Windows Vista troubleshooting

My New Favorite Vista Epigram

I jsut read a marvelous story from the Sydney Morning Herald entitled "Windows 7 looking good, especially after Vista woes." It includes a brief but telling remark...

Handy Tool: Halfdone Development’s Unknown Devices

If you're like me, you're nearly always in the process of building or rebuilding one or more Vista systems, or checking specific systems out for currency and correctness. Especially when dealing with new or revised builds, or with systems you haven't worked with before, you will occasionally come...

Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 Pro Edition

If the care and feeding of your Vista systems is anything like mine, from time to time there's just no getting away from messing with disk partitions. For me, that means one of several activities gets underway:

• Migrating a notebook or desktop user from a smaller drive to a larger one,...

Vista Wins 2009 Fiasco Award

Gosh, I love writing headlines because they can say so much and so little at the same time. Today's blog makes a terrific case in point. It refers to the recent Fiasco award for 2009, chosen by an anonymous Fiasco Awards Team, which was in turn sponsored by the Catalan Association of...

Another Use for WinPE: WinRE UFD To the Rescue

If you've ever messed with the Windows Vista Recovery Environment you know it's helpful, but it can take quite a while for it to appear on-screen on a machine in need of repair or recovery. In fact, the functionality behind this display is a WinPE-based facility that's bundled with the Windows...

Boot-Land.com is another hidden treasure

If you read my previous blog, you already know that VistaPE is  a project that uses WinBuilder to automate the construction of a WinPE 2.0-based bootable image from the Windows...

A Fabulous WinPE Resource: VistaPE

As I've learned to build various types of bootable CDs and UFDs with the Vista-based WinPE environment, I've also been working to learn more about its inner workings and capabilities. As I struggled to figure out how to add Windows Explorer and some kind of Web browser to a runtime WinPE image...

Other Uses for a Bootable WinPE UFD

I've just finished writing a story for Tom's Guide on using a bo0table WinPE UFD, and doing the research  for that story led me to a few interesting discoveries. First and foremost, no self-respecting Vista administrator should be without a bootable WinRE UFD--but perhaps, WinRE is more...

Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool

Like clockwork, Microsoft proffers up a new version of the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tools on each and every Patch Tuesday. In January, 2009, that item is described in Knowledge Base article KB890830. This tool is not intended to...

Create a bootable WinPE UFD

Everybody knows what a UFO is, but let me remind readers that Microsoft interprets UFD as "USB Flash Drive." Thus, what I'm about to describe is best understood as how to create a bootable Flash drive that includes the Windows Vista SP1 Pre-boot Environment (aka Window PE or even WinPE)....