Installation

Installing Office 2019 as a Microsoft MPN silver or gold partner is a little more complicated than it used to be. Partner Center has keys but does not directly offer installation media to download. This article lists the necessary steps to get Office 2019 on your machine(s) without assigning Office 365 licenses.

Having made the switch from my trusty Lenovo T520 to the W540 here is my account of what works well and what does not. If you wonder what made me choose the W540: read this.

Sony Vaio laptops are rumored to suffer from two defects: the preloaded OS image being full of crapware, and being extremely difficult to clean install. The former is true for nearly every laptop vendor. I do not care about it because I reinstall anyway - I know from first-hand experience how much can go wrong building an OS image. The latter is bad since it obviously jeopardizes my remedy for defect #1.

This kept us occupied quite a bit: after having worked with HP’s G7 line of servers for a long time, we ordered our first DL380 G8 for use with VDI. According to HP’s documentation the same custom image can (and must be) used when installing ESXi as with the G7. With that information, setting up the G8 sounded like an easy job: provision it via the existing automation mechanism and be done.

I encountered a strange error when I moved my laptop’s hard drive to another computer to make room for an SSD. When I tried to install Windows 8 on the repurposed drive I could not see any partitions. Neither could I install Windows on the drive. I kept getting the error Windows cannot be installed to this disk. In addition, the setup process was extremely slow.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the constants in the Windows universe is the knowledge that user profiles increase in size over time. They tend to accumulate all kinds of junk and become bloated which is especially cumbersome in the case of roaming profiles because all that “weight” is copied across the network time and again, slowing down the logon process.

This is a summary of my experience with Active Setup combined with what I could find on the internet. The information applies to older and current versions of Windows, up to and including Windows 7, Windows 10, Server 2016, Server 2019.