Daniel Petri

Windows Update Problems – Error 0x80070485 When you use a computer that is running Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition or Windows Millennium Edition to access the Windows Update Web site, you may receive a 0x80070485 initialization error message while the page loads. BTW, this error is not the only error message one might…

Many users of Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 have had problems when trying to access the Windows Update site. Windows Update works fine scanning for updates, but when you choose to download and install them the page displays this happy error message: Windows Update has encountered an error and cannot display the…

One of the most frequent questions I see on forums and newsgroups that deal with virtualization is the age-old question of “I have used all the space inside a VHD hard disk. How do I expand the virtual hard disk to make room for additional data?”. Luckily for us, with Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server…

Microsoft’s Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based technology that is a key feature of Windows Server 2008, and provides a scalable, reliable, and highly available virtualization platform. Hyper-V provides a great virtualization solution for many small, medium and large organizations. Some of the capabilities of Hyper-V include x64 host and guest support, ability to run guest machines…

One of the most frequent questions on virtualization forums that deal with server deployments is the question of how should one deploy their Active Directory domain controllers. Should they be deployed on stand-alone separate servers, should they be kept on separate physical servers, or should they be run inside virtual machines that are hosted on…

Remotely accessing your servers and workstations through terminal services or RDP is an easy method of doing your job from a remote location, or gaining access to specific published applications that have been published on your servers. However, without properly investing in securing these types of RDP connections, you could be compromising the security and…

In the past year notebooks have outsold desktop computers for the first time. If you have Outlook both on your Desktop computer and on your notebook (or netbook), then you’ll want to have the same e-mails, contacts and calendars and both machines. This article provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to do exactly that with…

How do I deploy SP1? Service Pack 1 (SP1) includes installation files that you can extract from the XPsp1.exe file. This file contains all of the service pack binary files that have been updated for SP1; it also contains the Update.exe program file. XPsp1.exe is a self-extracting compressed file. You can extract all of the…

A word about working with Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Terminal Servers Recently I had a long conversation with one of my clients about the proper way for using GPOs. I think my readers could benefit from the stuff that was said there. Naturally, the client’s name and details are not an issue and are…

  As described in the previous articles in this series, Active Directory snapshots in Windows Server 2008 allow an administrator to create snapshots of the Active Directory database. By using them, you can view the data inside such a snapshot and use it to restore or inspect data without the need to start the server…