Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research has previously taken us to task for not doing enough to get SP2 into the hands of consumers. Thankfully, there's a happy ending to the story : Last Thursday I ordered a Windows XP Service Pack 2 disc, mainly to see...

The quickest way to try out the new MOM 2005 bits is to download the evaluation version . You get a 120-day license, and the ability to upgrade in place to the full MOM 2005. And of course, to take full advantage of MOM 2005's new features, the MOM...

If you've got a Tablet PC and you're running SP2 (and you should be!) you might have noticed a couple of processes hanging around called TabTip.exe and TCServer.exe. And right after noticing them, you probably wondered why they seemed to be taking up...

My old post on " What is all this stuff doing on my computer " described how to track down and identify all the processes that start automatically when you log on to Windows. That post continues to get lots of Google traffic, due to a list of all the...

For more news about the RTM of MOM 2005 , go check out Nick MacKechnie's blog . In particular: " Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Releases to Manufacturing " has dates when customers can get their hands on actual code, plus pointers to the usual marketing...

Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Monitor still thinks that people won't download SP2 via dialup , presumably for the same reasons that he gave earlier , i.e. "it's too big to fetch in one chunk". Of course, XP doesn't actually need to download SP2 in one chunk...

I just fixed an annoying problem on my old Toshiba Tablet PC - the pen stopped working. To be precise, when I tried to use it the mouse pointer would flicker madly along the top and left edges of the screen, totally unable to track the real position of...

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 has just been released to manufacturing - the email went out 10 minutes ago. You can find out more about it right now at http://www.microsoft.com/mom/ , or wait for the inevitable slew of marketing materials :-) Update...

Microsoft Monitor from Jupiter Research is required reading for any serious Microsoft watcher. Joe Wilcox got the blogging bug early and hard, and often comes up with the story-behind-the-story - stuff about breaking Microsoft news that even I didn't...

The MOM 2005 release date is fast approaching, and they're setting up a series of webcasts for customers to learn more about it. Here's the schedule so far - all times are PST (GMT-8:00). Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 - Sept 2 nd , 9:30am-11:00am...

As promised , I'm returning to the topic of offline files. My previous article resulted in a lot of comments, so the client-side caching team have kindly pointed me at their internal FAQ. It's not yet in a customer-ready form, but I'll try to use it to...

The field teams are getting ready for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005: Jan Kiese points to management partner training in the UK on Oct 4-6, and how to register for the MOM 2005 release candidate Jose Barreto de Araujo points to the online MOM 2005...

As a followup to Monday's post on using SMS to install XP SP2 , the Software Update Services team have now released guidance on deploying Windows XP Service Pack 2 with SUS . This can dramatically cut the bandwidth requirements for a company and enable...

If the TLAs SMS, SDK, WMI, and MMC mean something to you, then version 2 of the software development kit for Systems Management Server could be in your future. It was released just last Thursday - grab it from here . If on the other hand you just want...

Jim Hugunin of IronPython fame (and new Microsoft employee) now has a home on blogs.msdn.com. Check out his first post on Dynamic Languages and the Common Language Runtime . Welcome to the community, Jim!

I've just been the victim of some anonymous drive-by journalism from PC Magazine, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth. My post " XP SP2 RTMs! " is getting a lot of traffic, thanks to an article that PC Magazine published yesterday called " WinXP...

The .Text software on blogs.msdn.com has been updated to fight blog comment spam — David Weller has posted an excellent description of the new features . However, as commenters to his blog have pointed out, some of the features could be seen as overkill...

The SMS FAQs were just updated - these FAQs should be your first port of call for technical questions about Systems Management Server. Also, next week's webcasts in the SMS 2003 Summer Series both take place on Thursday 19th August, although thankfully...

Hot on the heels of July's updates , I've published the August MOM and SMS news to the Management Updates blog : Management News - 8/2/04 Microsoft Solutions for Management - Updates and News, 8/2/04 Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) - Updates...

Or, in plain English, “ Windows XP Service Pack 2 has been Released To Manufacturing ”. Expect the bits to show up in your auto-update soon - and if you haven't already turned on auto-update, now is a great time to do so! Note that I don't think...

Good news in my inbox from the folks at Wintellect: This month, Wintellect announces the availability of a preview release of its new open source collection class library for .NET 2.0 called Power Collections .NET. ... Wintellect and Microsoft are...

The operating system deployment feature pack for SMS 2003 SP1 does just what you'd hope - allow you to create and deploy Windows OS images to lots of client machines, with unattended imaging, backup and restore of user state, and all the replication and...