I went over and contacted Acronis customer Support via LiveChat. It was just a matter of minutes, and I got this new bootable media, which allowed me to do my backup.

According to Acronis Tech Support this CD is recreated from scratch every week, to support new and even newer hardware. If anybody needs such a CD, you need to contact Customer Support. Refer to the thread linked above, or to my Case Number 00668024. Here´s a screenshot from this one:

Alternate bootable discs for Acronis True Image

Time taken by eseutil to defrag my exchange database

I´m glad I could remove some of the junk, as I forced my users to delete old E-Mails and all those Funmails.
In June I will move ahead to Exchange 2010….

The very (!!!) first thing one should do is making a backup. Skipping this step is a bad idea, except there´s nothing important on your machine. I was using Acronis True Image Home 2010, but any other backup tool you´re familiar with is fine. Closing all applications and stopping all unneeded services (e.g. local instances of mySQL and sort of) is also mandatory.

1. I started Microsoft´s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and removed everything it told me (especially Toshibas Bluetooth Stack. It was causing problems with Windows Vista, so I assume it wouldn´t work better in Windows 7).
2. Reboot!
3. I removed crap files and cleaned the registry with Piriform´s CCleaner.
4. Reboot!
5. I created a full backup and had a beer in the meanwhile.
6. Reboot!
7. I used Partition Wizard Business Edition, which is free of charge. It did a great job and resized my partitions without a glitch. However, it needed two reboots (without user interactions). Afterwards I checked my filesystems with the chkdsk command (without /f). See the screenshots below to see how the summary should look like.
8. The last and longest step was the updates. I started it at 11pm, and it finished somewhen at 1.30am. FYI, I´m writing this post on my new Windows!

Summary:
This task was rather time-consuming, but It worked without any problems. Also, my installation is noticeable faster than before. Thanks to Software Assurance I am up2date

One of my friends, who works at a well known firewall company in Innsbruck, pointed me to WPAD and PAC. After studying the very good articles on Wikipedia (WPAD and PAC) I started to reflect the mentioned changes to my network. Everything went fine, until I got to the point where I had to add a host called “wpad” to my Windows 2003 DNS. It just didn´t resolve! Testing some other hostnames I added afterwards, everything went fine. Just my wpad-host wouldn´t resolve.

Doing some research I stumbled across this article on Technet. The described method is to be used on Windows 2008, but also works on 2003. Strange enough I couldn´t find any articles about 2003, but enough on 2008. Go figure.

After applying the changes and starting a new instance of my Firefox (and, meanwhile, examining the live logs of SCM) I figured out it works.

So I could configure all my clients without going too many ways. Read ahead on my followup (which will be released soon) on how to achive this.

Für genau diesen Zweck gibt es verschiedenste Produkte, kommerziell, gratis, oder Opensource. Zu letzteren gehört DBAN – Darik´s Boot and Nuke. Dabei handelt es sich um eine Mini-Distribution, die eigentlich nur eines macht: Festplatten zu überschreiben. Dazu kann man aus folgenden Möglichkeiten auswählen, wobei die vermeintlich sichereren natürlich um einiges länger dauern, da verschiedene Datenmuster in mehreren Durchgängen geschrieben werden:

Bild1

Allerdings soll das alles, lt. dem Forensikexperten Craig Wrigh, unnötig sein.

http://www.heise.de/security/Sicheres-Loeschen-Einmal-ueberschreiben-genuegt–/news/meldung/121855

We no longer measure the reliability of our drives using Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). Our current drive reliability is measured using Component Design Life (CDL) and Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). The Component Design Life of the drive is 5 years and the Annualized Failure Rate is less than 0.8%.

The power saving of this drive is a drive feature, it does not relay on the operating system.

I got in touch with them again to clarify the AFR and CDL. I will update this post as soon as I have news.

//Edit: Here´s whar WD states:

The utilization for this drive is a 24/7 application and 1.2M hours.
The AFR means that less then 1% of these drives manufactured fail annually.

The first moments I didn´t believe it (remember the: “You are visitor 999.999! You win an Ipod.” nags on websites?), but later I got another E-Mail, a newsletter, telling everybody about the winners:

Ok. Cool! I´m one of the lucky guy´s. Heading next to vmworld.com I realized that this price isn´t the worst thing I ever got.

Now all I have to do is to use my gift!

When you take a look at the Office 2007 folder structure, wether from the original disc, or a download from eOpen, it contains a folder called “Updates”. when you take a closer look at this folder, you´ll find a readme.txt with the following content:

Any patches placed in this folder will be applied during initial install.

Sound rather interesting, doesn´t it? So, you have to download the Service Pack 2 from here. Fire up a console session, and type in the following command (assuming, you saved the file to c:\temp\):

Extract the Service Pack 2 files onto your harddisk.

After that, you´ll be prompted to agree to the EULA. You have to in order to go further. The files are beeing extracted to the mentioned location (change it to suite your needs):

Service Pack 2 files are beeing extraced.

Really?

No, it isn´t. Now you have to copy all the .msp-files to the before mentioned Update-Folder. After that, you can start your installation of Office 2007 as ever, and the Service Pack files are applied afterwards.

The only drawback is, that the files aren´t integrated into the installation, so you may encounter (much) longer installation time. Also, it cannot be used to upgrade existing installations. For this, you still have to use your downloaded file.

But for me the ease of use is much more important than saving some minutes in installation time. Just in case I find a real slipstreaming procedure, I will keep you updated.

The installation was straight-forward, all the special hardware, which forced me to create a special Windows XP CD (with integrated SATA drivers,…) were recognized out of the box. When I connected to the internet (more about my wireless issue later), all the missing drivers, except two, were downloaded and installed. Very handy! The two missing ones, however, were the Fingerprint Sensor and one of the well-known “Unknown Devices” often found on manually installed Fujitsu-Siemens devices. Those drivers, which are usually <50kb in size, have to be installed by yourself. However, until now I couldn´t figure out what they´re really for. Maybe I will bother Fujistu(-Siemens) Support with this later.

Windows 7 Device Manager - almost every piece of Hardware was found

Compared to Vista the first thing you may realize is the boost in speed. Everything works much faster than with it´s predecessor. It looks like Microsoft is taking care of customer opinions. Many discussions in the Internet were about how to speed up Vista.

The next thing is the improved User Interface – handling with multiple Tasks now got, well, not easier, but more beautiful. The Taskbar is missing the Tasks description, but switching through them is now a real eye catcher:

Windows 7 Task Bar

Windows 7 Task Bar

I wouldn´t call it a killer-feature, but I liked it from the moment I realized it.

The next thing is the Start Menu itself. Many users´s (especially the ones who are familiar with Windows 2000) first task on XP/vista was to switch back to the “Classic Start Menu”. Windows 7 doesn´t offer this feature, at least I couldn´t find it yet.

One more thing I´d like to mention here is the so called Action Center. It provides you with solutions to your all-day problems. In my case, I wasn´t able to connect to my wireless network at home, not realizing that I switched of wireless via the button on the rear of my notebook. Windows 7 realized it and pointed me immediatelly to that solution – good start!

Another thing is the missing “Show Desktop” shortcut in the Quickstart Toolbar. It was replaced by an unconsiderable, transparent bar at the very right of the Taskbar:

Show the Desktop

As many of the new useablility features there´s no need to click it – just hover your mouse and you´re done (well, that´s not the whole truth – hovering hides the active windows until you un-hover, if you´d like to minimize everything permanently, you still have to click. Rather good solution in my eyes).

Last week I attendet to the big System Administrator Appreciation Day Party at the Microsoft Headquarter near Munic. One very interesting point on the agenda was a speech about Windows 7. The responsible product manager told us, that Windows 7 is definitly NOT a fine-tuned Windows Vista, furthermore it´s his real successor, with many improvements “under-the-hood”. I´m curious about the other, not yet discovered new features of Windows 7.

My first impressions are, however, very good. If I would have the choice, I would wipe Windows Vista completly in my network at work, and switch directly to Windows 7. However, application compatibility and lack of experience  force me to wait another e.g. 6 month. But for me personally, Windows 7 seems to have the potential to be the next-generaton OS. Especially teamed with the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2.

//Appendix: When I find some free time I will post some short vid´s to demonstrate the User Interface.

Fehler bei der SMTP-Kommunikation mit dem E-Mail-Server des Empfängers. Wenden Sie sich an Ihren Systemadministrator.
<mail.domain.at #5.5.0 smtp;554 Service unavailable; Client host [213.213.213.213] blocked using bl.spamcop.net; Blocked – see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?213.213.213.213>

quittiert werden? Nun, zu allererst sollte man (ich gehe jetzt einfach von einem genatteten Netzwerk aus) den Mailversand aus seinem Netzwerk abdrehen. SMTP ausgehend für alles und jeden verbieten, andernfalls hat man keine Chance, von den Listen wieder herunter zu kommen. Je länger man gelistet ist, desto schwerer wird es, seinen Host wieder mit einer reinen Weste auszustatten. Ist der Mailversand erstmal unterbunden, kann man sich u.a. hier:

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

erkundigen, auf welcher der Blacklists man gelandet ist. mxtoolbox.com vergleicht seine Mailserver/Router-IP gegen 147 Blacklists. Wird ein Hit gefunden, kann man sich auch schon gleich per Link wieder löschen lassen. Doch Vorsicht! Löscht man sich zu früh, und die hauseigene Spamschleuder startet wieder eine Welle, hat man gute Chancen, nur noch vom Team/Admin der RTBL (Real Time Black List) löschen zu lassen. Dies kann natürlich eine ganze Weile dauern. Alternativ könnte man noch seine externe IP ändern (sofern dies möglich ist), oder den Smarthost seines Providers nutzen. Mit ein bißchen Glück weiß der nichts von der schlimmen Vergangenheit seines Peers.