Ravi Sankar

I still have not given up the habit of sitting on top of problems for long time before I even attempt to solve them. Latest of these incidents is the error I faced with hyperlinks in Outlook. I got the following error when I was clicking on a URL given inside a mail marked as junk.

"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator."

Finally I had to copy/paste the URL into the browser to open it. It was so natural for me to assume that this behaviour is due to the security settings applied against junk mails.

But I was wrong. Next day I faced the same issue with a normal e-mail in my inbox. My laziness clubbed with this misleading error message made me think that I am facing this issue because of some new security feature introduced in Outlook 2007 as part of regular software updates. So I ignored the message again and continued to copy/paste hyperlinks to the browser. But after some time I found it very frustrating. Copy/paste became impossible when I got a mail with URL embedded in an image. This time I was forced to solve the problem.

I assumed that there is a way to disable this "security feature" and I looked for some sort of settings in few obvious places in Outlook. But no help. Then I did Live and Google searches and realised that there can be multiple reasons for this problem though there was no definitive answer. I tried to experiment the easiest solution. The solution I tried was nothing but to check that Outlook is the default E-mail program in my computer. And to my surprise, it worked like a charm! Here is what I did

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Click Tools --> Internet Options --> Programs tab --> Set Programs button under Internet programs
3. In the Default programs window click "Set program access and computer defaults"

   4.   Select "Custom" and choose Microsoft Office Outlook under "Choose a default e-mail program:"

   5.   Click OK to close all the Windows.

If you want to know how reliable and scalable Hyper-V is, here is a quick list of Hyper-V statistics.

• 40% of www.microsoft.com runs on Hyper-V
• MSDN and TechNet web sites are completely running on Hyper-V
• Nearly 150 customers of Microsoft are using it in production as part of early adoption program
• Test figures have shown that I/O performance under Hyper-V is 90-97% of native performance
• Microsoft partner QLogic has achieved a throughput of 180,000 I/O per second for a storage device through Hyper-V

Of course there is more. This URL can give you more detailed information

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/Fastestever-Windows-HPC-Cluster/

This is indeed a moment of pride for me as an employee of Microsoft. Microsoft is a late entrant to the High Performance Computing (HPC) space. We released the first version of our HPC solution called Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) approximately two years back and today we are in the beta 2 stage of version 2 of it. The new version is called Windows HPC Server 2008 is due to release sometime later this year. And a solution built using beta version is already ranked # 23. Wow! The days ahead are going to be more exciting.

Are you an IT Pro? Are you geek enough to win the entire office’s respect? Prove it. Play Server Quest, where you’ll navigate through the perils of office life, protect the server, and keep clear of the arrogant sales guy. Click on the picture below to play this fun game. You'll love it.

Have you by any chance deleted the hibernation file while performing a disk clean up in Windows Vista? If you delete this file, the hibernation feature would be disabled and you won't be able to enable it again from anywhere in the Graphical user Interface (GUI). I wasted two days in searching for a setting in the GUI to turn the hibernation ON. Finally my friend/colleague Filinto helped me with this simple command line utility.

You must be wondering what is the relationship between Windows Vista and global warming. Since Vista's hardware requirements are more than that of XP, you must be thinking that Vista contributes to global warming by spending more energy. Then you got it wrong, it's the other way. Read on to find out how's this possible.

Vista has got a number of improvements in efficiently utilising power. You can find those details here and I am not going to explain them further. But I am going to talk about something else.

Millions of PCs worldwide are running operating systems without advanced power management features needed for today's environment. This includes Windows XP as well. Large number of these PCs are running continuously without any break. Needed or not these PCs are never shut down during the course of a day. The actual number of such PCs vary from organization to organization and it is a fact that these PCs waste large amount of electricity causing money loss and global warming.

But how can Vista solve this problem? PCs with Windows Vista can be forced into power saving modes such as sleep, hibernate etc. after a period of inactivity. Similar settings used to exist in previous versions of Windows as well. But those settings had to be done at individual PCs, thus making it impractical to implement in large networks. In Vista these power management settings are available in the form of group policies so that they can be configured and applied centrally on large number of PCs. See the picture below to locate these settings in Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

Under Power Management you can see 30+ different settings related to sleep mode, power button action, hard disk, video etc. The picture below is a quick view of those settings.

Now let's do a simple math.

Assume that you are managing a network of 1,000 computers each consuming on an average 100Watts power.

If these PCs are not used for 14 hours a day the total energy wasted would be = 14*100*1000 =1,400 KWh or 1,400 Units of electricity.

If power management is implemented total savings per year would be = 1,400*365 = 511,000 Units, that's a lot of money and energy loss.

So my request to every system administrator reading this blog is to try out these settings in your network and save the world!

This video is worth watching. It's a super cool demo on how System Center Operations Manager 2007 can be used to monitor a heterogeneous environment consisting of Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems.

 http://edge.technet.com/Media/Operations-Manager-with-Barry-Shilmover/

I am delighted to share my friend Pavan's work on terminal services features in Windows Server 2008. He has done some cool experimenting at work to publish applications using terminal services. Read on

1. I have a fairly large collection of photos. The Windows Photo Gallery is the best way to view and manage them

2. I am addicted to Aero. It’s so nice to view windows with Aero turned ON

3. File Tagging. Tagging files appropriately helps me organize same set of files in different ways

4. Instant search. I use this feature every second to locate my programs, e-mail, photos and virtually everything in my computer

5. Windows Sidebar. It’s a very handy tool for me as I have so many gadgets in it. Most commonly used are the clock (in fact I have multiple clocks), currency converter, whether forecast and some search gadgets. There are just too many gadgets available here

6. Network Speed. Copy large files between Vista/Windows Server 2008 machines is a lot (2-3x) faster than Windows XP

7. Games: It’s a pleasure playing games in Vista. Even the built-in games like Solitaire and Minesweeper are much improved

In fact there are lot more reasons for me to use Vista, like search folders, speech recognition and media centre. But I am yet to take full advantage of those features.

I decided to try out IE 8 beta 1 on the very first day itself. I could get most of the non-IE8 compatible applications working with IE7 compatibility mode of IE8. But there are still applications, especially the one uses ActiveX controls that are not really happy with even the IE7 compatibility mode. So I decided to uninstall the same after few days. As usual I went to "Uninstall a Program" in Control Panel to uninstall IE8. But I couldn't find one entry for IE8 there :(. It took me a while to realise that IE8 is considered as an update not as a program in Vista and so it's located under "View Installed Updates". So finally I got IE8 beta 1 uninstalled. Here is the screen shot.

It is nice to see that people from the ODF community are also coming out publicly in support of OOXML as an ISO standard. Read on

Remote Server Administration tools (RSAT) for Windows Vista has been released. You can download the same from here for x64 and x86 versions of Windows Vista with SP1. RSAT consists of a number of management tools for remotely managing Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003. This is the next generation of "Adminpak.msi" shipped as part of Windows Server 2003.

Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Windows didn't attract enough attention from Wal-Mart customers, and the chain has stopped selling them in stores. Read on......

Server core is one of the installation options in Windows Server 2008. I have been asked many times whether the core installation can be upgraded to full installation or not. The answer is NO. Also the full installation cannot be downgraded to core installation

There are few articles taking prowl in the Internet stating that Microsoft's Hyper-V is based on Xen's source code. This is not true and colleague has blogged about it here

I keep getting this question from many people on how to block USB storage devices in Windows XP. Here is the solution, may be not as smart as the group policy based solution in Vista.

A news I have been waiting to hear.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2207368,00.asp

Though I am not certifying the content here it is nice to read and try out some of the settings and tools mentioned there.

I've heard many people saying that Vista is slow and XP was better. I don't disagree with them completely as the hardware requirements of Vista are not the same as that of XP. But right hardware is only one of elements in deciding the overall performance of a computer. I have been using Vista Enterprise Edition for more than a year now. Initially I wasn't really happy with the performance due to incompatible hardware and software applications. Today I am extremely happy with Vista and I can't even think of going back to XP. Most of the time my usage is very typical to that of a power home and business user. And I have used at least six different machines during this time to experience how Vista performs on different hardware. Let me try to share my experience and knowledge around Vista usage

• Processor: Dual core is not really required. But I strongly recommend buying a dual core processor for both desktops and notebooks if someone going for a new computer. This is because dual core processors give better performance without much price difference compared to the single core ones. Plus it would provide ample room for your future needs. When it comes to old machines it's not a good idea to have Vista on a pre Pentium 4 age machine. In other words the processor should be of year 2005 model or later (both AMD and Intel) for ideal performance.
• Memory: I would say that a minimum of 512MB RAM is required. 1GB provides good performance. But if you can afford, 2GB is my recommendation. Before you make up your mind on memory please check the price of a 2x1GB module. You may find it affordable. The memory modules available today are all DDR2/667MHz and they are far superior than its predecessors. Again, like I mentioned in the case of processors memory modules older than two years may not give the best performance
• Hard Drive:The choices available today is just too much. One can find hard disks ranging from 60GB in notebooks to in excess of 600GB in desktops. What really mattered to me was the speed. 5400RPM gives reasonably good performance. But 7200RPM is better if you have demanding applications running on top of Vista. For superior performance one can think of 10/15K RPM. Another thing that can improve the speed is flash based cache attached to the hard drives. I think 4/8/16MB cache are available today. Though I haven't tried it out personally, a flash based disk should give better performance than a hard drive. Such disks are available today in select notebook models.

I am not going to elaborate further on hardware requirements. Probably you may want to refer to this checklist from Microsoft before you purchase the hardware.

Let me now spend some time on things other than hardware.

System BIOS: Make sure that the BIOS version of your system is the latest one provided by the computer manufacturer. Some manufacturers provide a software update tool to ensure that you have the latest BIOS version. But that's not always the case. In that case you may need to periodically check the manufacturer's web site to ensure that your machine got the latest BIOS. Many computer manufacturers have in fact released multiple BIOS updates after Vista was released.

Compatible Anti Virus Program: On many occasions the anti virus (AV) program is a cause of computer's poor performance. The simple reason being its lack of compatibility with the operating system. So make sure that the version of the AV you are running is certified to be compatible with Windows Vista. AV failing to start automatically is a good sign of its lack of compatibility with the operating system.

Sign Up for Microsoft Update: Make sure that Vista and other applications from Microsoft such as Office are updated with latest security patches and other updates. This is perhaps the easiest thing to do because all Microsoft products can be updated using a Windows Automatic Updating tool. sometimes you get latest driver updates also through this tool.See the picture below. This is how I have configured my computer. To reach this settings page just search for update in your start button.

So don't forget to turn Windows Update ON. It's super important

Tweak your Windows Sidebar: Windows Sidebar is a nice but optional feature in Vista that allows you to add useful gadgets. But it can turn itself into a performance bottleneck unless properly used. Most of the gadgets are network programs pulling data from remote servers. So if there are too many gadgets or gadgets that are not responding added on to your sidebar you computer will take longer time to complete the startup process. The solution here is to make sure that only necessary gadgets are added to the Windows Sidebar and also to have a periodic check on the added gadgets to ensure that they are working properly. Sometimes I don't use them also.

Latest version of all drivers: Windows update provides latest updates to the most generic hardware drivers in your system. But you should check the computer manufacturer's web site to make sure that all hardware drivers are updated with their latest version. This is similar to the exercise I suggested for BIOS update.

Startup Programs: Over a period of time computer's performance is likely to degrade depending on it's usage. One of the most commonly found reasons is the large number of programs added on to startup programs. Many of the programs that we install are configured to start while Windows starts. As the number of such programs increases, the time required for Windows to complete the start up process also increases. This results in long waiting time before the computer becomes usable after powering it on.

In earlier versions of Windows msconfig was the command used to remove unwanted programs from the startup. This command works in Vista as well. But Windows Defender is a better tool to do this job. So click  the start button

In the search bar type defender and hit enter to invoke Windows Defender. In the Windows Defender page click Tools and then Software Explorer.In the drop down combo box make sure that Startup Programs is selected. Click on . This appears near the bottom left portion of the screen. Now you can see all the start up programs in the list above. Identify the programs that you do not want to start along with Windows and remove them. Note that by removing a program from this list you are not uninstalling it. Typical programs that you f

ind here are instant messaging clients, CD writing software etc. Have a look at the settings in my computer.

The discussion over Open Office XML (OOXML) is heating up these days as the voting date for considering it as an ISO standard is nearing. I don't think that having two standards (ODF is already there) is a problem to anyone as long as they are interoperable. Look at CDMA and GSM standards in wireless phone industry. They are very much interoperable. In fact multiple standards give more options to the end user. Different formats would have different capabilities and users should have enough choices based on their need. IBM and Sun are playing a cheap game in an attempt to beat Microsoft.

This is awesome! One can upload documents, music, pictures etc. up to 500MB and share the same with others. Check this out http://skydrive.live.com

Apache is fast losing its dominance in web server market share. It's market share has gone below 50 per cent for the first time since netcraft has started tracking the web server share on the Internet. At the same time Microsoft's share has gone up to 34 per cent and is steadily growing. For a detailed report and analysis follow this link

Watch this web page. Awesome!

Very funny! Watch this site www.easyeasier.com

Here is an interesting blog on PowerShell usage by one of my friends