Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (Med-V) is on its second iteration to help businesses deploy legacy applications. Windows XP Mode allows users of Windows 7 to install a virtual copy of Windows XP to allow use of legacy applications – but this is designed to be installed one user at a time.

What if you have several hundred (or thousand) computers that require access to legacy applications?

Med-V can help with that issue of migration to Windows 7, while still maintaining legacy application use. Med-V is part of the MDOP group, so if you already have the licensing available, this product could come in handy.

What does Med-V do that makes it a viable solution?

By itself, Med-V can provide a single Windows XP image (called a Workspace) to computers using Windows 7, but it really shines through with an ESD such as SCCM. Users will still be able to use the legacy applications without resorting to dual-boot, multiple computer or RDS scenarios. These programs appear on the Start menu and can also be pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar.

We recently encountered a SQL server with very high processor utilization. This utilization would stay near 100 percent even at night and over weekends, when very little activity should be occurring.

The server hosted numerous SQL databases, including Sharepoint. We had some concerns that search or some other similar process was continually running, causing the issue. We ran index rebuilds on the busiest databases, and on the Sharepoint search index database. 

After completing those rebuilds, I noticed that the processor utilization on the server continued to be unusually high, especially considering that there should be very little activity on the server.  I then did some investigation into the high CPU utilization and found the culprit. My process for doing that is outlined below:

Highly Available (HA) resource environments are truly amazing, when they work.

Recently, I worked with a client who wanted a complete infrastructure refresh. They were moving from 7+ year old equipment to a HA Windows Hyper-V Virtualized environment. Once the core infrastructure was set up with the SAN and two hosts, I launched Hyper-V Management Console and created a new VM and Virtual Network. The server came up and I built it to the client’s specifications.

Once the machine was set up, I configured Failover Clustering to make the hosts and Virtual Machines (VMs) Highly Available. This is where I encountered a problem. When testing LiveMigration and Failover, the VMs refused to move between hosts unless they were completely shut down and moved manually.

I recently had a client that was getting her Active Directory account locked out about once a week. I could tell when her account got locked out, and which computer was locking it out, by checking for event 644 in the security log on her company’s domain controller.

However, I could not find why it was getting locked out.

I did all the normal checks … checked for services running as her account, checked for persistent drive mappings, checked for scheduled tasks that might run as her, and checked to make sure she didn’t have a phone that was checking her email. None of these were causing the lockout.

I recently came across an error in Outlook 2010 where I couldn’t open any attachments and received the following error:

   Word was unable to read this document. It may be corrupt. Try one or more of the following:

      * Open and Repair the file.

      * Open the file with the Text Recover converter

The other day I stumbled across an interesting new website that our programmer friends will love. The website is called If This Then That and is very similar to the commonplace “If…Then…” statements in many programming languages. Don’t worry, though, there is no programming required.

So what does this website do, exactly?

Well, their slogan is “Put the internet to work for you,” but that’s kind of vague. Essentially, it’s a free web-based tool that can automatically perform tasks you specify across well-known websites. For example, you can create a task sequence so that whenever you take a picture with Instagram (a free photo sharing app available in the iPhone App Store), it automatically saves the picture in your Dropbox (a free cloud-based storage solution).

Troubleshooting ActiveSync on an Android or iPhone can be a daunting task, since very little information is provided when there is a failure. However, with the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer and accessmyLAN’s ActiveSync Tester you can not only see exactly what is taking place behind the scenes but also have direct access to knowledgebase articles specific to errors generated in the testing phase.

The first tool, Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, is an easy to use website hosted by Microsoft. Here, you can test ActiveSync as well as other Exchange features, such as Out of Office and RPC over HTTP and SMTP connectivity. There is also an Office 365 tab, but, as of writing this article, I have yet to test it.

Recently, I had a user with a nasty Trojan virus on our network. It populated the screen with large amounts of pop-ups and errors requesting the user to run scans. To make matters worse, Task Manager was disabled, Malwarebytes was being closed, and the problem persisted to other logins on the computer.

That wasn’t all.

All the desktop icons were gone, the right-click context menus for the desktop didn’t work, the start menu was empty and the system icons on the right of the start menu were disabled.

Have you ever tried cleaning off a malware program that locks you out of the task manager and the command prompt? You can’t use the task manager to kill the process and you can’t kill it thru the command prompt.

Luckily, you can kill it remotely!

TASKLIST.EXE and TASKKILL.EXE are two very powerful commands that come with Windows that can be used to kill tasks on other computers.

I came across an issue the other day with a computer that was received from a company whose domain had been shut down. If you plugged any USB drive into the PC, the PC could see the contents and copy files from it, but it could not write anything to any USB drive. It seemed like it could be some sort of group policy setting.

I checked local group policy first with no luck. Then I did some research on where this setting might be in a domain’s group policy. Unfortunately, the domain was no longer available.