One of the pains I have with Hyper-V is that evertime I want to launch my VM, I have to open the Hyper-V Manager ( accept the UAC prompt ) and then launch my VM. I found a very nice gadget called the Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar written by Tore Lervik. It resides on the Windows Sidebar and shows the satus of all the VM’s. Also provides single click interfaces ( with any UAC prompt ) to start / stop / pause VM’s and also to open the Virtual Machine Connection for quick connection to the VM with just a double click.

For those who are wondering how to get Windows Sidebar running with Windows Server 2008, check out this article.

As Windows 2008 is now officially released ( and people suspect that the release of Vista SP1 is similar to the codebase of Windows Server 2008 ), it would be nice recap the top new features which are making its way to us. I found this nice article which introduces to some of the fantastic changes coming with Windows Server 2008. I am really looking forward to a GUI less set of servers running on a dual core machine and providing multiple services. Oh, and the self healing NTFS sounds cool. Check out all the other features and I am sure you would be dying to get your hands on the new system.

Now I am off to find out more about Server Core. It is a really fantastic concept if it lives up to it’s promise. It will definitely ease the burden on existing servers, boost performance, and decrease power consumption and cooling needs. One Quad – Eight core servers, lots of ram and server core to replace 2-3 existing servers, would be fantastic. From a developers point of view, if I can get AD, SQL Server, DNS and Mail working from a GUI Less Server Core VM installation, using under 512 MB of Ram, that would be just fantastic. All I need is to connect via a admin GUI to the Server Core machine and configure the services. Would be even fantastic if all servers ( SharePoint, Office Servers, Biztalk etc ), are enabled to run via a GUI less server in the future. This would make it phenomenal. It would take away the pain of developing on a laptop.

Just installed Windows Vists RTM on my laptop and I am impressed by the ease of setup. The setup experience was much better, faster than any previous Windows version.

One good thing I liked is the ability to install without a key and then add it later on within the grace period. Really fantastic if you ask me. Now I can enjoy Vista for a week before we get our VLK keys, and then pop in the VLK keys as soon as available and activate my installation.

Another thing I noticed, was the driver support. I have a Dell Latitude D800 with 2 GB ram. It is quite an old Laptop, but still it did not detect two devices. 1. Base System Device ( I have absolutely no idea what this is referring to ). and 2. Texas Instruments UltraMedia Smart Card Adapter. I would have assumed that it would have auto detected and installed drivers for this old laptop, but now I have to dig up Vista compatible drivers for these two just for the peace of mind that all components are running in peak shape. Not that I will be using that Smart Card slot anyways. Never needed to use it.

I do miss the up folder button on the file explorer. I was very much used to it. Guess will have to get used to this new way.

It automatically installed and started Windows Defender for me, which is nice, but I am not very confident on how efficient it is now. I did not have a very satisfied experience last time using Windows Defender on XP. So will give it a try and see.

Anyways will hunt for all my favourite utilities which I can run on Vista and get this system up to date. Will update on my progress in a seperate post.