If you have a MSDN or TechNet-Plus subscription, you probably know that today the downloads for the latest version of the Windows client operating system were released.

Windows 7 comes in a number of flavours, targeted/marketed at different audiences.  Starter (for NetBooks and the like), Home Basic (for emerging markets), Home Premium (the primary candidate for home users), Professional (for most common business uses) and Ultimate (all the features). There is also Enterprise edition which is the same as Ultimate, but with a different licensing mechanism.

Like Windows Vista, Microsoft use a common install media (DVD) which has all the bits required for any of the installation versions on the same disc.  Which bits to install is determined by the edition selection/configuration.

With the Windows Vista downloads from MSDN / TechNet, you had a single disc and when you started the install process, you picked which edition you wanted/had the key for.  You then entered the key.  This was easy, except when you didn’t know what edition the key you had was designed for.

Windows 7 downloads are different this time round, because Microsoft have created a DVD for each edition, not giving you the choice of which edition to install at run-time.

That means if you want to test different configurations using Home Basic, Home Premium and say Ultimate, you need to download 3 different DVD images (at 2.4 or 3GB each)

BUT.  There is a was to bring back the selector.  HOWEVER, it requires a bit of time and a few tools.  The tools I use in this description are ones I used, but there are alternatives available.

1. Download an ISO for the desired platform (x86 or x64).  I recommend the Ultimate but it makes no difference (except possibly the enterprise edition, due to it’s different licensing system)
2. If you want, burn the ISO to disc.  Remember that this disc will only be for that particular edition.
   • If you didn’t burn a DVD, then you can use a virtual drive software (Daemon Tools, Virtual Drive, etc..) to mount the ISO as a drive.
   • Otherwise, use a archive extraction tool like 7Zip or WinRAR to open the ISO like an archive file
3. Copy the contents of the ISO/disc to a temp folder on your hard-drive.  Be sure to copy all subfolders.
4. Now navigate to <temp>\sources and delete ei.cfg.  This config file tells the installer what edition the disc has been classified as.  Removing it enables the edition picker.

Right.  That’s it.  Now you just need to make a bootable media so you can do some installs.  I prefer to use a USB drive.  There are a number of good tutorials on how to do this, such as http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/

Otherwise, if you want to make a DVD, you will need to create a bootable ISO image. Again, there are a number of packages out there.  I use a Microsoft (internal) tool called CDImage

cdimage –lGRMCULFRER_EN_DVD –m –u2 -b<temp>\boot\etfsboot.com <temp> <dest>\Windows7.ISO

Give it a while and you’ll have a ISO file that can be burnt with any standard burning software (or even Windows itself if you’re using the RC)

Let me know if you have any problems and I’ll try and help where I can…

• Did you know there are 3 MCITP tracks for Microsoft SQL Server 2008?  What are they, and why should I care?  
• Did you know there are 3 MCPD tracks for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008?  What are they, and what’s the difference from MCITP?    

James is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.  He has contributed lectures on Microsoft Certification, SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Data Services to the INETA and PASS communities.

6:00pm - Thursday 30th April

Datacom Systems Ltd
210 Federal St
Auckland CBD
Map

Food and Drink will be provided from 5:30pm.  Please feel free to contact us with any specific culinary requests

Please register here:  http://www.aucklandsql.com/Meetings/Certification.aspx

The sort of points that might kill a bee¹

• VB6 runtime support will be supported in Windows7.  Woo?
• Not sure I like where they’re going with the Visual Studio 2010 interface.  I want fast, efficient and productive; not pretty. 
• I have over 300MB of images in my Wallpapers folder (I love that W7 has a built in wallpaper changer).   And surprisingly 0 boobies. 
• I willingly installed iTunes (with QuickTime) and Safari 4 (beta) tonight.  The Safari installer was nice; it asked what extra bits I did/didn’t want.  
  iTunes just went for it, and I had to remove a pile of junk later.
• I fired up the version of a customer facing application I developed at work.  It was replaced by a new and improved version (that I didn’t write) in 2006.  My old version presents the EXACT same look’n’feel, offers more features and is at least 400% faster according to the benchmarking tools I used.  
  We’re upgrading to an “even better” platform in June/July.  Current test site is 1000% slower than the current site, let alone my site.  Performance is not expected to improve, but it’s got more wizzy bits now.

¹ Sorry, private joke.

Firefox 3.x (with a few additional plugs-ins/add-ons) seems to be meeting my day-2-day browsing requirements.

At home at least.

The kicker will be next week, when I return to work.  Sure I’ll need to use IE for several key things, but I will also try and use FF as much as I can.

Are my days of zelotry for M$ at an end?  Will I soon be giving my whole to the OSS (Open Source Software) community.

Not bloody likely.

IE8 on Windows7 has a few annoying quirks.   Many of these quirks are resolved with the latest build if IE8, but you can’t install that on Win7, so I’m out of luck (until such time I decide to download/install a later build).

So I’m giving Firefox a whirl on my laptop at home.

I played with Opera 9 for a while at work, and while it was fine for simple browsing, there were way too many annoying things that IE just dealt with (like NTLM authentication, keyboard shortcut completion, filtering of content. Oh and the random lockups) to make me lose interest.

Anyway, I’ve downloaded Firefox 3.0.5 (GB) and set it as the default browser. It’ll be interesting to see if:

- I can adapt to the way it handles tabs and windows]
- any shortcuts inside applications (such as Live Mail) correctly launch FF instead of IE
- I find any sites that worked fine in IE6/IE8/IE8 that either works better or don’t work with FF.

Is it just me, or does GoogleReader suck recently.

It’s missed a lot of updates from lots of blogs

I still haven’t found a single tool I can use to maintain my blog, Facebook and Twitter.  Hell, even a single tool which let me update Twitter and Facebook (optionally) at the same time would be cool.

Marcus started school today.  I’m pretty sure we were more wigged out about it than he was.  He had a few confusing moments because he didn’t fully understand a few things, but it’ll get better.

I have a cunning plan.  My last cunning plan required rebuilding a PC. This one could very well require building a PC.  We’ll see how the planning goes.

Gardening is a lot of hard work.  But satisfying.

I’m sad, but not surprised, that my 5 year old MP3 player can’t cope with an MP3 that is 700MB (9 hours) long.

I’m on day 2 of my holiday.  I’ve already been bugged by work 5 times.  2 phone calls, 1 TXT and 2 “incredibly urgent” emails.  And that doesn’t even include the emails that need my attention and if do ignore them until next week, will probably cause me more headaches that it’s worth. 
Doesn’t help that the only other guy on my team that could possibly do some of what I do is currently skiing in Canada. 

I’m a little miffed that Windows 7 can’t access my MP3 player the same way previous versions did.  Sure, it shows up as a removable drive, and I can view the files, delete files and create new folders.  But if I try to copy new music onto it, I get a “Permission denied” error.
I can sync it just fine using Media Player though, so it’s not a real biggie.

Auckland SQL – February meeting.  Need to plan it.  Tomorrow; Thursday at the latest. (PS:  If you want to come talk, please let me know)

Using Windows 7 with a widescreen laptop?  My tip for the day.  Put the “start/task bar” on the side.  You get 40 pixels of vertical real estate back, and the new style bar makes it totally usable.

Need to spend some quality time with the aquarium.  It’s been neglected the past couple of months.  Will get some new plants and try and find new stock to replenish those who have passed on.

IE8 in Win7 beta has a serious problem with remembering cookies.  Serious problem...

My only regret about having my home computer running Windows7 is that I can’t play with the IE8-RC that was released today.

Click to embiggen

I need to install some sort of virtualisation package to be able to do the demos for my presentation on Wednesday night, so I figured I’d download/install VMWare workstation and Virtual PC (not at the same time of course) and see which performs better.

VirtualPC 2007sp1: 31MB (54MB for 64bit edition).

VMWare 6.5: 499MB (32/64bit combined installer)

I checked my archives and VMWare 6.0.5 was 326MB.  How the hell do they add 175MB of “content” to a package like this.  What, are they shipping OSes with the installer now?