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For Windows Administrators

The ever ongoing race between cloud and on-premise computingYesterday

Gartner Analyst Nick Jones posted an interesting article in his blog with the title The cloud computing fantasy. Contrary to many analysts, he is a cloud skeptic. The argument he puts forward is my favorite one against the cloud computing hype, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that cloud computing is a fantasy.

On the contrary, cloud computing has been a reality since the early days of computing. Not so long ago computation took place only in huge datacenters. Cloud computing never really died out. Basically, Nick Jones’ blog post names one of the reasons why cloud computing got a little outmoded: storage capacity for home users (and therefore also for businesses) became cheaper than network connections.

I think his prediction that by 2012 we will have cheap terabyte flash drives is realistic. I just bought a new eSATA disk drive with 1.5TB. It cost me only 200 Euro. All in all my laptop now has 3TB storage capacity. There was a time when this would have been an unbelievably big storage capacity for a whole datacenter. Moreover, if you rent this storage capacity nowadays at a cloud provider you would pay significantly more. Therefore, it is not just the costs for the network connections to access the data, but also the fact that the prices of cloud providers for storage capacity are much higher.

I’d like to add that this doesn’t only ap

Betas of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server R2 on Technet - Laptop with now keyboardYesterday

Windows 7 Beta and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta available on Technet and MSDN. Download from Germany is very slow (20 KB/sec) #
Windows 7 beta key troubles: Microsoft is working on it #
Announcing Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta! Also check out my Server 2008 R2 complete feature list: #
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta (Microsoft’s bare metal hypervisor) is now available for Technet Plus and MSDN subscribers.

FREE: MF Shutdown Manager – Schedule shutdowns, restarts and wakeupsJanuary 7

MF Shutdown Manager is a simple tool that allows you to schedule actions such as Shutdown, Restart, Standby/Wake-Up, Hibernate/Wake-up, Log off, Alarm, Monitor On/Off, Cleanup (delete private Windows and browser data), Lock Workstation and Launch File. These tasks can also be accomplished with the Windows Task Manager. However, MF Shutdown Manager is easier to use. If you only have to do one of these tasks every now and then, you will be faster with this free utility.

Actually, there is a free and a full edition available for d

AutoAdministrator v2.0 - Windows 7 product keys - PowerGui 1.6 - Windows 7 upgradeJanuary 7

AutoAdministrator v2.0 lets you query or update Windows settings and services across multiple servers and/or workstations #
Windows 7 product keys appear on MSDN #
PowerGUI 1.6 Released (PowerShell IDE) - New: PowerShell v2 CTP3 support, improved editor, debugger, and admin console #
The Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Program - When you buy Vista after July 1 2009, you will get a free upgrade to Windows 7 #

FREE: PC Wizard 2008 - a system information and benchmark toolJanuary 6

PC Wizard 2008 is a freeware utility that provides detailed system information in a clearly presented way. Furthermore, it comes with a couple of system benchmarking tools that enable you to measure the performance of several hardware components.

The Outlook-like user interface makes it easy to access all the integrated tools fast. There are five sections: Hardware, Configuration, System Files, Resources, and Benchmark.

The Hardware section has 13 tools: System Summary, Mainboard, Processor, Video, IO Ports, Drives, Printers, Devices, Multimedia Network, Power Status, Voltage/Temperature/Fans, and Wi