Create a Virtual Machine of your Existing Computer

Microsoft’s Sysinternals team has released a simple application called Disk2vhd, that lets you easily migrate an existing computer to a virtualized hard drive (VHD). It’s a tiny utility doesn’t even require instillation.

Create Virtual Hard Disks with Disk2VHD

When you run Disk2vhd, it will immediately show you all the drives and partitions on your computer that it can migrate to a VHD. Simply select a drive that you wish to create a VHD file from and click “Create.” Disk2vhd will convert the hard drive into a VHD file even if the computer /drive is currently in use.

When the Virtual Machine VHD file is created, you can run it in any desktop virtualization program including the free Windows Virtual PC, Virtual Box, or VMware Player. You can also mount the virtual machine as a standard hard drive in Windows 7, and can even boot from it if your computer is running Windows 7 Ultimate.

Last logged in username in Windows XP

The default last logged in username can be found in"DefaultUserName"HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon

If you want to clear the last logged in user from the registry,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
"DontDisplayLastName" change the value to 1

Outlook 2010 Read Receipt Email Tracking

After sending the email, sometime it becomes a frantic need to know when the recipient will start reading it, Outlook has an intrinsic feature which lets you know immediately when the person starts reading your message. By using Tracking, you can track down the email. This post elaborates how you can enable this feature.

Launch Outlook 2010, and from Home tab, click New E-mail

Navigate to Options tab, and From Tracking pane enable Request a Read Receipt option, now click Send to send it to recipient.

Windows 2008 Installation

Follow the screen shot to install Windows 2008 Server Windows 2008 Installation

Select you Language, time and currency format

Type in your product key, if it's a evaluation version click "Next" then "NO"

Select the edition of Windows server to install

Accept the license terms

Select the custom installation if its a new installation, if you are upgrading the version, please select "Upgrade"

Select the disk space where you want to install windows server, the installation is going to wipe out all the data's in the hard drive

The installation will take a while and restarts itself to finish

Once the installation is complete, it will prompt you to change the password

Once you change the password you will be able to log into the server, you will get a welcome screen with initial configuration to complete.

How to copy files to ESXi server through SSH

Copying ISO images or files to ESXi is much easier through SSH. It can be done by enabling SSH and then transferring files through WinSCP.
To enable SSH on ESXi 5.1 follow the screen shot

Once the SSH is enabled download the WinSCP and the connect to the server, then you can access the ESXi server datastore through WinSCP.

The data store path is /vmfs/volumes/DATASTORE