EnergizeIT Windows 7 Install Fest – Edmonton

We had a lot of fun with the folks that showed up for the EnergizeIT Windows 7 Install Fest.

We got to see folks installing Windows 7 on Macs, using BootCamp, dual booting Vista and Windows 7 or XP and Windows 7 on Intel/AMD hardware, all manner of laptops, and even some brave fellows that brought along their PC systems.

There was a small group that came to help out with the installs and were designated Proctors. We walked about the large room checking with the people installing Windows 7 to make sure they were getting through the process with as little difficulty as possible.

Other than one laptop that did not have near enough RAM (256MB) or disk space (8GB) to install as it was too old, we had a 99% successful install rate. A few hiccups here and there with drivers and figuring out how to shrink an existing partition to enable dual booting were encountered.

For newer laptops, there were a lot of exclamation marks in the Device Manager. For older hardware, there were a few exclamation marks for chipsets and Intel motherboard management features.

Damir Bersinic, John Bristowe, and Qixing Zheng put on a very good EnergizeIT event for us. Across the three evenings we received some very valuable information on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Azure.

The three evenings were well worth the time.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

EnergizeIT 2008 Certification Boot Camp at EMUG last night

We had the Canadian EnergizeIT Certification Bootcamp hosted at our Edmonton Microsoft User Group meeting last night.

We had about 240 or so register and it looked as though most of them showed up.

Our presenters were Kai Axford and MVP Kirk Munro.

The presentations were awesome. Kai has an excellent ability to make his point very clear and get a few laughs in between. Among other things, we learned that VMs must be managed in the same manner as a physical system: They must be patched, have A/V running on them, and share similar access permissions structures as physical systems.

Kirk did a good job getting into Server Core as well as a good overview of PowerShell's capabilities.

While working on Server Core, Kirk demonstrated a neat GUI tool that allows one to configure a Core install:

Server Core Configurator

The Server Core Configurator allows one to work with a Core installation without needing to run the various configuration commands at the command line.

This is an excellent little tool for those who are looking to get a Core installation up and running and available for RSAT (x86 download site) management via a remote Windows Vista SP1 or Full Server 2008 installation.

All in all, the evening was very rewarding with both excellent speakers and great content.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.