Windows OS

Vista and Longhorn Power Options default to 'Balanced' which is normally fine for most VM platforms. If you have laggy/slow VM performance of Vista or Longhorn, set your Power Options to 'High Performance' and see if it makes a difference.

I find myself forgetting this from time to time but it becomes particularly important if you are using VMWare 6.0 and report your battery status on your laptop to your virtual machines. I like reporting battery information to the virtual machines just in case I am running on battery and about to lose power. VMs will gracefully shutdown before my host machine because I crank up the power percentage that triggers a system shutdown inside my VMs.

For most desktop computers, this won't make much of a difference, but I find it essential for laptops.

I love the secondary bay battery on my Thinkpad T60. Unless I absolutely need a DVD burner at the moment, I leave the secondary bay battery installed. It also saves battery power because there isn't a CD/DVD rotor motor spinning up anytime a 'File Open' dialog box triggers.

Also noteworthy: If your system has hardware based virtualization support (Intel VT or AMD-V), make sure to enable it on any VM platform that has it available. It becomes particularly handy when doing the initial install of any VM before you can install any VM client tools.

It is for restoring .bkf files created by NTBACKUP on 2000/2003/XP/etc.
I'm not a big fan of NTBACKUP's replacement in Vista and Longhorn so far.
I'm not sure if you can trick NTBackup to do backups or not with this version.

You can download it here, available in 32-bit and 64-bit.

All of these are installable by executing *ocsetup* and if you forget the exact syntax, you can always execute *oclist* . Only exception right now is installing Active Directory, which you will want to use *dcpromo* with an unattended file.
BitLocker
BitLocker-RemoteAdminTool
ClientForNFS-Base
DFSN-Server
DFSR-Infrastructure-ServerEdition
DHCPServerCore
DirectoryServices-ADAM-ServerCore
DirectoryServices-DomainController-ServerFoundation
DNS-Server-Core-Role
FailoverCluster-Core
FRS-Infrastructure
Microsoft-Windows-RemovableStorageManagementCore
MultipathIo
NetworkLoadBalancingHeadlessServer
Printing-ServerCore-Role
Printing-LPDPrintService
QWAVE
ServerForNFS-Base
SIS
SNMP-SC
SUACore
TelnetClient
WindowsServerBackup
WINS-SC

I'll be curious to see just how many roles and features will end up being available at RTM for Core.

Most interesting new feature (to me) is support for Folding@Home on the GPU.
Lots of bug fixes too.
Read all about it and get the new version here.

More information about the stalled network connection issue that occurs with Vista when behind some firewalls/routers.

This relates to having to use:
*netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled*
to restore proper TCP-IP operation behind some firewalls/routers.

The noteworthy addition to this KB article over what has been previously known:

*NetApp Cache Appliances NC 6.0.2 or an earlier version*

The TCP splicing feature may not work together with the Window Scaling feature in Windows Vista. By default, the TCP splicing feature is enabled on NetApp Cache Appliances NC 6.0.2 or on an earlier version.

*Cisco PIX 6.1(5), Cisco PIX 6.2(3), and Cisco PIX 6.3(1)*

These devices do not support the Window Scaling feature in Windows Vista.

*Cisco IOS Software Release*

Cisco IOS Software Release 12.3(15) and later versions of this software support the Window Scaling feature in Windows Vista.

*Sonicwall*

The Window Scaling feature in Windows Vista may not work if you enable either of the following features on a Sonicwall firewall device: Strict TCP Enforcement Option, Enforce strict TCP compliance with RFC 793 and RFC 1122

*Checkpoint NG R55*

To work around this issue, disable the Sequence Verifier Enforcement feature.

Handy online site to test your home connectivity capabilities.
You will want to use Internet Explorer on this site for proper behavior.

The "official" description:
The Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool checks your Internet router to see if it supports certain technologies. You can use this tool on a PC running either the Windows Vista or Windows XP operating system. If you're planning to run Windows Vista, this tool can verify whether your existing Internet router supports advanced features, such as improved download speeds and face-to-face collaboration using Windows Meeting Space.

Test your internet connection here.

I'm personally happy that NetMeeting is going the way of the dodo but there are still some applications and needs that rely on the program and related DLLs. If you really need NetMeeting under Vista, you can request this hotfix.

I forgot to mention that like with every VMWare RC, unlike the Betas, the debugging logging is not forced to 'Full' and the performance should be on par or better with VMWare Workstation 5.5. I've got a build of Longhorn installing under it right now and I'm amazed at how fast it is going.

The two big items mentioned:

1. Fix to help those SQL workloads that show a high kernel time and at least some of it is due to network traffic. The optimization fixes a bug within the sockets API where Winsock would signal an internal event even if SQL didn’t provide it one and nobody was waiting on that. Signalling that event would cause a dispatch event that required holding the system wide dispatch lock. This lead to unnecessary spinlocks and excessive kernel time. The fix was to introduce a new sockopt called FO_SKIP_SET_EVENT, which indicates to the socket API that it’s unnecessary to wait and signal on the internal event.

This specific issue came up with Winsock IO, where during data-sends on a SAP workload, the data-sends always ended up taking the fast-IO path, and the IO always completed inline with STATUS_SUCCESS. Removing the redundant KeSetEvent on this path gave us 7% back! This turned out to be a huge win for SQL Server 2005.

2. Timer processing in Windows is performed at DISPATCH_LEVEL on CPU #0 and requires the Dispatch Lock, so it can have significant performance impact on enterprise systems running heavy loads. In 64-bit Windows Server 2003 SP1 and x64, an optimization to break up timer processing into batches contains a well-hidden bug. A simple code change produces a 30% increase in tpmC on a 32-socket NUMA Intel x64 system.

Read more about it here.

I removed the MS internal weblinks in the original blog post.

If the VM additions fail to install properly, make sure you do not add a sound card to your Virtual PC profile for the Core server. Core doesn't support sound cards.

Very cool article on a small form factor computer. I really want to build something like this for my kids so they don't scratch up our DVDs when they want to watch movies. When I get home, and get some spare time and money, I might just mimic what the guy did here.

KB 931321 - Battery power may drain more quickly than you expect on a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003-based portable computer.

It specifically fixes this scenario:
"The portable computer cannot enter the deeper Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) processor idle sleep states."

"This occurs when the USB 2.0 driver leaves the asynchronous scheduler component running continuously. This prevents the processor from entering the deeper ACPI processor idle sleep states, or C-states. C-states save power when the processor is not busy. These states range from C0 to C3 or C4. Typically, an idle portable computer uses the C3 and C4 states to preserve battery power. If an idle portable computer cannot enter or maintain the C3 or C4 states, the battery power drains more quickly."

You will typically get better battery life if your laptop can enter into the 'deeper sleep' C-states.

This is just a heads up for anyone that follows this blog. I'm in Redmond working on a very cool project for the next two weeks. A lot of very long hours, but I'm doing something I've always wanted to do, and am learning quite a bit in the process.

I wish I could be less vague than that, but for now that will have to do.
The only bummer so far is being away from my wife, kids and cats.

A cool sidenote: I was able to build a full functional Windows Longhorn Core server that used less than 1GB of drive space and about 150MB of RAM while running on my laptop. I see this is a good thing overall. You might see more Core specific contents on here soon. I am really liking the stripped down server. I feel at home on the command line.

If you really want to push the envelope with your VMs, drop the memory given to each Longhorn instance after installation and see how many you can launch side by side.

There are a lot of updates in Windows 2003 SP2, which also shares the same service pack with Windows XP x64.

A few potential gotchas:

You'll want to uninstall IE 7 before upgrading from SP1 to SP2.
You'll want to install ADAM SP1 before upgrading to SP2 if you are running ADAM.
If you don't know what ADAM is, 99% of the time, you probably don't have it installed.

As a FYI, ADAM is getting renamed/reworked in Longhorn Server. The concept will still stay the same.

Here is the download link for the ISO containing Windows 2003 SP2.

More valid links will appear as the day progresses for people wanting to go SP2 RTM.