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Possible workaround is to use a different remote desktop – for instance VNC – a well–established and reliable alternative to native Microsoft RDP / MSTSC. Haven’t trioed it with W2K8 but my educated guess is that it will work fine.
HTH
Chris
By the way Arris, this BB software is awful when you do long posts – I had to do the one above in WordPad then paste it in, by the time ! got past 30 or 40 lines of post, the scrolling in the edit window didn’t work properly at all.
Regards Chris
Hello halladayrules
You’re in luck, I have 30 mins before I go and see a movie (Easy Rider, whioxh I’ve never seen, yay!)
I work for a finanicial institution, where I am one of a team running a very large Wintel (almost entirely W2K3) infrastructure used for hosting secure financial applications, Inter and Intra nets). The Wintel systems are the front-end, presentation layer of large n-tier apps, the business data is held by mainframes and UNIX systems.
Don’t touch my server! You touch my server I break your fingers. hehe jk
Actually pretty close to the truth. The servers are built, end-to-end, by deployment scripts. No manual changes are allowed except in the most exceptional circumstances, everything is change-controlled to the nth degree. Unauthorised changes to live systems are pretty close to being a sacking offence.
I’d really like to know more about what exactly you do. Maybe you could answer a few questions for me.
1. What type of network topology do you use? (bus, star, ring, IP VPN, MPLS?)Basically 100Mbps Ethernet, Gigabit where necessary and increasingly Gig for net stuff we introduce. The toplogy is complex, I don’t really have much clarity about it, that’s down to the network teams
2. What type of medium do you use? (Fiber, cat5e, cat6, ?)
Nearly all Cat5 as far as I know, but again I don’t have visibility
3. What is your role in terms of AD?
The AD specialists deal with that, I have privileged access and can see it but don’t mess with it.. The ADs are very different for Inter and Intra purposes: the Intranet ones are pretty standard large ADs (hugely complex internal structures and Group Policy setups) The Inter one is tree-structured with the DMZ-resident web servers in child domains using one-way trusts. So if one child gets hacked, the compromise should be limited to that child domain (it’s never happened so far)
4. What type of tools do you commonly use to diagnose problems with the network? It can be connection problem (physically), authentication issue, diagnosing failed hardware? Maybe you can enlighten me on what IT people in the field use.
For the Wintel systems, hardware is monitored via use of suppliers proprietary utils (Dell OpenManage, HP Insight) which put events into the Windows event logs. The ELs are parsed by IBM Tivoli which then sends alerts to the support teams. Authentication issues inside an n-tier app will almost certainly show up as application-level failures which get reported by users, or by the HP Transbac systems (which imitate users logging on and exercising the apps, again alerting through Tivoli). Connectivity issues are similar, they show up as app failures, support teams investigate and tell the network teams “I suspect…”
5. How much does your business depend on virtualization?
It’s currently a mad scramble to implement as fast as poss, for large organisations you have to do it or the explosion of live and test hardware has really severe consequences – like filling up your datacentre and needing a extra one (think £0.5 billion approx). Currently virtualising (on VMWare) the Intra stuff like mad, not yet started rolling it out for the Internet-facing apps but that’s coming soon.
6. What type of disaster recovery plan do you use? Do you outsource any of your online backups to Iron Mountain or any other remote sites like that? What things do you implement to ensure data integrity?
The main DR capability is use of two fibre-linked geographically remote datacentres (around 20 miles apart) with *everything* duplicated to the extent that the entire setup could work from one of them. I presume that there are plenty of offsite backups but don’t have visibility, that’s the storage guys’ job. It’s not outsourced. Data integrity – dunno really, my bit is just front-end hosting for the real business data which lives in the glass house. I’d like to think that the best guarantee of data integrity is (no surprise) regular, verified, tested backups. Certainly works forthe platform-level data (IIS logs, event logs,etc) I deal with
OK, just to finish this thread off……
…… after trying stuff out for a while, booting in and out of Win 7 and 2K8, I eventually realised several things:1) I wasn’t just missing the Aero Peek previews in W2K8, I was missing the whole Aero “glass” thing. I know this sounds a bit dumb, but my day-job is server engineeer, and I’ve never had experience before of messsing wirth user interfaces, never had up-to-date hardware or OSes at home till recently.
2) Whether or not I could get full-feature Aero on my W2K8 setup depended on the colour depth – unless I went into True Colour, there was no “glass”. And when I did that, the interface slowed down horribly. Window resizes were painfully slow, but even menus / favourites / Aero Peek popups etc, were all really sluggish for an up-to-date quad-core PC.
2) My Win 7 setup was just A-OK, felt really responsive in full-feature Aero.
It began to annoy me, and (shamefully) I took the easy way out….. bought a cheap PCI-E graphics card and installed that.
All OSes now updated and working just great with bfull interface features.
Regards Chris
Nearly there…….
Check this thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/ed2b6c41-4cb4-4c0b-a072-a72f71071d61
I changed from High Colour to True Colour, and voila! – the previews were there, the Taskbar check-box wasn’t greyed out….. but I had the distinct impression that I was paying a performance penalty. So I started messing with the System Properties…. after switching things around a few times, I now have a True Colur setup and the Taskbar box is greyed and unchecked…..
Anyway I’ll get it to my preferred state in due course – My Win 7 instance seems to run Aero Peek with no feeling of “I’m taking a performance hit” so I’ll examine that again.
Regards Chris
Thanks for your continued interest and fast responses halladayrules……
…. I really thought you’d cracked it there, but still no joy I’m afraid. I found that the DWM value was actually 0, but changing it and killing / restarting Explorer didn’t make any difference. Just to be certain, I even tried rebooting the box, no difference.
For clarity (and this has always been the case I think), when I hover over the Taskbar I get rectangular boxes decribing the windows / IE tabs etc (i don’t get nothing). Taskbar properties “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” check box still checked and greyed out.
Anyway, cheers for trying, look forward to any further ideas and I’ll post if I manage to get to the bottom of it.
Regards Chris
Hi halladayrules, thanks for the response……
…..tried it, unfortunately it didn’t work. Followed your instructions, + changed my theme from my fave (Bing Japan) to the one that my Win 7 runs (UK). Still no previews.
Note additionally that the Taskbar properties, Taskbar tab, has a check-box entitled “Preview desktop with Aero Peek”. The box is greyed out but checked, so it seems kinda like “should be working but in this case isn’t supported”
Maybe something to do with the video drivers,I’ll reboot into Win 7 and have a dig around.
Regards Chris
Er…. just stumbled across this thread, which I should have updated about three months ago…
I solved the problem eventually by substitution – after a considerable struggle and two sets of HP official build disks, got HP warranty support to agree to a motherboard swap. To my amazement it made no difference.
So I took the machine to work and borrowed a CPU from another dc5750, and that fixed it, at which point HP had to agree to a warranty on that as well.
So some subtle problem with the CPU. Now running W2K8 R2 just fine.
Regards Chris
Just in case anyone is interested……
UPDATE – since sending the above I have
– located another dc5750 at work, and installed my Samsung 1TB SAT drive with crashing copy of W2K8. It ran fine for 5 hours with no signs of instability
– borrowed the RAM (2x Kingston 2GB DIMMS) form the work PC and installed them in the home machine – crashed after 5 mins
– tried resetting the dc5750 BIOS back to full default config – crashed as I logged in to W2K8
– tried running with an old PS/2-style mouse and keyboard, no USB devices attached at all – crashed after 3 mins
So that’s everything I can think of, I am down to faulty motherboard or CPU hardware, there’s nothing else to try short of exorcism
I’m told this machine has a 3-year warranty, so in the absence of any miracle cures, I’m looking for a replacement CPU / m/b assembly.
Regards
Chris
