Sometimes you get tired of looking at a server desktop. So, here is a way to spice up Server 2008 R2 and make it look like Windows 7.
Category Archives: Windows 7
Wake-On-Lan Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2
Sometimes, I am too lazy to get up and turn my server/desktop on, when I am using my laptop. So I decided to enable Wake-On-Lan. The network adapter in my desktop will remain on and listen for a Wake-On-Lan Packet. When it receives that packet the machine will turn on. I remember back in the old days you just had to make one change in the bios to enable WOL, but now you need to make a few changes in windows 7/Server 2008 R2 in order to enable it.
There are many different BIOS’ and NICs, so unless you have the same motherboard as me, the changes you will need to make will probably be slightly different, but the process should be the same.
Full Sound Through RDP From a Hyper-V Windows 7 VM
Windows 7 is a nice operating system and it has some pretty cool features. One of which, and one of my favorites, is that it comes with the newest version of Remote Desktop (RDP). This version is capable of letting you watch HD video through it (assuming your network connection is fast enough…). RDPing from one physical computer to another physical computer is easy and sound between the two works just fine. This is because both machines (most likely) have physical sound cards.
Sometime during my travels, I loaded Windows 7 onto a Virtual Machine (VM) running on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Virtual Machines in Hyper-V don’t have physical or even virtual sound cards like VPC. When RDPing to a Windows 7 VM the sound card is listed as Remote Audio. This is fine and will actually push through a decent amount of sound. While testing, it seemed to work fine for WMV files and a few other formats. For some reason, I was unable to get it to work with AVI files, and flash websites like youtube.com. I wanted full sound capabilities. So here is what I was able to get working.
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