I recently purchased a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch for use at a client site. The switch has some great features for the price, but the setup instructions are very wrong. I finally gave up and called Dell Support. As soon as the technician saw the 28xx model number, he knew why I was calling; he said about 75% of the calls on these models are due to the incorrect documentation.

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I had this issue with Vista and now it has returned with Windows 7. I got some good advice in the Microsoft Partner Newsgroup and wanted to pass it along.

After adding a Windows 7 machine to a Windows Server 2003 R2 domain, I started getting lots of 675 errors in the server's Security Event Log.

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I've recently added a Windows 7 Enterprise computer to a network that is mostly running Windows XP SP3 with a Windows Server 2003 R2 server.

One of the main challenges is to get Group Policy to work properly in the mixed Windows XP - Windows 7 environment. For now, the goal isn't to take advantage of all the new Group Policy features--we just want Group Policy to do on Windows 7 what it does on XP.

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A small customer purchased Software Assurance (SA) on their Windows desktop licenses. One SA benefit is the right to install Windows 7 Enterprise. The size of the site does not warrant a KMS server. I was able to obtain a Multiple Activation Key (MAK) from the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site. But the Windows 7 installation never prompted for the key, and when I try to activate Windows 7, I get the message "Windows could not be activated. DNS name does not exist."

I assumed that the problem was the missing key, so I went looking for a way to enter the key through the Windows GUI.

There is none.

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A small customer has an in-house mail server. After some recent DSL connection woes, I'm getting nervous about this single point of failure for their email service.

The customer's Go Daddy domain and hosting accounts include free email addresses and forwarders. Could we move the email to Go Daddy's servers to get a more robust, redundant solution?

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A non-profit customer has an underutilized server and a desktop due and budgeted for replacement. Would it make sense to replace the desktop with a thin client, and run the needed programs in a virtual instance on the server?

I blogged earlier about Microsoft Desktop Virtualization Licensing for the SMB. Mostly for licensing reasons, it doesn't make sense to do full virtual desktops. So that leaves the option of running a terminal server to host the customer's apps.

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