Installing Windows 7 / 2008 R2 from a USB Stick

Too much of my life is spent staring at install screens - no more I say!  That time is better spent looking at the blinkenlights, drinking coffee or browsing slashdot.  One way of significantly speeding up install time is using a USB device instead of CD/DVD media.  Here is how to create bootable USB Installation media for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

• Launch the DiskPart utility by typing diskpart at the Start Menu.  If your system does not have diskpart you can download it from here
• Run the list disk command to, surprisingly, list the disks in your system
• Now run select disk % where the "%" is actually the number of your USB drive (obtained above).
• Run clean.
• Now run create partition primary.
• Let's set the partition to active by entering active
• Now we format the drive with the FAT32 filesystem via the format fs=fat32 quick command
• Run the assign command to assign a drive letter to our USB device
• Copy the entire contents of the installation DVD to your USB device (a simple drag and drop will do)
• Plug the USB drive into the target system and proceed with the (hopefully faster) installation.

Configuring the relevant BIOS options is left as an exercise to the reader. 

Trend Micro OfficeScan Uninstallation

If you, like me, have ever been faced with having to uninstall Trend OfficeScan, only for it to ask for a long-lost password, you were pretty much out of luck.  Trend does have a KB article with manual un-installation steps, but that is an exercise in frustration.

Fortunately I recently happened across a "hidden" command that will take care of business.  You need to do the following:

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder where your Trend AV client is installed, usually c:\Program Files\Trend Micro\*****
2. Execute the following command: NTRMV.exe -331

This takes care of all the nitty-gritty stuff, stopping the services, removing files and folders and removing all the relevant bits from the registry.

Another great thing about this approach is that it's much easier to script and / or deploy with your favourite management app.