How to detect Vista or Server 2008 using WMI

We found ourselves wanting to target a GPO at Vista and Server 2008 machines today, and came up with this WMI query which I thought I would share, it may help someone 🙂

 

For Vista

SELECT Version, ProductType

FROM Win32_OperatingSystem

WHERE Version >= “6.0” AND ProductType = “1”

For Longhorn Server

SELECT Version, ProductType

FROM Win32_OperatingSystem WHERE

Version >= “6.0” AND ProductType = “3”

Product Type has three possible values:

Value	Description
1	Work Station
2	Domain Controller
3	Server

 

More information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa394239.aspx

 

Version number can be any of the following

Version No.	Description
6.0	Windows Server 2008
6.0	Windows Vista
5.2	Windows Server 2003 R2
5.2	Windows Server 2003
5.1	Windows XP
5.0	Windows 2000

 

Sorry no link to a list of versions, if anyone has a link, I would gladly modify the post to include it.

Or you could just use:

select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Caption like ‘%Vista%

Hope this helps someone

BDD 2007 Lite Touch and SMS 2003 Zero Touch Video Walkthroughs

If you are like me, there is nothing better than someone showing you how to do something, instead of finding it on Technet or in a book, in fact a combination of a demo and Technet/book would be great!!

Any way I spotted some Video walkthroughs on the development Guys blog, I have not had time to download them yet, but I will be tonight 🙂

Here is the link to the downloads, and here is where I found it

Windows Search 4.0

I have been using Windows Search 4.0 preview on my Vista SP1 x64 laptop for a few days now, and I must say I am extremely impressed with its performance, that with the newest update to Communicator 2007 has seen a significant improvement in system performance. Check out the improvements compared to search in Vista:

• With Windows Search 4.0, the Windows Search Team has fixed most of the reported bugs causing a majority of distractions users have seen since Windows Vista RTM – many of those bugs were reported by you.
• Great improvements have been made with regards to performance. Even now as Preview, Windows Search 4.0 has query response time about 33%faster than search queries in Windows Vista RTM.
• The Windows Search Team has extended Remote Index Discovery for PC-to-PC search to work on every supported version of Windows. This makes finding information on other PCs running Windows Search 4.0 quick and less resource-consuming. Now Windows Search can find information shared on a remote PC by accessing an index on that PC – and you will open files only when relevant to your search. This will also work if the user’s profile is redirected.
• The Windows Search Team has implemented Rollback Recovery where your search index will roll back to the last known good state (this is good in handling disc write errors). If an error occurs, your index isn’t rebuilt from scratch; only the newly changed files are added to the index, making recovery from system errors not as disruptive to the machine or the user

Windows Search 4.0 also includes the following improvements:

1. Support for the Encrypting File System (EFS)
2. Reduced affect on Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode, and there is no local cache (.ost)
3. Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
4. Improved indexing performance
5. Faster previewer updates for Windows XP
6. Per-user Group Policy settings
7. Windows software updates for Watson errors
8. Enterprise Group Policy settings

Download it from here