service Pack Blocker Tool removed
• Notable Changes in Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP2
• Information about Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and for Windows Server 2008
• IE8 now being delivered as ‘Important Update’ for Vista, ‘High Priority’ for XP
• Office 2007 SP2 Administrative Template files (ADM, ADMX, ADML) and Office Customization Tool
• Microsoft GPOAccelerator – creates all the Group Policy objects (GPOs) to deploy recommended security settings
• How MED-V v2 helps you manage Windows XP Mode
• Microsoft gives server app virtualization sneak peek

This review was written by Gilberto J. Perera from LaptopLogic. LaptopLogic.com is a great source for the latest laptop computer reviews. Are you looking to buy a new netbook? Visit their site for the latest netbook reviews!

With the release of Windows 7 Microsoft has done a great job in maintaining user account management pretty consistent compared to Windows Vista. In this article we will explore the key differences and highlight some of the basic operations while managing user accounts s in Windows 7.

What’s New?

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Update: You can also use the free tool SafeMSI for installing in Safe Mode.

I’ve never really understood why uninstalling programs in Safe Mode isn’t officially supported in Windows. The main purpose of Safe Mode is to troubleshoot Windows, and what usually causes the trouble? Right, misbehaving programs. This may not even be the fault of the program itself. Windows is a very complex system and sometimes unforeseeable things happen. If an application has been somehow damaged, it might not even be possible to uninstall it. For example, its service could hang immediately after the system boots, or other programs could interfere.

In Safe Mode, Windows has reduced functionality, because only the core components have been loaded. In such an environment it is much easier to get rid of an application that has gone mad. Windows Safe Mode can be entered by pressing the F8 key before Windows boots up.

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• Office 2007 SP2 is now available for download
• Office 2007 SP2 – What You Need to Know
• XenServer 5.5 (“Project George”) beta release available
• Microsoft Expands Online Services Globally
• Microsoft targets Windows, Linux management
• Review: Windows 7 RC1 adds speed, UI improvements — and promises more to come
• Windows 7′s virtual ‘XP mode’ could mean support nightmares
• Leaked Windows 7 RC Build 7100 May Contain A Trojan

• What you need to know about the Windows 7 Release Candidate Great FAQ by Ed Bott
• Microsoft’s new Windows 7 video blog: Talking about Windows It will officially debut in May, but it is already online.
• Revealed: More Windows 7 RC details
• Engineering Windows 7 Graphics Performance Most important for me: The improved desktop responsiveness
• Why all the fuss over XP Mode? It’s not the technology, it’s the licensing.
• Will Windows XP Mode Put Compatibility Before Security?

Submitted by Edward Lansink

GFI LANguard is a network security scanner that’s used by a large number of net admins and is now available as a freeware version.

GFI LANguard scans your computers and ports to detect, assess and rectify security vulnerabilities on your network, with minimal administrative effort. It also provides the tools to easily and effectively remediate vulnerabilities, install missing patches and automatically uninstall unauthorized software.

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• Secret No More: Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7
• Windows 7 RC will be available for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers on April 30th
• Windows 7 Release Candidate now available for unsanctioned download I wouldn’t install “leaked software”.
• Investors relieved Microsoft results weren’t worse Think positive. The crisis exists only in our heads.
• Internet Explorer 8 is now available in 18 additional languages Not yet for Windows XP.
• Amazon Says CIO Interest In Its Cloud Services Is Surging

Have you ever wondered why it takes so long to create a fixed virtual hard disk (VHD) in Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005? The Virtual PC Guy dealt with this issue in a blog post. The reason is that the hard disk space assigned to the VHD is wiped out. This is just as if you are using a tool like Active@ Kill Disk to make sure that deleted data can’t ever be recovered again. The process is so time-consuming because every byte on the disk has to be overwritten.

It is unnecessary to zero out dynamically growing disks, because they only occupy disk space when they actually write data to disk, thereby erasing all the data still stored on the corresponding hard disk sectors. Fixed virtual disks already occupy the hard disk’s space before the virtual machine writes data on it. Therefore, if you don’t wipe out the data on the disk, it is possible to recover data that has been stored on the hard disk before the space was assigned to the VHD.

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• Windows 7 RC completed, build 7100 Guess it will show up soon on Technet and MSDN.
• Microsoft bends (a little) on Windows 7 due date It seems Windows 7 won’t be released before 2010.
• Gartner: Windows 7 Won’t Need SP1, but Will Still Need 12 to 18 Months Before Deployment Begins Too early to tell I think
• Monitoring Hyper-V Performance Quite detailed article at Microsoft’s performance blog
• Why does VMware cost as much as 3 times more than Microsoft’s virtualization solution? Not really convincing.
• Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 is available for download
• Google Trends – Cloud Computing Surpasses Virtualization in Popularity

In my last article, I gave a general introduction to AutoAdministrator, a nifty tool that lets you automate all kinds of Windows administrator tasks. Now let’s have a closer look at AutoAdministrator’s functions.

Online Status

Before you perform a particular action, it is advisable to check whether the relevant computers are available. With AutoAdministrator, you can ping any number of computers with just two mouse clicks. You can configure the packet count, the packet size, the required success rate, and the maximum roundtrip time. The latter two options determine whether a machine is flagged as available or whether you receive an error message.

Services

This function is certainly one of AutoAdministrator’s highlights. Managing system services on multiple machines is a feature that many expensive system management solutions lack. AutoAdministrator enables you to query, start, stop, continue, pause, and restart services. Furthermore, you can configure the startup type remotely. You can, for example, use this feature to set the startup type of the Remote Registry service on all your machines to automatic, to ensure that you can use all of the features of AutoAdministrator. It is also possible to remove services, or to configure their logon account.

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• Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3 is available for download
• Botnet with 1.9 million PCs discovered
• Negotiate volume licensing deals with Microsoft

NETIKUS.NET, the publisher of EventSentry, is raffling off ten AutoAdministrator licenses, available to 4sysops readers. AutoAdministrator clearly demonstrates that no command prompt or scripting language is needed to “automate” system administration tasks on multiple computers. This useful tool costs only $69 US and can save you a lot of time. It would certainly be a lot more expensive for your organization to ask you to program scripts with the same capabilities. Moreover, AutoAdministrator is multi-threaded. You can’t easily do that with a script, and that can reduce the time it takes to perform certain updates 10-fold (e.g. with 10 threads).

AutoAdministrator 2.0 lets you query or manage nine different settings on multiple computers: Services (query and edit services), Password (manage user passwords), Registry (view or change registry values), File Management (copy and delete files and folders), File Information (view file details), Logons (view users logged on), Shutdown/Reboot, Online Status (ping hosts), and ODBC (query and manage DSNs).

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• VMware Unveils the Industry’s First Operating System for Building the Internal Cloud ”VMware vSphere 4″
• VMware VSphere – Initial Comparisons with Hyper-V and Xen
• Windows 8 starts to come into focus Mary-Jo Foley thinks Win8 will be released in 2011.