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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

windows w2k8 R2 64bit – 32bit ODBC for virtual center server

June 10th, 2010 Daz No comments

You must create your ODBC connection using the 32-bit ODBC program. It is not as simple as running odbcad32.exe from the run / search bar.

you must run the following to get the actual 32-bit version;

%systemdrive%\Windows\SysWoW64\Odbcad32.exe

Populate this with the details and you should see it in the virtual center installer.

Categories: Virtual, Windows

vmware – XP as a virtual guest

May 6th, 2010 Daz No comments

I’ve run into some issues lately with XP guests that are running off a IDE controller. If you want any kind of performance you must build your machine with the LSI drivers (parallel).

Here is a flp image with the required LSI drivers (Press F6 etc on xp boot)

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1499140#1499140

Categories: Virtual, Windows

HDD short stroking – is it worth it?

December 21st, 2009 Daz No comments

I’ve got some old 250Gb drives that are starting to show their age. I’ve currently got them setup in a 3x RAID 0 config which presents about 750Gb of space.

I’ve got everything on a single partition (meh, i’m lazy). I’ve done various speed tests in the current setup (with all space allocated), but i thought i’d re-image onto a short stroke partition.

I only use about 150Gb of space on my main machine (most of my data is on another box), so i’m going to try creating a 200Gb partition to test if this provides any kind of performance boost.

So reducing my raid 0 from 750Gb to 214Gb, and here are the results…

Before with all 750Gb presented…

Same disks but short stroked to 214Gb….

Conclusion : Yip, seems like its worth it if you have the spare space. Average throughput is up by 10MB/s and seek has improved by almost a third loosing 4ms.

You will get even more of an improvement if you can use a smaller % of capacity per drive and / or more drives for your stripe.

Updated : 07/02/2010

btw – the above was without write-back cache enabled…. if i turned that on i got the following…

Categories: Storage, Windows

windows 2000 – ITMU / Windows Update Issues

August 18th, 2009 Daz No comments

Get this when doing a windows update – Error number: 0xC8000408

First check the basics, ensure that windows update is a trusted site and the seucirty level is set corretely within the Zone – test with lower secuirty to see if that resolves the problem.

If that doesnt work try the following;
1) Added the user SYSTEM with every privilege to C: and subs
2) Stopped the “Automatic Updates” service
3) Renamed the C:\WINNT\SoftwareDistribution folder
4) Started the “Automatic Updates” service again

Categories: Windows

SCCM – installing client via GPO

July 29th, 2009 Daz No comments

If you dont have sms / sccm client in your gold disk then GPO is the next best thing to get the SCCM client out into your environment.

This is a real nice and clean install script for IE 7 which i have modified to install SCCM. http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/installing-application-using-vbscript

Categories: Windows