Microsoft Announces Oct. 22 GA of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

Microsoft announced at Computex 2009 in Taipei that Windows 7 will be available for the holiday shopping season. I had been hoping that it would also be available for “back to school” but I was also pleasantly surprised to see Microsoft offering a “Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program” which I am assuming will get consumers [...]

SharePoint SP2 Bug Warning from Microsoft

For those of you that have applied SP2 to your SharePoint farms please be aware that Microsoft has released an alert about a bug in the service pack. It appears that after application of the service pack the farm will go into trial mode that expires in 180 days. For those of you that have [...]

Excellent usage article on SCCM

My friend Jarvis wrote an excellent article about how to manage the default collections to make them easier to use. This is one of those great usage articles that all SCCM administrators should read regardless of their experience.

Apple revolutionizes the keyboard

I saw this from the Onion and I couldn’t stop laughing.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

Microsoft to Offer Free Anti-Malware / Virus

While perusing my RSS feeds this morning I saw a headline stating that Microsoft was going to stop selling OneCare. I was very disappointed because OneCare is one of my favorite AV products as it covers 3 PC’s for one cost and it uses very little resources. However it appears that Microsoft is going to [...]

Failed to download pre-requisite components (0×80090024)

This error may be the root of evil, it actually means virtually nothing other than your screwed and that your not going to complete SCCM setup today.
I was recently at a customer helping them setup SCCM 2007 R2 and no matter what we did on one machine we couldn’t get SCCM setup to complete. If [...]

SCCM R2 Softgrid integration very good with one low spot

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time working with the SCCM R2 Softgrid integration. First off the overall integration is excellent, it adds the powerful SCCM infrastructure to the great Softgrid solution. In the past the ability to scale with Softgrid was extremely limited by the Softgrid infrastructure. The integration with SCCM allows [...]

Great Password Complexity vs. Pass Phrase Post

A very good friend of mine recently posted a great password complexity vs pass phrase article here. That agrees with something I have said for a very long time. I read it first in a series of security articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) some years on Microsoft TechNet that changed my mind forever. [...]

Deploying XP with SCCM: Part 1 Building an XP Base Image

This post and subsequent posts will be a step by step on how to build a base XP image in SCCM. I will be outlining not necessarily pointing out every click. Hopefully others will find this helpful. This assumes an understanding of SCCM and uses what is refereed to as a “Thin Image Strategy”.

Create a [...]

How to remove Rule Lines in Microsoft OneNote 2007 on a Tablet

First of all let me first say that I struggled with this for FAR too long. When I input into OneNote via pen I tend to use the tablet input panel rather than inking directly into OneNote. Therefore I was trying to edit the “Default” template in OneNote on my tablet to not include rule [...]