I ran into some trouble with Hyper V the other day – I had booted from a VHD into Windows Server 2008 R2 and was trying to start a VM – I got the usual  ‘The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running” error.
I had just had a BIOS failure on the machine so I figured it may have switched hardware virtualization support off in the BIOS when it reloaded the defaults.

Checking the BIOS, I found it was switched on – strange. I Googled a bit but everything seemed to be around flipping the setting in BIOS, when I knew to be correct.
Some further investigation around the boot environment and BCDEDIT settings I found the parameter “HypervisorLaunchType”, thinking this could well be connected, I set the parameter to “auto” in the BCD configuration:

BCDEDIT /set {big-long-guid} hypervisorlaunchtype auto 

This fixed it !!
So now all my BCD configurations go like this:

BCDEDIT /copy {current-or-guid} /d "New Boot Option"
BCDEDIT /set {new-guid} device vhd=[V:]\vmimage.vhd
BCDEDIT /set {new-guid} osdevice vhd=[V:]\vmimage.vhd
BCDEDIT /set {new-guid} detecthal on
BCDEDIT /set {new-guid} hypervisorlaunchtype auto

It is official, dual booting is now dead – Boot from VHD is the new king.

On my flight to BoS2009, I was inadvertently reliving some nostalgic milestones from the past 10 nay 20 years.

I had my Windows 7 laptop, booted from a VHD (see Scott’s great post for some easy instructions on how to configure this) – the OS I had booted into was Windows 2008, I had installed the Hyper-V role and was running an install of Windows XP on a virtual machine at the same time was running a command line install of Exchange 2007.

If only I had brought my Windows 3.1 diskettes with me I’d have had a straight flush…. here’s how it looked…

After upgrading to Windows 7 on my laptop I found that I could no longer sync with my Sony Ericsson X1 (Windows Mobile 6.1) Phone. It didn’t even seem to be charging (over USB).

Looking in the system Device Manager I found a missing driver for the ‘Generic RNDIS’ device.

A bit of goggling uncovered that this was something required for syncing mobile devices. Although there are comments around that Windows Mobile devices are not supported on Windows 7 beta, and a number of people seem to be having the same problem, the good news is it does actually work.

I simply downloaded the Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 for Vista (from Microsoft), installed it and everything was rosy.

It installed the driver for the ‘Generic RNDIS’, I connected the phone, it was recognised a Microsoft USB Sync device was installed and it all started working as expected.

I am loving the Sticky Notes app in Windows 7. The only issue I have with it is the dreadful font it uses – well my issue is not the font, it is the fact that you cannot change it to something more ‘normal’.

I mean, I can easily change the font for Outlook Notes. I know, I know, you want it to look like handwritten notes that you would stick on your fridge at home, but hey – this isn’t my fridge at home, it’s my PC at work (and unfortunately there is no cold beer inside it !!).

Eileen Brown confirmed for me that there is no way to change it right now (in the beta – build 7000), but there may be a ‘Non UI’ way of changing it in the official release…