Ordinary Mind

Win 7 licensing issues detailed!

Windows 7 Modifies License Rights

I was worrying that discontinuing Campus Agreement would require everyone to downgrade from Windows Enterprise edition to other retail available edition. If Windows 7 Enterprise edition is a perpetual right for SA users, CA users may have that too. I’ll take a look of agreement to be sure.

Remote boot is one of the area I would like to explore. But with Windows 7, remote boot right goes to VECD which costs you an arm and a leg. We can just forget it.

Step-by-Step: Multilingual Image Creation
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd755995%28WS.10%29.aspx?ppud=4

Understanding Multilingual Deployments
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744336%28WS.10%29.aspx?ppud=4

Understanding MUI
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/dd218459.aspx

Two new VDI licenses from Microsoft,

VDI Standard Suite: US$21/device/year
include: hyper-V server (free anyway), SCVMM, SCCM, SCOM, RDS CAL & MDOP

Premium Suite: US$53/device/year
standard + RDS (i.e. terminal service session) & App-V for RDS

Additional VECD licence is required to deploy VDI. For session virtualization using WS08 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS), you don’t need the VECD license.

VECD is device based subscription which costs US$23/year for SA and US$110/year for thin client and non-SA PC.

The VECD license can be re-assigned to another device, but not within 90 days of the last assignment unless there is a permanent hardware failure of the assigned device. You can have up to 4 VMs with the VECD license, but they can only be accessed from the licensed device.

Microsoft VDI Suite Licence

http://www.vdi.com/Cprompt/question/10

Don’t quite have the incentive to try out XP Mode. There are alternatives like VirtualBox which provides same or better feature set without requiring VT support. Of course, XP Mode includes a Win XP licence that is valuable to non-enterprise users.

The XP Mode setup installs a 1GB Win XP VHD file. User created Win XP VM uses differencing disk based on it. I suppose the licence allows modifying of the base VHD, so, on a shared machine, admin can pre-install common apps on the base disk.

Host integration of XP Mode application is great, at least for the MS Office 2003 I tried. Apps installed in Win XP get published to the host OS automatically. The default file save folder is the document dir on the host OS and all host drives are mapped to the guest. No rocket science but really user friendly. The only glitch I encountered is that XP Mode app window doesn’t move across the 2 displays attached to my system. The app window clips at the border between the 2 LCD.

Overall speaking, I think it’s a nice piece of software.

Update: After installed for a week and installed only Office 2003 and AV, the linked disk grows to over 6GB!!

Hands off CSV - the comments are entertaining!

科大八年歲月 - 生活簡樸，學者風範。

Interesting report. Things are useful/productive when people stop talking about it.

Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle Special Report

Testing is one of favorites. Many times I feel I rolled service without adequate testings. However, preparing test cases is a time-consuming task that I think on one really like. So, any ways that can automate this tedious job interested me. I’ll find time to give it a try.

“Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning.”

I believe in it from the very beginning. But getting your another halve to believe in it is no easy matter.

Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn

Further to my last post half-year ago, it turns out that any subkey under the Uninstaller key,

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

that has a value name DisplayName with empty value will trigger the NOD32 conflict bug. And it happens that the default setup of quite some notebooks, including some Sony/Lenovo models, have such key exist.

The steps below help to resolve the conflict,

1. Launch Regedit and export the uninstaller registry tree,
   

   HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\

   to a registry file.

2. Open the exported file with a text editor, perform global replacement on,
   

   “DisplayName”=”"

   with,

   “DisplayName”=”dummy”

   and save it with a new name.

3. Double-click the new file to import it into the registry.

Indeed, the F-Secure Client Security 8.0 setup shares the same bug but it’s been fixed in version 8.01. Thus, the next version of FSAV will likely to have this rectified.  However, it’s a bit hard to understand why it takes so long to fix such a simple bug.