The majority of the 10 most popular posts on 4sysops are how-to articles about common administration problems. Surprisingly, the most popular article in 2010 was about rearming Office 2010.

Another good year has passed for 4sysops. Traffic has increased by about 60 percent (now about 350,000 page views) per month, with about 5,200 RSS subscribers and 1,700 Twitter followers. I want to thank all 4sysops readers for their loyalty and all 4syops sponsors for their continuous support. Blogging for 4sysops has been a lot of fun. I also want to thank all other bloggers who have been writing for 4sysops and those readers who submitted free admin tools.

In this post I listed the most popular articles that have been written in 2010. There a few older articles that still get more traffic, like the all-time high post about different methods of how to reset a Windows password. I didn’t include those in the list.

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• New Free Microsoft Hyper-V Tool Released – HyperV_Mon 1.8 (monitoring and diagnosing performance )
• Microsoft Volume Licensing Reference Guide Is the praying guy on the right a customer and the laughing one from MS?
• Benchmarking Amazon EC2  Confirms my impression. Amazon really has to work on performance or lower prices.

BootRacer is a free tool that allows you to measure the boot speed of Windows PCs. The tool determines the time to logon and the time from logon to desktop.

Did you ever need quick access to your computer but the wait for boot process completion seemed like eternity? These are the moments when many come to the conclusion that Windows is a slow operating system. However, it is a well-confirmed psychological fact that the human brain has its own subjective timeline, which often has little to do with objective time measurement.

For instance, it is beyond the capabilities of my brain to measure browser speed differences, which, according to various benchmark tests, must be huge. But when it comes to boot speeds, my brain tends to measure much bigger boot-up times than objective measurement tools do.

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• Microsoft Server Application Virtualization CTP Released – Run More of your Applications on Windows Azure
• New rollups released for TMG 2010 and ISA 2006

Both options to activate Office 2010, KMS and MAK, have their up- and downsides. This article discusses a few things you have to consider when you decide for the activation method in your organization.

Now that you have an overview of the Office 2010 KMS activation and MAK activation, I can address the question of whether KMS or MAK is the better option to activate Office 2010. Most of the arguments also apply for Windows Vista and Windows 7 activation.

Microsoft recommendations

You need at least 5 Office 2010 installations if you want to activate Office 2010 with KMS; however, Microsoft recommends using MAK activation if your network has fewer than 25 computers. If you have more than 50 Office 2010 machines, Microsoft recommends going for KMS.

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This article summarizes the most important facts about Office 2010 MAK activation. Among other things, you will learn about the ways to deploy the MAK key, about MAK independent activation and MAK proxy activation.

In the last post of this series, I discussed Office 2010 KMS activation. Today, I will have a look at the second option that Microsoft provides for volume activation—the Office 2010 MAK activation. Like in my previous post, I will only list the most important facts you have to know.

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• Windows 7 SP1 Close to RTM, Build 7601.17514.101119-1850 Signed Off (not confirmed by Microsoft) 
• Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Test Lab Deployment Guidance
• Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 RTM Video Demo
• Bill Gates is America’s fifth-most admired man Steve Jobs most admired by Financial Times journalists

This article summarizes all important facts about Microsoft Office 2010 KMS activation. Among other things you will learn which software you need, how to activate the KMS host and what things you have to keep mind if you use KMS activation.

Many admins who still haven’t upgraded to Vista or Windows 7 will first have to deal with volume activation when they deploy Office 2010. Microsoft’s documentation about Office 2010 volume activation is quite comprehensive. Today, I will summarize the key facts about Office 2010 KMS activation. In my next post, I will cover MAK activation, and in the last post of this series I will compare Office 2010 KMS and MAK activation.

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Bleachbit is a free tool that allows you to free disk space and delete Internet history. It has a few advantages over comparable tools: It is Open Source, supports many applications, is portable, has a command line interface, and helps you to wipe disk space.

BleachBit is a free tool that allows you to clean disk space, on Windows (and Linux). For many third-party applications you can free disk space and to delete compromising files such as Internet history data.

Thus far, CCleaner has been my favorite cleaning tool. I haven’t yet had much experience with BleachBit, but the free tool has a good chance of getting a permanent place in my toolbox. Like CCleaner, BleachBit allows you to free disk space by deleting unneeded files from various applications. However, there are a few differences between the two free cleaning utilities.

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• Microsoft releases Server App-V first build My view: A basic edition of App-V should be an integral part of Windows 8
• Microsoft confirms critical IE bug, works on fix

The easy-to use free Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector allows you to search and troubleshoot Wi-Fi conections by providing you quite a few valuable data about the the reachable Wi-Fi networks.

Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector is a free tool that allows you to search Wi-Fi networks, manage and troubleshoot Wi-Fi connections, verify Wi-Fi coverage, locate Wi-Fi devices, and detect rogue access points.

The user interface is self-explanatory if you are familiar with Wi-Fi concepts. The first thing that catches your eye is the radar display. Honestly, I think this display is a joke. You can do a lot of things with software, but somehow I doubt that you can build rotating radar antennas with it. Xirrus admits that the orientation of networks around the circle does not indicate actual angle of location. All this diagram does is give you a graphical overview of the signal strength of the Wi-Fi access points around you.

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• Windows 7 Application List for IT Pros Updated 
• UAG Service Pack 1 Upgrade and Integrated Packs
• Windows 8 Development Process Still in the Early Stages 
• Windows Phone 7 Guides for IT Professionals 
• System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1 Product Documentation 
• Chip provides its own power – Autonomous microsystem with its own solar cell
• Microsoft Plans New Windows Version for Tablets
• Microsoft: 1.5 Million Windows Phone Sales in First Six Weeks – We’re in the race – and we’re in it for the long run
• Google offers backup service for Exchange

The free disk analyzer Xinorbis offer many different views on a hard disk: space usage of categories and file types. Time-based and size-based views, diagrams and many more.

Xinorbis is a free disk analyzer that is easy to use and provides a lot of valuable information about hard disk usage. There is an installable and a portable version.

Contrary to other disk analyzers, Xinorbis allows you to specify precisely what folders and files you want to include in the report. This is useful because sometimes you only need disk information for a small portion of a large disk. You can choose specific folders, exclude folders and files, and combine folders from different drives in one scan operation.

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With SolarWinds WMI Monitor you can monitor Windows applications and servers. The built-in WMI browser helps you find the right WMI objects.

SolarWinds WMI Monitor is a free tool that allows you to monitor the status of WMI objects. With this tool, there is hardly anything that you can’t monitor on a Windows server. The tool is installed in minutes, and a wizard guides you through the configuration. First you choose the server you want to monitor, then enter the credentials to authenticate against this server, and then select WMI values and thresholds that will trigger alarms.

WMI Monitor comes with a few pre-configured sets of WMI values for monitoring Active Directory, Exchange 2007, Internet Information Services, SQL Server 2003, and SQL Server 2008. You can modify these monitors—that is, you can add or remove WMI values and also change their thresholds. To change WMI Monitor’s settings, you click the tiny gearwheel in the title bar.

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• I am currently in Singapore. Any 4sysops readers living here? Want to meet me for a coffee? Contact me:
• Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 available for download  New features: 
• Download Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 4 RTM 
• System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1 RTM’d
• Microsoft: Issues with the recent update for Outlook 2007 (KB2412171)
• Microsoft paper: Deploying the Core Optimized Desktop Using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2
• Microsoft paper: Deploying the Core Optimized Desktop Using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010
• Microsoft paper: Local P2V Migration Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 and Sysinternals Disk2VHD