scandals of an ITian

Last week we completed our migration from our aging IBM workstations and laptops to newer hardware that could support Windows 7.

Due to various restrictions I could not replace the old hardware and have them replaced with the newer one straight off. Instead the newer machines had to be built from the bottom up using MDT 2010. You can do the user state migration via MDT 2010 and can be really useful and time saving but my deployment scenarios.

Instead I relied on another piece of software from Microsoft called Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7.

So, let’s take a look at the scenario that I ended up with.

Saturday- Getting all the new workstations from the supplier, had them all powered up, keyboard, mouse, monitor and networked. Started off with batches of 5 machines getting Windows 7 deployed out to them.

Sunday- Continued with the Windows 7 deployments.

Each machine that finished the deployment had the following:-

1. Operating System
2. Office 2007
3. Visio 2007
4. Flash Player
5. AV Client Installed
6. Domain Connected
7. GPO deployed (few application installs, printers, network drives)

On the other hand I had the older machines still running in the domain. We couldn’t use the same computer names for the newer machines, but this was ok as these machines aren’t going to be decommissioned yet but retained to be used as Remote Web Workspace machines for all the laptop users at work who don’t have desktops to login into while they are remote.

Monday morning- Got the users to log onto both the machines, since they are not local admins on both the machines, had to run the software both on XP and Windows 7 machines with administrator accounts.

On the XP side:-

Download the software for x86 XP machines from here .

Install the software and it will be available under Start>All Programs

Here you have 3 options to go with. Most scenarios the options will be 2 and 3.

Option 3 is quite simple and helps transfer all your settings onto an external storage, another partition, file storage etc.

Lets take a closer look at Option2. This avoids for any error after the migration where you may have a user complain that something is missing.

Since we are migrating from XP to Windows 7, this is the only option that is presented to us. Later when we come across the same steps on Windows 7, there will be an option to choose whether the system is the old computer or the new one.

Take a note of the migration key as we would need to enter this again on the Windows 7 machine.

At this stage the XP machine will be searching for the Windows 7 machine with the same key to start the exchange process.

Now lets head over to the Windows 7 machine:-

You could either open it by searching for it

or browsing to system tools folder

Windows Easy Transfer starts off with the same screen

Depending on the options chosen from your original computer, choose the same selection here as well. I am going with the network option,

Since this is the computer to which we are migrating all the settings into, the option that needs to be selected is that its a new system. Incase of transfer from Windows 7 machine to another variant or another edition of Windows 7 we choose the old computer option or vice versa.

Get the key that was given to us at this screen on the Windows 7 machine and enter it here

At this stage the system is scanning the XP machine for all the user settings that are stored on that computer.

Once the scan is complete you have the option to choose which of those user settings you would like migrated.

Choosing what needs to be restored can be tricky but its quite straightforward and can be easily browsed as shown.

And then the transfer can be strarted.

Towards the end you should be able to see a finished transfer report including a comparision between the programs that are installed on both the machines.

This took on an average between 5 to 10 minutes per user and ultimately was quite easy and time saving in the sense of settings up outlook,printers,desktops, wallpapers etc.

Quite useful even for doing a Windows 7 RC to RTM edition.

There had been an issue identified with XP Sp3 machines not being able to connect to remote machines within an SBS or EBS environment via Remote Web Workspace.

Some classic signs of the issue and various options that I had tried out in vain

1. When you click connect to your default remote machines the following box pops up

   

2. When following the error message and various steps available online to enable the add-on you don’t get to view the add-on in the first place.

   

3. You could also follow the procedure of deleting a few registry keys that would enable you to view the add-on from the manage add-ons from IE

   

4. You add the website to your trusted lists and it still doesn’t connect
5. There are scripts available that are used to install the RDP 6.1 ActiveX
6. @markstan helped me out heaps and we even tried this solution
7. After all my nagging I think @markstan went on vacation because of me as seen from his tweet

   

8. Another thing I had noticed was the clean untouched XP SP3 VM that I build and manually updated with IE8 and latest updates didn’t seem to suffer from this.

So I setup the calendar appointments with my 4 users that had this issue to bring their different laptops back to the office. These guys are teleworkers and only come in couple of times a month to the office. So you could probably understand their frustration and of course mine.

But then on 27^th October the RDP Gods decided to take pity on me and sent message via @nathanm with this tweet

All my test machines were powered up, installed RDP 7 from here and life returned back to normality.

The ActiveX issue was fixed and I had a couple of happy EBS RWW users going home in less than 20 minutes.