.NET From India

Vista SP1 Application Issues

If you are installing Vista SP1, then you maybe intersted in this KB Article that talks about some programs that do not work on SP1 and which may need a update.

Most of these are Firewall and AV software, so it is important that you take a look before you install SP1. Obviously, SP1 is not yet available to the end consumer and so this maynot be a major problem. But if you plan to play around with it and have access to it, then this is something you need to take care of.

Free MS Software For Students

Students had multiple ways to get free Microsoft software. MS has a decent academic program, which allowed students of enrolled colleges to get access to MSDN for free. There are also a number of free to download software like the Express suite of products.

Now MS has a new offer called Microsoft DreamSpark. This allows students who are studying in registered universities/colleges to have access to Professional versions of MS software for free. The main thing here is that they get the real professional versions of software like VS 2008 and Windows 2003. The site does say it is Global, but I don’t know if there are country wise restrictions. Maybe someone who has used it can leave comments.

Any effort to get legal professional software into students hand is very good, especially from an Indian context. This allows them to enter the job market with skills and knowledge of tools that are widely used in the industry and that is good both for them and for companies that hire them.

Good Show Microsoft.

Hyper-V in Win 2008

A review of Hyper-V that is available in Win 2008 is available at ZDNet.(this will not ship out of the box with the March release of 2008, but will be release later as it is still in Beta now. But basically it is part of Win 2008 license and so is a part of the OS).

I am not a virtualization expert, but as with every techology person, VMs are a part of life nowadays. Most of my customer demos are packaged as VMs... Technical POCs and tests are VMs... Virtual PC is one of the tools on my "I cannot do without" list.

But my experience on the server site, with Virtual Server has not always been great. Performance is a big problem when going for a virtualized server. So from what I can see, anything that can improve performance on a virtualized server is a good thing..:)

I can see Hyper-V being something (if it is sucessful) that would push a lot of the bigger enterprises to upgrade to Win 2008.

Security Centre and WMI Repository

One of my machines runs Vista with AVG for antivirus. It has been running fine for around 6 months and then suddenly a couple of weeks back I started getting security centre warnings. When I go into Security center I find that AVG (my antivirus) is not recognized and so Vista says I don’t have any Anti-virus and it also says defender is off.

So I try turning on defender from SC and it shows up a windows saying checking for updates and kind of hangs there. When I look at Defender and AVG separately, I find both of them are running fine. After a bit of searching I found a couple of posts that talk about how the WMI repository being corrupt can popup such problems.

So I went ahead and run

winmgmt /verifyrepository

and sure enough it tells me that the repository is inconsistent. The way to repair the repository is to run

winmgmt /salvagerepository

There are quite a few posts in the internet on how this can fail multiple times and that you need to keep running this till it succeeds. It did fail the first time for me, but it did give the message that it had requested for a service to be stopped. So I kind of gave it 5 minutes and ran again. This time, it went through fine.

A reboot later, security centre was back to recognizing defender and AVG.

More information on winmgmt (From MSDN).

Those nifty utilities you cannot do without

Everyone has a list of utilities they cannot do without. The first thing you do once you format and install Windows is to go to that directory with all those installs. Some of these are ones you install only when you need them and some you need to have just to get started.

George Ou at Zdnet has put together a list of his must-have free utilities.

Not surprisingly I use quite a few of these or the equivalents (I prefer Azeurus to utorrent etc). Some others like Skype and AVG, I am a big fan of.

The one other utility I cannot do without that is not on that list is DAEMON Tools. This is my preferred CD/DVD emulator. Why? It is small, it does what it is supposed to do well and best of all, it can emulate some of the most common security mechanisms used in CDs. This is very important to me as I usually rip my Game CDs on to my HDD so that I don’t have to keep switching CDs to play games. So without these emulations, I cannot do that.