Internet Explorer Cannot Download https://something (Eric Law’s IE Internals)

Earlier today, I was asked to troubleshoot a secure site where file downloads were always failing. Having seen this problem many times often over the years, I immediately suspected that the web developer wasn’t aware that

if a user tries to download* a file over a HTTPS connection, any response headers that prevent caching will cause the file download process to fail.

* Note that this applies to “downloaded” files that open in programs other than IE. It does not apply to resources that render inside IE’s HTML rendering engine, like images/script/css/etc.

When Internet Explorer encounters a HTTPS download that will not be cached, the download is aborted with the following dialog box:

Creating a VHD from an Installation CD (Vineet Sarda)

To create a bootable VHD from the Windows 7 install CD, you will need to locate the main WIM file which is in the sources directory of the DVD –> E:\Sources\Install.wim

With this WIM file you will have to use the WIM2VHD utility, which is script file to create the VHD.

From an Administrative command Prompt, The command line will be as follows

CSCRIPT wim2vhd.wsf /WIM:E:\sources\Install.wim /SKU:ULTIMATE

continues at the MSDN Windows 7 and Application Compatibility blog

Native boot from VHD on a Windows XP computer (Mark Wilson blog)

Like almost every other corporate in the world, where Mark and I work there is a standard build deployed to everyone. The default in our particular organisation is a 32-bit Windows XP OS regardless of the capabilities of the laptop or desktop it is deployed to. Over the years, this has caused a number of problems that have required an increasing number of “exemptions” from standard policy to allow people to run a different Windows version or platform.