Converting Microsoft OS to VMWare Guest

A friend had two notebooks running Microsoft XP Home and Professional editions in which the notebooks were no longer functional but the hard drives were in good shape so I recommend running them in a VM guest. I knew I could use VMWare converter tool that was freely available and it supports converting from live hosts and images created from several software programs. I was disappointed to find that VMWare's converter would not convert from Ghost enterprise (*.gho) images, but the latest version of Symantec Norton Ghost 14.0 would so I created images of the drives.

After the images were created I next fired up VMWare's converter and let perform it's magic.

This operation performed flawlessly. I ran both notebook images with two hitches, I had to reactivate both XP installations because running the guests inside VMWare workstation caused the operating system to assume it was running a different hardware but this wasn't a big deal. The second problem was trying to run the guest operating systems in VMWare's free server product. I received an error message that the guest were created with more capabilities then what VMWare server could handle so the friend decided to purchase the workstation product in order to run the products.

Converting Microsoft Vista from one version to another

A desktop that I had which was used for work recently would not activate because it required connectivity to the companies KMS server which I would connect to via VPN to complete but since I no longer work there that's out of the question. Since the Vista OS was an enterprise version I had no way to purchase a license for it. I did however have a Vista Business license that is legit so I wanted to migrate to it from the version of Vista Enterprise.

First make sure that everything near and dear is backed up in case something goes screwy.

Before inserting the Windows Vista CD
Go to, Start, Run: and type: regedit.exe
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
Change the key : ProductName from "Windows Vista ™ Enterprise” to “Windows Vista ™ Business”
Change the key: EditionID from "Enterprise" to “Business”

Do not restart

Now insert Windows Vista CD and start upgrading (the option Upgrade will not be graded out anymore)

A copy of program/drivers had to be reinstalled but much easier solution for me then reinstalling everything which is usually a week long process it seems like now.

Domain registrars spamming sub-domains?

In the process of setting up some virtual servers (slices) from www.slicehost.com I had to move the name servers around along with a migration to Google web apps. A user called complaining that they could not access the web-mail service. The user was trying to access www.mail.domain.com instead of mail.domain.com which a DNS record had yet to be setup for and we weren't planning on it. To our surprise there was a page there though, a place holder with some nasty pop-ups. We immediately added a record for this entry to kill it but it makes me wonder how many other sub-domains have been compromised? The registrar was www.godaddy.com, we will be migrating to a new one very soon.