Logon time delay hunting example

Here’s a good example of learning some Windows Logon diagnostics. An “unknown” company with AD and Windows 7 clients.

After 15 minutes spent on diagnosing a really slow logon when using Direct Access I changed one setting in a Group Policy Preference item. The following picture shows that the logon time dropped from 400 seconds to under 200 seconds. The tools used were Event Viewer’s Group Policy log and Performance Toolkit. PT is part of the ADK which you can download here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30652

Customized AppLocker messages

Many people ask about customizing AppLocker to tell people why software was not allowed to run.

AppLocker only allows to have a support link to a website but it’s easy have your own on top. What you need to do is to create a Scheduled Task.

First open up the AppLocker logfile to attach a task to the error event:

Then tell the Task to display a message (you should remove the constraint of running without power cord so laptops can use this while without power):

And the result looks like this:

Show Desktop icon to Windows 7

As a few customers wanted to have the old Show Desktop icon (below) back on the taskbar I just created a small program to do it as I didn’t find a shell shortcut right away. You can have it if you have need

Here’s the exe: http://www.adminize.com/ShowDesktop.zip

Upgrading WS2008R2 Standard to Enterprise

Already installed the standard version but need to get clustering etc working?

As I seem to try to find these instructions so often and they are spread around the place I decided to summarize them here:

1. Start an administrative command prompt (UAC elevated)
2. Run the following command:

DISM /online /Set-Edition:ServerEnterprise /productkey:AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC-DDDDD-EEEEE

You can try to use your own key but as it often doesn’t work you can use this general key: 489J6-VHDMP-X63PK-3K798-CPX3Y temporarily

After the restart (this takes a while) run the following commands to change your own key back:

1. Type in slmgr.vbs -ckms (this clears any KMS entry you may have)
2. Type slmgr.vbs -upk (this removes any product key installed)
3. Type slmgr.vbs -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx (where the x’s is the new product key you want to use )
4. Type slmgr.vbs -ato (this activates the server)

Done!

Sami

WSUS CleanUp

WSUS gathers huge amounts of “waste” so it’s a good idea to schedule the cleanup to be run once a week.

It’s easy to do following the two great posts:

http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/powershell/wsus-cleanup-with-powershell/

http://blog.pointbeyond.com/2010/04/23/run-powershell-script-using-windows-server-2008-task-scheduler/

Running Windows To Go (how to survive with an Asus Zenbook)

I’ve tried to figure out how I would run my new Asus Zenbook and different OS’s on it.

First of all I wanted to test out how different disk drives perform on my Asus. I have the challenge that I used have a ten kg heavy Dell Inspriron M6400 with 640GB hard drive and 8 GB RAM. It also had an eSata interface and at least three USB ports.

Asus has one USB2 port and one USB3 port, 4GB of ram and 128GB SSD so I have lots of downsizing to be done. But hey, my Asus weights less than the power supply of my old Dell. First thing to shop for was absolutely a USB 3 hub and as USB 3 has bandwidth to play with this has been a very pleasant surprise.

I have to run my virtual machines from somewhere else as they will never fit on the 128GB SSD. So I started out testing different disks attached to the USB3. Here are the results:

So the results are quite obvious. While the Super Talent USB drive will be great for running Windows To Go and faster than conventional disks it lacks the power of the SSD disks. After playing around with different setups I ended up using the following combination:

Disk0 = 128GB Asus Internal disk for Windows 7 and software for daily use

Disk1 = USB3 casing with Samsung SSD for my mostly used VMs

Disk2 = 1TB 7200RPM USB3 drive for my ISO’s etc.

Disk3 = USB3 Key for running Windows8 (To Go)

“Disk4” = Home computer with reliable Internet connection and 16GB of RAM + lots of HDD.

I’m very happy with the performance especially for the VM’s running on the external SSD.

Next paycheck might change a few things though. The internal SSD would be nice to be at least 256GB and I would kill for 8GB of memory (Asus is said to have this available next summer so I’ll upgrade to that asap).

How to partition a USB disk in Windows

As Microsoft has published the manual instructions on how to create a USB stick for Windows To Go the only drawback is that there are only a handful of devices that these instructions can be used on. The problem is that the USB drive needs to show itself to the OS as a normal basic disk rather than a removable drive as Windows doesn’t allow partitioning a removable drive. You can do it with one partition but you lose the support for UEFI. I used to use a 7200RPM 500GB USB3.0 external drive but that’s not really pretty for demonstrations although it performs well and is totally suitable for running Windows 8.
You can get USB sticks partitioned following these instructions:

• Install Windows 8 x86 on some machine
  
• Download USB_LocalDisk here
  
• On you Windows 8 machine extract the USB_LocalDisk to local harddrive

• Insert the USB stick you want to use and find it in your Device Manager
  
• Open the Details tab and find the Device Instance Path –value. Copy the value to the clipboard by right clicking it

• Open the .inf file and replace the device_instance_id_goes_here with the string from your clipboard – Save the file

• Go back to Device Manager, find your devices Driver tab and choose Update Driver

• Browse for your driver

• Choose Let me pick…

• Choose Have disk and find your driver

• Choose the default driver

• Choose to install the driver by accepting the warnings
  
• Now your USB drive shows up as a basic disk!
  
• Now you can try following the instructions on Technet but I couldn't get it working still... So I believe it's still the one darn bit that we're missing that would tell at the firmware level that the drive is a permanent one:(
• The instructions on Technet can be found here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6991.windows-to-go-step-by-step.aspx