Windows OS

Check out the excellent post here detailing the GUIDs involved when using the powercfg.exe command in Vista.

The dirty little secret is that powercfg.exe is also pretty much the only way to control power management inside a Windows Server 2008 Core server.

At minimum, I usually set these values on my Core VMs/Core Servers, inside a batch file, which is primarily a cut and paste from some of Richard Smith's post:

REM sets the power configuration to High Performance
powercfg -setactive 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

REM turns hibernation off
powercfg -hibernate OFF

REM set the absentia power scheme (the scheme used when no one is logged in)
powercfg -setabsentia 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

Note: Many people might wonder why I am setting power management settings on a virtual machine, but I tend to use VMWare Workstation 6.0 and report battery status, which in turn enables power management items inside Server 2008 and Server Core 2008.

Everyone knows Divx, or they should. No, it isn't the alcoholic Circuit City Divx player anymore. It is a popular codec and the company behind it is giving away their 'Pro' version for a limited time.

Advantages over the normal version:

DivX Converter
Drag-and-drop nearly any video format to create a high-quality, highly compressed DivX video.
Merge and convert multiple videos into a single DivX file with an automatically generated menu.

DivX Pro Codec
Higher performance, including multi-threaded support for better performance on all HyperThreaded, dual core and dual CPU (SMP) systems.
More encoding options, including six carefully optimized encoding modes that balance visual quality and performance for virtually any application.

Go here to grab the free version of Divx Pro.

Originally spotted here and here.

Go here to download WSS 3.0 SP1 for new installations, including Windows 2008.

You can get a more complete description of SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 936988.