Not that all my desktops and laptops are running Windows 7, I wanted to get the newest tools for administering my Windows environment, including Hyper-V. It took a little bit of searching, and a lot of the search results pointed to the beta tools or the RSAT for Windows Vista, neither of which will work with the released version of Windows 7. So, if you’re looking for the link, here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en#filelist From there, you’ll find the direct download links to both the x86 and x64 versions of the tools.  Happy administering!

Here is an easy way to determine the partition alignment of any given disk on the local system or remotely. $OffsetKB = @{label=”Offset(KB)”;Expression={$_.StartingOffset/1024 -as [int]}} $SizeMB = @{label=”Size(MB)”;Expression={$_.Size/1MB -as [int]}}   Get-WmiObject -ComputerName "localhost" -Class "Win32_DiskPartition" | ft` SystemName, Name, DiskIndex, $SizeMB, $OffsetKB -AutoSize This will output table that looks like this: Why should you care about this?  This is particularly useful for determining partition alignment of existing disks that may be running applications like Exchange or SQL.  Exchange recommends a 64K partition alignment as does SQL in most cases.  In Windows Server 2008, partition alignment is automatic and defaults to 1024KB for new partitions. Note that the alignment of partitions on servers that were upgraded from Windows 2003 to 2008 are not changed.

First and foremost, I am a Windows user. I have been forever. I was a “blue badge” so I was very much a “fanboy” of Microsoft from the platform to desktop apps to mobile devices and still pretty much am. I have also opened my eyes to other computing technologies like the Mac and iPhone. I used to try to make my Microsoft software work the way I wanted in every case. There really wasn’t any other solution. I have moved away from that thought process, and accepted that some other technologies do the job better. Take Windows Mobile for example. I owned no less than 10 devices in a matter of less than five years because I thought that the issue had to be the device, not the platform. Last year, I finally purchased an iPhone. I absolutely love this device and it will take me a long time…

I was looking for a creative way to be able to share my USB hard drive that I had formatted for the Mac with my PC. HFS Explorer, worked fine, but required me to extract files instead of being able to expose the volume as a drive letter. I decided I would search for something that would allow my Mac to not only read (which OS X does by default), but also write to an NTFS partition. I was going to reformat my USB hard drive as NTFS since I now primarily use it with my PCs. My search turned up an app called MacFUSE. MacFUSE, as the website indicated, “implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It provides multiple APIs, one of which is a superset of the FUSE (File-system in…

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of IE8 RC1. A release candidate is a version of the software that has been made available to the general public while it undergoes some final testing. You can download IE8 RC1 here.