All quiet on the Win 7 front…

I’ve been using Windows 7 RC as my main machine at work for two weeks now and my lack of posts about it, other than some of the cool BITS improvements,  has simply been due to the fact the it’s pretty much been a seamless transition, it even happily dealt with the dodgy MSI for our help desk application (which was built quite some time ago on a W2K PC).  The only issue that cropped up a few times was the lack of a Win 7 version of the Remote Server Administration Tools.  I tried to install the Vista version but no joy, until today when I found out, via my TechNet Flash feed that the RSAT RC for Win 7 was now available.

Downloaded, installed, working.  Not much more to say really…

Things must be bad…

You kind of get an idea as to how bad the current economic climate is when Microsoft announce further job cuts.  While I was checking my RSS feeds this morning this was really made apparent with both Steve Riley and Eileen Brown announcing on their blogs that they were both victims of this second wave of redundancies.  On more than one occasion I’ve been lucky enough to hear them present at various MS events, including TechEd, on security and UC, and I’m pretty sure that neither of them will be out of work for very long.  I know that they won’t have been the only people that MS will have made redundant, but if they' need to lay off people like Steve and Eileen then things must be grim.

(Web) surfing

Spent ages in a meeting of a non-tech nature this morning (that’ll be four hours I’ll never get back) and finally got back to my desk, and more importantly, my lunch. While eating and perusing the BBC website I found a link to the below…

Not tech-related at all but pretty cool though.

BITS on Win 7

A while back I posted about the ability to leverage BITS with PS v2, some of the really cool things being that it’s a network friendly way of transferring large amounts of data and that once the transfers are running they can survive connectivity-loss or even a reboot.  I started to take a look at this again today, this time using PS on Win7, but when I ran the script that had previously worked it bombed out.  Before you can do anything BITS-related in PS you need to load the required module, so I did the same again hoping to identify the error…

And there was the answer, turns out that with the version of PS that ships with Win7 the module name changed, so running…

get-module –ListAvailable

…showed that the module name was now BitsTransfer.

Yay!  So after importing the correct module name I was back in business.

Note that the cmdlet names have changed as well.

Vista SP2

Vista SP2 RTM was made available on TechNet last week so to add insult to injury, I’ve taken my trusty M400 out of the cupboard to use it for a test install (not only am I neglecting it for something shinier with a new OS, I’m also prepared to kick it when it’s down and throw a new Service Pack at it).

Anyway, kicked off the install and..

Well, it didn’t quite take an hour but it wasn’t far off and so far so good, as in it hasn’t BSOD’d on me.  Having reviewed the Notable Changes doc I’m not sure I’ll really notice anything different: already had Search 4.0 installed and my M400 didn’t ship with a Blu-Ray burner….

Meeting prep…

I’m trying to use Windows 7 as much as possible (I’ve installed it on a Toshiba A600 and it seems to be running pretty well) and that means leaving my trusty but ageing M400 running Vista in the cupboard. My scripting tool of choice is Primal Script but it’s still on my M400 so I’ve been using the PowerShell ISE that ships with Windows 7. I had to attend what I knew would be a boring meeting this morning so in preparation I decided to print some PS code I’d been working to take with me (and hopefully not get caught doing so by the other attendees!). It was at that point that I discovered that the ISE doesn’t have the ability to print! I’ve never noticed before as I’ve done pretty much everything through Primal Script, although given that it still only (I think) the CTP I shouldn’t really complain if it’s missing a couple of features, although printing does seem pretty fundamental. Just meant that I had to actually pay attention during the meeting…

Quadrillions of bytes…

With PowerShell v1 came a set of administrative constants that made it easier to easily display storage values in MB, GB etc.  PS v2 has gone even more enterprise-class as shown below:

Yep, you can easily report disk space in terabytes and petabytes.  So this bit of code…

 

…shows how much space I’ve got free on my C: drive in petabytes.  Even with a 134GB of free space on the notebook I did this on I had to format the output to 5 decimal places to show a readable value!