I came across Mary-Jo Foley’s post “Windows 7 compatibility problems? Microsoft might have an app (or service) for that” on the All About Microsoft blog and thought I’d offer my $0.02. Based on my experiences in the field, including a successful Windows 7 Rapid Deployment Program, I have to say the compatibility story for Windows [...]

I recently implemented a Microsoft-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. With the release of Windows 2008 R2 you now have a pure-Microsoft VDI stack. It includes all of the previously-named Terminal Services components and a bunch of new functionality to enable the two key scenarios of Personal Virtual Desktops and Virtual Desktop Pools. Microsoft’s proof-of-concept [...]

Every now and then I’ve needed to configure Group Policy settings locally or offline and backup/restore them to another computer. Here’s a simple way to do so. It can even be used to bake the settings into an image for mass deployments. This is documented from a Windows 7 system box, but it may work [...]