So what does all this mean? I really don’t know. It’s just an observation. I don’t think that the GUI is going to completely go away any time soon, but it does strike me as odd just how much of a comeback the command line is making.

I have a Windows 2008 server that is running Hyper-V. Right now that server is hosting a bunch of lab machines that I am using to produce a training video on Exchange 2007. To make a long story short, I had a power failure last night and it caused the registry on one of my Exchange servers to become corrupted.

I was able to repair Windows and get it to boot, but there was a problem with the .NET framework that caused my Exchange services to fail to start. Because of the damage that had occurred, I couldn’t uninstall the .NET framework, but I wasn’t able to reinstall a fresh copy either because the installer was convinced that a fully functional copy was already installed.

During my quest to manually uninstall the .NET Framework, I found a Windows utility called the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. This simple utility removes applications from the list of applications that are installed on a server. That way, if you have to remove something manually then the Windows Control Panel won’t keep showing the application even after you have removed it.

You can download this utility from: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

“Those who are not familiar with hardware might be impressed by your claims, but I seriously doubt your honesty in this matter”

You can imagine why I was a bit irritated by the message. My first reaction was to simply take a screen capture of my Windows Experience Index, and post it for the world to see. When I thought about it though, I began to realize that a screen capture wouldn’t prove anything any way. It’s too easy to manipulate the Windows Experience Index.

If you would like to try it for yourself, open Windows Explorer and go to \Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore. Open the most recent assessment file using Word Pad.  The assessment file is in .XML format, and you can change the scores to anything that you want. If you look at the figure below, you can see that I was able to change the scores to 9.9, even though Vista doesn’t actually use any scores higher than 5.9. Incidentally, this screen capture did not come from the same machine that I performed my recent upgrade on.

OK, so back to the issue of the score that I got after my upgrade. For those of you who may be wondering, I was using fairly high end hardware, but certainly not top notch. It really isn’t that difficult to get a score of 5.9. The hardware that I was using included:

An ASUS M3A78 system board

An AMD Phenom II Black Edition, quad core CPU

4 GB of RAM

A NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 graphics card (the super clocked edition with 2 GB of RAM).

At the time, Microsoft wanted to simplify things for home users by getting software publishers to list a minimum experience index rating for applications rather than firm hardware requirements. In other words, if an application required a minimum score of 2.0, and your computer was rated at 3.0, then you could be guaranteed that the application would work. Well, that was the theory anyway. Ultimately, I don’t know of any software publishers that actually began using the Windows Experience Index.

Although nobody really uses the Windows Experience Index to determine what applications they can perform, I do use it to test the effectiveness of hardware upgrades on my primary workstation. Tonight something interesting happened though. My computer previously had scores ranging from 5.0 to 5.9 and had an overall score of 5.0. I ended up replacing the system board, the CPU, the power supply, and the graphics card. This time when checked the Windows Experience Index, all of my scores were 5.9.

What I didn’t realize is that in Windows Vista, the scores are capped at 5.9. No matter how good your hardware is, you will never score higher than 5.9. This means that there will eventually come a time when the Windows Experience Index becomes meaningless as a benchmark because of improvements in hardware. Windows 7 also includes the Windows Experience Index, and the maximum score has been raised to 7.9. Even so, I have to question the effectiveness of the index if it is capped. Oh well, I guess that’s what the Performance Monitor is for.

The book that I just finished is solely mine. I actually only wrote five chapters in it. Even so, writing this book was a learning experience, as it always is. This particular book was about Windows Essential Business Server.
Any time that I write a book I always set up a lab so that I can test the techniques that I writing about. This time I decided to use virtual machines rather than physical ones. According to Microsoft, Essential Business Server can be virtualized. Even so, I really struggled with getting Essential Business Server to work right in a virtual server environment.

If you have ever worked with Essential Business Server, then you know that there are three servers that make up the server suite; a management server, a messaging server, and a security server. Ultimately, I was able to virtualized the management and security servers, but I ended up having to run the messaging server on a separate box.
Another issue that I struggled with was network connectivity. For some reason, my host server (which had always worked fine in the past) periodically dropped my network connectivity. I have not had this problem for any other virtual machines, so I suspect that the problem may be links to Essential Business Server. So far I have not been able to come up with definitive proof though, so I plan to continue researching this issue.

I thought about writing about the reasoning behind these speculations in yesterday’s blog post, but ultimately I decided not to. I’m really glad that I waited, because today something was announced that could change everything. Windows 7 is going to come with a Windows XP compatibility mode that is based on virtualization technology. This new feature hasn’t made it into any of the betas yet, but it will be included in the RC build that is scheduled for public release on May 5^th. Right now there aren’t a lot of details available regarding this feature, but I will definitely write more about it as details become available.

One of the problems with first generation netbooks though, was that they usually came with a Linux operating system. Manufacturers did this as a way of keeping netbook prices low, and also because first generation netbooks lacked the power to run Windows Vista.

Since Microsoft didn’t want to lose out on the entire netbook market, they have licensed Windows XP for use on netbooks. Using Vista still wasn’t an option, but because of improvements in the hardware and more efficient software, netbook users will be able to run Windows 7 when it is released.

Microsoft has created a low budget version of Windows 7 that they are calling Windows 7 Starter Edition. Netbook manufacturers can license this version of Windows 7 for about fifteen bucks. So what’s the catch? Windows 7 Starter Edition can only open three applications at once, regardless of what the hardware is actually capable of.

At first this probably sounds like a deal breaker. I sure wouldn’t buy a copy of Windows that only allowed me to run three applications at a time. Things are not as bad as they seem though. Just because you can only run three applications at a time doesn’t mean that you can only open three windows at a time. Microsoft also has a very easy going definition of what constitutes an application.

What this means is that things like control panel applets, anti virus software, system services, and Windows Explorer are not usually considered to be applications, and hence do not count against the number of applications that you have open. Furthermore, you are allowed to open multiple instances of an application. There is nothing stopping you for example, from opening a bunch of different copies of Internet Explorer all at the same time.

I recently stumbled onto a news story in which stated that Microsoft will only be releasing three versions of Windows 7. There will be a Home Premium, a Professional, and an ultimate version. There are actually going to be some other versions too, but those are supposedly going to be used solely in other markets.

The Home Premium version is going to be the Windows 7 equivalent of Vista Home Premium. The Professional version will have all of the same features as the Home Premium version, but will also include the ability to attach to a domain, and will offer enterprise oriented management tools such as the group policy editor and remote desktop hosting capabilities.

The ultimate edition will have all of the same features as the professional version, but will also include BitLocker and the ability to boot from virtual hard drive files.

In a way my vacation was quite the eye opener for me. No, I didn’t spend my time off optimizing a cruise ship’s or a hotel’s datacenter. Rather it was what happened in my own datacenter while I was gone that was an eye opener.

What happened was a lesson in evolution. Not evolution in the sense that I think that my great, great, great grandfather was a chimpanzee, but in the sense that one of my servers has evolved.

Because I write about so many different types of topics, I had to convert the entire second floor of my home into a datacenter. I spend an astronomical amount of money on hardware each year, and believe me when I tell you that you don’t want my electric bill.

Back in the spring I decided that I could cut costs by buying a really high performance server, and using it to host virtual machines rather than using dedicated hardware for all of my lab servers.  Normally, I attach battery backups to all of my production servers, but I never bothered to buy a battery backup for this machine, because it wasn’t actually a production machine. It is just hosting fifty or so virtual server images, many of which I blow away and recreate on a regular basis.

A couple of months ago though, I started working on a new book. The book’s labs all build on one another, so I have been forced to create virtual machines and maintain them for longer than I normally do.

While I was on vacation, we had several power failures that took this server offline. The power fluctuations corrupted the hard drive containing the operating system. When I remembered that all of the virtual machines that I needed for my book were on the machine and that I have a fast approaching deadline, my heart sank (at least until I remembered that I do back the machine up).

I put a new hard drive in the server, restored my backup, and all was right with the world again, or so I thought. Initially, the RAID array containing all of my virtual machine images seemed to be undamaged. This morning though, I booted one of the virtual machines that I had not used since before my vacation and had a bit of a surprise. I was not able to open any of the management consoles. Every time I tried I received a Class not Registered error.

This error message usually means that a critical DLL file is no longer referenced in the system registry. Since I was up against a deadline I took the lazy way out and reapplied the latest service pack. This corrected the problem quickly and easily. Even so, the whole situation made me realize that servers can go from trivial to mission critical without anyone really realizing it. It has me thinking about what other precautions I need to take to safeguard other machines on my network.