Samba is becoming more and more important. Windows servers will increasingly use SMB 3.0 as their networked storage protocol in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3. And EMC’s purchase of Likewise means the rest of the storage industry is looking for an SMB stack. But I’m most interested to see what Active Directory support means for future home and business devices.
Windows 7
Microsoft Adds Data Deduplication Savings Evaluation Tool to Windows Server 8 Beta
The latest beta of the server version of Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 operating system includes a handy tool related to the new data deduplication feature. DDPEVAL will test a given dataset using the new deduplication and compression engine and report the savings to be expected. And it works even on non-Windows 8 systems!
Dragon Dictate for Mac: Utterly Frustrating
For the last few months, I’ve been experimenting with dictation software on the Mac. Previously, I had used the built-in dictation software in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but it was annoying to launch a virtual machine every time I wanted to dictate something. On the Mac and purchase an (expensive) copy of Dragon Dictate for Mac. So far, my experience has been less than positive.
How To Disable Windows 7 Automatic Reboot After Update
Despite using Mac OS X for most of my daily work, I normally have one or two Windows 7 virtual machines running in VMware Fusion. But Windows Automatic Update is causing me trouble. It automatically restarts these virtual machines whenever there is an OS update, which seems to be every night lately. This automatic reboot kills whatever programs happen to be running at the time, causing me to lose half-written articles (even though I saved them and Auto Save is on) and almost killing an old BlackBerry I was updating. I had to figure out a way to disable this automatic reboot!
Versioning FAIL: Windows Vista/7 Robocopy
Last week I posted the excellent news that the Robocopy in new versions of Microsoft Windows is multi-threaded and thus much (much!) faster. Then I tried to actually use it on a Windows Vista machine. Redmond, we have a problem. It turns out that only the “6.1” versions of Microsoft Windows (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2) include multi-threaded robocopy.
