If your firewall is blocking the online registration of KMS (Key Management Service) for Vista/Server 2008, then you need to activate it offline by calling. The US Number is 1-866-740-1256, but there’s a trick: The IVR system will ask for your Installation ID in “groups”, but in Server 2003’s KMS console (slmgr.vbs) you are given one long string. If you don’t pause at the right time, the IVR will get hung up and tell you “please only give me the group X”. The grouping magic number is six, so just stop between saying each six numbers, and imagine the dash between them :).
Tag Archive for 'Microsoft'
This post is a record of what I’ve learned and done to make the built-in backup utility in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003 as useful as possible.
Often my clients, as well as most home users have operating systems like Windows 2000/2003 Server (or Windows XP for home users) installed and end up using a 3rd party application to backup their data. For servers, this can get expensive quickly, and often my clients don’t understand why they have to pay as much money (or more) for backups then they did for the server(s) it’s backing up (expensive software combined with expensive tape systems). With home users, or business workstations, they are very rarely backed up because of the complexity that they perceive it to be. Often, I believe the built-in backup utility of modern Windows could do the job just fine for small businesses and home, but many don’t know how to work with it, and deal with its limitations (and Microsoft doesn’t have a good wizard to walk you though the more advanced scenarios).
Continue reading ‘Utilizing the Built-in Windows Backup (ntbackup.exe) For Windows’