But when it comes to distributing these applications, many companies seem to go down the difficult route instead of taking the easy one. When distributing applications within Enterprise environments, you want them to install automatically, hence you need a software package.

Many companies seem to create their Adobe Flash and Shockwave installation packages by capturing the installation sources that are used when initiating an end user installation from the Adobe website as shown in the picture below.

The challenge of this method is that you need to capture the sources while the web based installer is running (these are stored temporarily on the system) and that you probably want to get rid of any additional software that is being installed such as the Google Toolbar in this case.

Many people seem not to be aware that Adobe does provide redistributable media for enterprise deployment of their Adobe Flash and Adobe Shockwave players. On the download pages of the appropriate Player, you will see a link called “Distribute Flash Player” or “Distribute Shockwave Player”

By clicking on one of these links you are being redirected to the Adobe Player Licensing website where you find the links to apply for a license and obtain the installation media to distribute the players within your enterprise.

License Flash Player ›
License Shockwave Player ›

You will have to provide some information like Company name, number of seats and the operating system used. Once you have submitted your request, it takes about 5-10 minutes until you will receive an e-mail with the links to download the players.

Well, that is what I consider as taking the easy route, clicking on a link, filling in a form, and after let’s say 15 minutes you get the install_flash_player_10_plugin.msi for Flash and sw_lic_full_installer.msi for Shockwave and you’re ready to go.

A similar method is available for Adobe Reader. I plan to post an article about that soon.

The pause feature causes a virtual machine to cease operation temporarily, without powering off or suspending. Use the pause feature when a virtual machine is engaged in an lengthy, processor-intensive activity that prevents you from using your computer to do a more immediate task.

VMWare Guest in Pause Mode

For those of you that have been using VMWare before, you probably know that situation where nothing goes anymore on your system because your 1 or 2 or even more VM’s consume all of your system resources. Well that’s exactly where the Pause feature will be of great help.

Note The Pause Feature does only release CPU usage, not Memory. The graph below shows the Host system CPU utilization of a Windows 7 64 bit client, where a VM Guest, running on Windows 7.

To simulate CPU load within the Guest OS , i simply executed a dir c:\*.* /s command and I then “paused” and “re-enabled” the VM twice after a few seconds.

Read the entire article here

Thanks to Claude for the pointer.

If you launch the tool manually it will tell you if your system meets the requirements for running Windows Virtual PC or not, quite similar as the Securable utility I wrote about in the Detect XP Mode Support article.

But since I usually work in enterprise environments, I’m more interested in command line automation than in visual user interfaces, so let’s see what we have here.

When downloading the tool you get the havdetectiontool.exe, which is a self extracting executable. So the next step is to extract the content which we do by running the havdetectiontool.exe /x command which will prompt you for a location where to store the content. Once extracted you will see a havtoollauncher.exe and a subdirectory called Sources that contains the havtool executables for both 32 and 64 bit clients.

I was not able to find any command line options for the havtoollauncher.exe itself, so i moved on the to the 32 bit version of the havtool.exe. And yes, indeed the tool does provide command line options, Hura!

Executing the following command will parse the output into a log file:

havtool /log havresult.txt /q

Content of havresult.txt

System CPU doesn’t support Hardware Assisted Virtualization.
BIOS Vendor : Hewlett-Packard
BIOS Version : F.22    
System Manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
Final returnValue = 1

Executing the following commands will set the result into the Errorlevel variable and then create a new System Variable called HAV and sets its value with the Return code.

havtool /q
SETX /M HAV %ERRORLEVEL%

Setting a system variable is just one example, you could also write a custom registry key or log file. Once you have marked your system with the result, you can use your system management software such as SCCM 2007 to collect the data and create your custom reporting.

When you click on the “optional updates are available” link, all updates are listed as shown in the picture below.

So if don’t intent to install certain updates, then select these and within the right mouse context menu select "Hide Update”, this will make the update disappear from the updates list.

If at some stage you feel that you would want to install an update that you have hided, then click on the “Restore Hidden Updates” link which will then show you all the updates you have hided previously.

You then select the updates you would like to get back in the list again, and click on the Restore button. The word Restore might be a bit misleading, but no worries, it will not install anything yet, it just adds the update back into the available updates list. 

I’ve spend some time to figure out where the system stores this information (hided updates), but besides the c:\windows\windowsupdate.log file, I was not able to figure out where in the registry or file system this information is being stored. Any hints are welcome.

AppTimer can be downloaded from here

Hoping to find at least something new, i had extracted the content of the the MBSASetup-x64-EN.msi of both versions, but could not find any differences other than some updated readme and about files and the new compiled executables. Also when launching the new MBSA it’s only showing 2.1 and not 2.1.1.

The MBSA 2.1.1 can be downloaded from here

The video can be downloaded from here

In this post I want to focus on the functionality provided by ImageX to split and merge image files. So why would you want to split and merge image files? Well think of the following scenarios:

• Your image is too big to fit on one DVD and using Dual Layer DVD media is not an option.
• Network related limitations to transfer large files
• Merge image files provided on multiple DVDs for network based deployment

For the purpose of writing this article, I prepared a simple folder structure to demonstrate the capture, split and merge process.

The folder “Output1” is used to store the initial captured image file which contains the data stored within the “source” folder. The source folder was filled with some wallpapers located in C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper The folder “Output2” is used to store the splitted image files. The folder “Output2” is used to store the merged image file created from the splitted image files that are stored in folder “Output2”.

To run the following commands you must open the “Deployment Tools command prompt” which gets automatically added to your start menu when having installed the WAIK. Note that all commands must be run with Administrator privileges.

 Image Capture

Use the following command to capture the first image:

imagex /capture c:\data\splitmerge\source c:\data\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim "splitmerge" /COMPRESS maximum

For validation purposes, I talk about that later, we also produce an image info file using the following command:

imagex /info /xml c:\data\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim > info1.xml

Image Split

Now we are going to split the previously created splitmerge.wim file. Since we are dealing with a rather small image file, the split is set at 20 MB.

imagex /split c:\data\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm 20

and again we create an image info file.

imagex /info /xml c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm > info2.xml

Image Merge

Finally we are going to merge the previously splitted image file back into a single image file.

imagex /ref c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge*.swm /check /export c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm 1 c:\data\splitmerge\output3\splitmerge.wim "splitmerge" /COMPRESS maximum

and create the image info file

imagex /info /xml c:\data\splitmerge\output3\splitmerge.wim > info3.xml

The Output

If all worked fine, the following files should be present:

• C:\DATA\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm, splitmerge2.swm and depending on the size of the source folder your might also get an additional splitmerge3.swm
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\output3\splitmerge.wim
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\info1.xml
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\info2.xml
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\info3.xml

Checking data integrity

When comparing the file size of the splitmerge.wim stored in c:\data\splitmerge\output1 with splitmerge.wim stored in c:\data\splitmerge\output3 you will probably notice that the size in bytes differs. The same applies for the total size of the swm files stored in c:\data\splitmerge\output2.

Well, forget about these file/folder sizes, to ensure that your final wim file contains the exact same data as the initial wim file, we’ll take a look at the previously created image info files.

All of the 3 image info files have the same value stored for:

<FILECOUNT>43</FILECOUNT>
<TOTALBYTES>41339064</TOTALBYTES>

Happy imaging !

Related articles:

Getting your OS Restore DVD to work with large image files

The problem was that if the WWAN device has been turned of via the quick launch button by the end user, the software would not install.

What many don’t know is that there is a command line  utility that allows you to automate the Wireless Device State on HP devices. If you have the HP Wireless Assistant Software installed, you should have the utility wireless.exe stored under C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Wireless Assistant.

Launching wireless.exe without providing any command line options will show a dialog box describing all available command line parameters.

So if you want to enable all Wireless Devices automatically on a HP notebook system, then simply run the following command:

C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Wireless Assistant\Wireless.exe all on

Or if you just want to turn on the Wireless Lan Device, use the following command:

C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Wireless Assistant\Wireless.exe WirelessLAN on

You can see the state of the individual Wireless Devices within the HP Wireless Assistant Application.

• Aero support for Windows 7 and Vista Guests!
• Windows 7 support (as a Host and Guest OS)
• OpenGL and Shader Model 3.0 support for Windows guests
• Create guests with Multi-core or 4-way CPUs and up to 32GB of Memory
• Download VMware vSphere 4 and install ESX as a guest OS to try out the latest features.
• Dynamically Download the latest VMware Tools package only when you need it.
• Print from your VM without installing printer drivers. Virtual Printing courtesy of our friends at ThinPrint.
• Automatically create snapshots on scheduled intervals with AutoProtect.
• Secure your Virtual Machines with 256-bit encryption.
• Remote Replay Debugging and other advanced development features
• ALSA Sound support on Linux hosts enables multiple VMs to play "music" concurrently.
• Instantly pause a VM to free up system resources or dedicate horsepower to other running VMs.
• The Virtual Network Editor user interface has been redesigned for Windows users.

Download VMware Workstation Release Candidate – October 2009

Read VMware Workstation 7.0, VMware Player 3.0, and VMware ACE 2.6 Release Candidate Release Notes

Business Desktops

HP Compaq dc7900

HP Compaq dc7800

HP Compaq dc7700

HP Compaq dc5800

Business Workstations

HP Z400 Workstation

HP Z600 Workstation

HP Z800 Workstation

HP xw8600 Workstation

HP xw6600 Workstation

HP xw4600 Workstation

Business Notebooks

HP EliteBook 2730p Notebook PC

HP EliteBook 6930p Notebook PC

HP EliteBook 2530p Notebook PC

HP Compaq 6730b Notebook PC

HP EliteBook 8730w Mobile Workstation

HP EliteBook 8530p Notebook PC

This week there have been some questions around the use of mobile broadband with Windows 7, so I’ve started searching the web for information.  and came across the Mobile Broadband Team Blog.

If you plan to to use Windows 7 and mobile broadband, I strongly recommend having a look at the various posts on this blog. The blog contains detailed lists of devices that work and don’t work on both Windows 7 32 and 64 bit. You can also download this whitepaper which contains a lot of useful information.

Additional Information:

Mobile Broadband Stack Changes for Windows 7

New for Windows 7: Mobile Broadband Miniport Driver Documentation

Mobile Broadband Driver Development In Windows 7