Windows reports its missing a required driver or certificate in order to use a smart card

When trying to use a smart card, you receive the error message:

A smart card was detected but is not the one required for the current operation. The smart card you are using may be missing required driver software or a required certificate.

Steps to resolve:

1. Go to the Microsoft Catalog and download the driver required for your smart card (I searched for "Gemalto" and found the Gemalto Minidriver for .NET, which worked for me).
2. Unzip the downloaded file.
3. Right-click the .INF file and click “Install”.
4. Done. You can use your smart card now. :-)

More information (thanks to Ben and Daniel for those articles):

• Smartcard Needing Drivers In Order To Be Smart
• Connecting a Smart Card to a Windows 7 virtual machine

How to convert a VMware's VMDK hard disk to Hyper-V's VHD format

Answer: Use Vmdk2Vhd.

Description from the creators's website:

Vmdk2Vhd is a simple utility to convert virtual hard drive images from VMWare's VMDK format into the Microsoft's VHD format. This is a sector by sector copy operation from one format to the other and the source file remains unaltered.

Shortcut for entering BIOS in VMware

… is [F2].

Disabling time synchronization in VMware

Sometimes it might be useful to set the date and time in a virtual machine explicitly. Therefore you need to turn of the automatic time synchronization with the host system.

To do so set the following options in the virtual machine's configuration file (.vmx) using your favorite editor:

tools.syncTime = FALSE
time.synchronize.continue = FALSE
time.synchronize.restore = FALSE
time.synchronize.resume.disk = FALSE
time.synchronize.shrink = FALSE
time.synchronize.tools.startup = FALSE

Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/AJGB/archive/2006/10/19/94498.aspx

For more info see:
Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines

P.S. For disabling the time synchronization with Virtual PC 2007 see:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/11/28/disabling-time-synchronization-under-virtual-pc-2007.aspx

Windows requires activation after cloning a VM

Even if your base image is activated correctly the clones created from it might require an activation.

A simple workaround is to force VMware to generate a new MAC address. This will probably cause Windows to ask you to re-activate your base image. Once this is done you can clone it without having to re-activate it again.

Turn off beep sound in virtual machine

As described here:

sc config beep start= disabled

Converting Virtual PC virtual machines to VMware

The most reliable way to convert your Virtual PC/Virtual Server/Hyper-V virtual machines to VMware is to use the "VMware vCenter Converter" (available free of charge).

Optimizing VMware virtual machines with PerfectDisk 2008 grows, instead of shrinks, the virtual disk

Prerequisites:

• Product: PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware
• VMware: Virtual Machine *with* linked disks

Situation:

• After "optimizing" the VM the file grows (in my case from 13 GB to 100 GB, which is the maximum size of the dynamic disk)

Workaround:

• Create a full clone of your VM (this copies all the linked disks + your VM into a target disk). You are not using the base disks from that moment on. But the resulting VM will be nice and small and in the future you can use PerfectDisk again to optimize and shrink your VM.

Background:

• VMs with linked disks are not available for SHRINK operations.
• WIthout linked disks this works perfectly.

Not enough free space to create a full clone out of a linked clone with VMware

Situation:

• You have a linked clone.
• You do not have any snapshots, just the current state.
• You want to create a full clone out of the base image(s) and the current state using the VMware Wizard.
• You get the error message that you need (3.5 GB) of free hard drive space.
• Freeing space on the source and target drive does not seem to help.

Solution

• Just create a snapshop and re-try the full-clone-creation.

Enjoy!

[Virtual PC] Ever wondered why the Wireless Network Adapter is not recognized?

Wireless network adapter support is not turned on by default, but can be done by following a few steps outlined by the Virtual PC Guy  [1].

[1] blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/10/24/why-doesn-t-virtual-pc-2007-recognize-my-wireless-network-adapter.aspx