When Software Attacks!

Solving a mystery: Windows 7 games won’t work on HP TouchSmart TX2

This one has been nagging at me for a long time. My grandmother has an HP TouchSmart TX2 tablet. It was bought with Windows Vista, but as with her main computer, I upgraded it to Windows 7. It was a good plan – Windows 7 should make it perform better, and the touch capabilities of 7 are better than Vista. There was, however, a small matter of the N-Trig digitiser drivers not being great at point of release – something which would lead me down the wrong path over the problems I encountered.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, May 1, 2010

Unable to remote control Hyper-V VM after installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

True to form, you only discover something isn’t working when you’re in a desperate hurry. We use lots of Hyper-V VMs here at Black Marble and they are mostly running on our four node cluster. I use Failover Cluster Manager and this morning I couldn’t connect remotely to any of the Hyper-V VMs. I kept getting an error: Virtual Machine Connection: A connection will not be made because credentials may not be sent to the remote computer.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, April 30, 2010

Twitter clients: Twinbox and Tweetz

Anybody who follows me on twitter will know that @rikhepworth is by no means a prolific tweeter. However, I do follow a number of people around the planet, and in addition to the ubiquitous Tweetie2 on my iPhone, I have found two clients to be useful and reliable. The first is Tweetz, from Blue Onion Software. This is a great gadget for the Windows 7 desktop (or Vista Sidebar). The UI is simple and extremely usable (I love the way I can scroll the history for older tweets) and it makes posting a breeze.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 11, 2010

Creating a new Virtual PC using the Virtual Windows XP Base Disk

One of the most useful elements of the Virtual Windows XP feature in Windows 7 is that the VPC is easily replicated and you can have multiple virtual machines all publishing applications which run in their own sandboxes. Create a new Virtual Machine Create a Differencing Hard Disk from the Virtual Windows XP Base Start the VM and run through the setup wizard: Accept the Licence Agreement image ] Set the keyboard and locale to your needs

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Install System Center Capacity Planner 2007 on Windows 7

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 (!) We tried all sorts, and in the end I resorted to our old friend, Orca – the MSI editor shipped with the Windows SDK.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Windows 7 on the 8Gb SSD Mini 9: Redux

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 20, 2009

Windows 7 on the Dell Mini 9 with only the 8Gb SSD

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. Interestingly, Windows 7 will actually install in about 8Gb. However, when I tried to run through my previously documented steps, it told me that it did not recommend installing to a disk of less that 8303Mb.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, February 19, 2009

Achieving HDMI audio output with ATI hardware on Windows 7 (and Vista)

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. Background first. I spent a while sorting our AV gear so I could use HDMI as the universal connection standard.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, February 8, 2009

Windows 7: Attempting to install to VHD – an odyssey

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. The solution seemed simple: install Windows 7 to a VHD file sitting on the Vista disk.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, February 7, 2009

Managing Remote Hyper-V Servers From Windows 7

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… It turns out that Windows 7 ships with the Hyper-V management snap-ins. No real surprise there as my understanding is that it also includes Hyper-V (although I’ve not managed to run it up on an x64 machine yet so I can’t verify that - it certainly isn’t available in x86).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, December 2, 2008