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I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now, but I’ve never needed to install the System Center Capacity Planner (Andy usually handles that side of our SharePoint engagements). He now has taken the plunge with Microsoft’s shiny OS and hit a problem: SCCP refused to install with an error message saying it was only supported on Windows XP (!)

You may remember that I ended my previous post with about 1.6Gb free on the 8Gb SSD of the Mini 9 after installing Windows 7. I still needed to install Office 2007, or at the very least Word and Excel for the ‘book to be useful. I therefore rummaged out another 16Gb SD card and revisited my earlier vista post about installing apps to an SD card. This time I simply let the card allocate a drive letter and installed Office to d:\Program Files instead.

In my previous post about getting Windows 7 onto the fantastic Dell Mini 9 I talked about solving things like the driver issues and antivirus. This time I’m going to cover how I installed Windows 7 onto the 8Gb SSD version of the Mini 9.

The steps in this article were figured out with Windows 7. However, they should work just fine with Vista for anybody having the same issues. Note that whilst this is written for ATI hardware, it may be the case that NVidia gear suffers from the same problem and this solution should help.

One of the things I am most impressed about with Windows 7 is the latest Media Center. As a result, I wanted to install the build 7000 beta release onto our media PC at home. However, I already have that working nicely with Windows Vista and, frankly, I didn’t want to have to repeatedly reinstall if the beta caused problems.

Having just spent a long time examining the state of a new farm we’ve been working on for demonstrations, I would like to issue a warning… The Problem: None of the ‘New…’ menu items in our document libraries would work – we were seeing the error message:

I’m using the Mini9 quite a lot lately, at least in part to fiddle with Windows 7. I decided it would be nice to be able to access our Hyper-V servers so I went looking for the management tools…

What better way to try Windows 7 then installing it on the Mini 9? Having read all the commentary about the smaller footprint of the new OS I couldn’t resist.

So, we’re on the penultimate day of TechEd EMEA and I have to say that exhaustion is starting to creep in. However, the day had a great start with sessions by Steve Riley and then Mark Russinovich.

The last session of the day was just incredible. A surfer-dude with boundless energy wandering around the audience in shorts, cracking jokes and telling stories and every single one related in some way to his point. Steve Riley is a fantastic presenter, and his session - Do these ten things now or else get 0wned was a great session on security. Sadly, I don’t think it’s repeated or I would urge you all to attend the next viewing. If you have the chance to see Steve speak, grab it with both hands - especially if you are involved in any way with security or IT management.

We were in early today, looking forward to a session on SharePoint with Bill Engolish. Sadly, that was cancelled so Andy and I sat in on the Server 2008 R2 overview session presented by Iain McDonald. That was very interesing, and we learned a bit more about BranchCache. It doesn’t look like it will replace WAN accelerators like Riverbved, because it doesn’t appear to function at their low level. However, it does a similar thing at the file level. The client requests a file from the remote server, which instead replies with hashes. The client PC the requests those hashes from the local cache, improving performance. The cache itself is built on request so does not need to be pre-populated (which is good). I think WAN accelerators have nothing to fear from this, but for smaller organisations or ones which aren’t able to put the accelerators in (perhaps their servers are hosted, for example) BranchCache looks like a very promising technology.

OK, MED-V is cool! Sadly, cool though it is, it’s not something we’ll use3 at BM, but in my previous lives doing large organisation IT, MED-V would have been a killer.

So, the first session of the day was an extremely well-attended overview of Windows 7 features. When they talk about evolution rather than revolution with regard to Windows 7, I think that’s accurate. It was very much about developing and extending the foundations of Vista.

Andy and I are now in a TMG preview demo. This looks really interesting - we spoke to the guys at ATE last night and saw a few items that I hope to see now in more detail. TMG is ISA Server vnext - codenamed ‘Nitrogen’ and part of the ‘Stirling’ next wave of Forefront.

It’s 7:25 AM. Andy and I are hoping to make a whistle-stop trip to the Cathedral before making it to the conference early enough to get good seats for the keynote.

It’s an exercise in surreality. I’ve just walked through tunnels reminiscent of THX1138, to emerge in a wonderful blue-bathed auditorium, and they’re playing the Akira soundtrack (specifically the bit from just after the first nuclear explosion). Weird.

So, the keynote was interesting. Much of the content I had seen before, but there were some demos that were interesting and a few snippets that made me take note.

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it’s not sunny. Oh well… However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you’re passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food.

Andy and I are travelling to Barcelona this weekend for TechEd EMEA IT. I’m really looking forward to some of the sessions on Hyper-V, SharePoint and Forefront.If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop us a line and say hi.

I don’t visit the Mix community site often – historically, the content has been of little interest and infrequently updated. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a relaunched Mix Online with a new Microformats project – Oomph.