Microsoft announced the Windows 7 retail pricing structure for all of the various versions of the operating system today, and at first glance it looks at though they missed the boat. While Windows 7 looks very promising thus far, as seen in the betas and Release Candidates, it looks as though they are going to drive folks away from it by maintaining nearly identical pricing to Vista, which the world seems to agree was one of Microsoft’s worst efforts to date. However, as usual Microsoft has an ace in the hole.

Pricing is as follows:

Home Premium       $199.99 Full / $119.99 Upgrade / $49 Pre-order before July 11
Professional              $299.99 Full / $199.99 Upgrade /$99 Pre-order before July 11
Ultimate                     $399.99 Full / $219.99 Upgrade

Most Consumers Don’t Buy Windows

What Microsoft normally banks on is the fact that most people don’t buy individual copies of Windows and install them on their existing computers, they get Windows when they buy a new computer. Which in my mind is why Microsoft should lower the retail price significantly, so that they can fight the public perception that Windows is expensive, but they won’t because that would require them to undercut what they are selling the licenses to OEMs and businesses at. Doing so would cause an uproar with some of their biggest partners and clients.

Microsoft also knows that Windows 7 seems to run better than Vista on existing computers that are currently running Vista and XP. This has not traditionally been the case. In the past with every new Windows release, if you simply upgraded your existing computer there was a performance hit, your computer usually would run slower than under the old operating system. This does not seem to be the case under Windows 7, which seems to fly on older computers and lower powered systems like Netbooks. All of this means that the potential market for retail boxed copy licenses for Windows 7 is greater than previous versions of Windows. Also with the current economic conditions people are more likely to upgrade than spend money on a whole new computer.

Pre-Ordering Offers The Most Value

If you are one of the many that are actually planning on buying a retail boxed copy of Windows 7, I encourage you to pre-order it before July 11th, 2009, as this would entitle you to the lower pricing of $49 and $99 for Home Premium and Professional respectively.

Active Directory automatically sets up an internal DNS server for use on your network, and assumes that it is the Authorative server for the domain you used, which in our case here is “example.com”. When clients on your internal network ask your Active Directory DNS server for a lookup on example.com it is going to direct them to one of your domain controllers. If you request”www.enirtia.com” and you happen to have IIS running on one of those domain controllers you will see whatever the default website that is running on that server.

To get around this we need to add a redirect to your IIS server, a Host record to your internal DNS server, and a delegation to your DNS server, all of which are simple to do. These changes are based on the assumption that your external website is setup on external DNS servers with an “A” record pointing”www.enirtia.com” to the IP address of the server that is hosting your website, and that example.com without the “www” is setup with a CNAME record pointing at”www.enirtia.com”. If it is setup in the opposite manner this will not work.

Host Record:

First find out what the IP address is of the external web server if you do not already know it. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-click and choose “New Host (A or AAAA)”. Type “www” into the name field, and the IP address of your external web server into the IP Address field. Click the “Add Host” button to save.

IIS Redirect:

To redirect “http://enirtia.com” to “http://www.enirtia.com we need to create a redirect in your IIS server. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services and locate the Default Web Site. Right-Click on the default web site, and choose Properties. Go to the Directory tab and setup a redirect to point to”www.enirtia.com”.

DNS Delegation:

To create a DNS Delegation you must know the names of external name servers servicing your domain name. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > DNS and locate example.com. Right-Click and choose “New Delegation”. Type www into the Delegated Domain field, click next and provide it with external authorative name servers for your domain name.

Unlike the traditional Add/Remove Windows Components functionality, the switches will not fully remove the applications do to internal Windows and developer dependencies on components of the applications. Instead it merely deletes the “.exe” and any shortcuts for the applications. Should the user decide that they actually need the applications they can flip the switch back and regain full functionality.

The other applications & services that can be switched off are: Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, Windows Search services, Handwriting recognition, Windows gadgets, fax and scan, and the XPS viewer and some other misc services.

This move is most likely to appease those examining Microsoft for Antitrust issues in the EU. Microsoft has long maintained that they are unable to extract the browser from the OS due to the way it is built, which was one of the sticking points in their US Antitrust case nearly a decade ago. While I do not agree with those that are claiming the bundling of IE with Windows is anti competitive, I do applaud Microsoft for giving users a choice, for a change. I think that it is their product and they should be able to do anything they want with it, short of putting technical roadblocks for 3rd parties developers to make their applications run on the OS. Users are fully capable of installing alternative products if they choose to do so.

Easy come, easy go.

The details of the rumored deal is that the investor group will buy Yahoo for around $20 Billion, apparently taking it private, and sell the search and search marketing business to Microsoft for an unknown sum. The group would most likely replace all of the Yahoo Execs, and try to lure some talent back to the company to continue operations of its other businesses.

In the end this may be the best thing for Yahoo. Last year, I may not have been convinced of this, but now I think that Yahoo should dump their search business and focus on their other valuable web properties that have huge potential. For the record I am a Yahoo shareholder.

It is important to note a couple things in this whole story, first, Yahoo, while weakened is still a viable, profitable company, that just seems to have lost it’s way as of late, mostly due to Microsoft’s unsolicited deal nearly a year ago. Second, this is all as of right now purely a rumor, and may not ever happen.

Fortunately there is a tool put out by ForensIT that makes this a relatively trivial task. You can download it here. After you download it, follow these directions to use it to transfer your profiles seamlessly.

1. Load the computer fully with the appropriate software, including MS Office if needed.
2. Login and create the account of the user that you wish to transfer.
3. Either remove and hook up the hard drive from the old computer to the new computer or connect to the computer’s default share (i.e. \\computername\C$)
4. After hooking up the drive or connecting to the default share open launch a Windows Explorer window and navigate to “C:\Documents and Settings” folder.
5. Copy the Folder for the user that you wish transfer to the new computer.
6. On the new computer paste the folder to that same respective folder.
7. After copying the folder to the new computer, open up the Windows Control Panel, double-click the System icon, and go to the Advanced tab. Click on the “Settings” button under the User Profiles section.
8. Check the “Show Unassigned Profiles” checkbox.
9. Choose the folder relating to the folder that you wish to assign, and click assign.
10. Type in the username of the user that you wish to transfer.
11. Log out and log back in as the migrated user

After following those steps you should have a fully migrated user profile. Keep in mind this dows not migrate programs, Windows is still incapable of doing this.

Enjoy!

So in my opinion, if Microsoft’s is true to their word that they are not interested, Yahoo needs to take this as the final word in this ugly chapter in their history and use it to spur them to build a new exciting company.

In addition to the long release cycle, Microsoft has invest significant amounts of money and time into .NET and its tight integration with IE, which is notorious for not working with or rendering well with other browser rendering engines. Even if Microsoft went entirely AJAX for all of their web-based products, there is massive amounts of code from other developers out there that are tailored to run on IE. Microsoft would even have to rework many of their core products to use another rendering engine, an example is Outlook Web Access. OWA is puedo AJAX-based, but it still maintains separate versions for IE and other browsers, not to mention that many of the MMC snapins rely on IE for rendering key components. Would they have to rework these too? Finally, could you imagine Microsoft working on an open source code base that they share with not only the general public, but Apple, and Google?

What I could see Microsoft doing in the short term to test the waters is releasing an unofficial addon that allows you to manually choose to render a page in WebKit. This is much like the IE 8 betas have for rendering as if it were IE7. This would allow them to gauge the demand, as well as test functionality with a new engine, without having to rework, much of their core products. If this were to happen I could see it being released much like the PowerTools have always been released, without official support.

The DMU allows you to take the .vmdk or hard drive files that are used for your virtual machines and mount and access them in the same way you would a USB Thumb Drive to access the files located on the virtual drive. One might ask, “Why would you want to do such a thing?” the answer is simple, what if you just need the files on the VM not the whole VM, do you really want to have to fire up the VM, waste time and resources only to have to copy files between a computer and the VM? This method makes this process much more straight forward. This works well when used in conjunction with VMWare Converter. If you need more info on Converter, see the VMWare site or my presentation on it.

On to the Howto:

1) Get the Disk Mount Utility software from VMWare.

2) Install the software.

3) Launch a command prompt. Start > Run and type CMD.

4) Change your working directory to the Install Directory by typing:

cd “\Program Files\VMware\VMware DiskMount Utility”

5) Next you will run the mount program using the format of vmware-mount <the drive letter you wish to mount it to> <the full path to the target virtual disk>

Example:

vmware-mount z: “f:\My Virtual Machines\Windows XP Server 2003\Windows Server 2003 Professional.vmdk”

Thats it, within a few seconds you should see the drive in the My Computer window. When you are done with the virtual drive simply type the following to dismount it:

vmware-mount /d z:

If you need further help or want to explore some of the other options available type the following:

vmware-mount/?

It is also of importance that there are some GUIs out there for this to simplify the process, but they usually are fairly cumbersome.