There have been quite a few blog posts about how to manually switch edition of the Windows 7 ISO, for example to change from Ultimate to Home Premium.

What I wanted was a program that automated all the steps. I was going to write one myself, but thankfully someone has already released a tool to do just that. The guy responsible is Kai Liu and in fact he has two programs:

• One to turn your ISO into an “All editions” ISO, just like the RC used to work (eicfg_removal_utility)
• One to switch ISO editions which results in a “bit perfect” rendition of the original MSDN ISOs, verified against the MSDN hash codes (windows7_iso_image_edition_switcher)

You can download them both here: http://code.kliu.org/misc/win7utils/

Here is the original neowin post where he talk about the utilities. For the untrustworthy, both of these utilities come bundled with the source code so you can see exactly what they are doing.

Notes: Both these utilities modify the ISO files in-place (so you don’t need to worry about multiple GB file copies).

One potential draw back is both programs use dialogs to select the ISOs so you won’t be able to automate use of these utilities in a script very easily.

As is often the case it can be hard to find the “original” (trustworthy) executables for utilities like this as they get shared widely, copied, and referenced on random forums. Hence after a bit of research I wanted to do my bit to add Google juice to the genuine “Windows 7 ISO Edition Patching/Switching” article.

This lesser known command line utility, introduced on Windows 2000, is something of a hybrid between ping and tracert.

Instead of just determining the path, pathping also sends a barrage of pings to each host along the route. After pathping completes (which can take 5 minutes) it generates statistics for failed pings at each node making it easy to indentify hosts in the route where packet loss is occurring. It also shows averaged round trip times (RTT) to each node, allowing you to identify slow hops, and visualize a packet’s journey.

If you are anything like me though, you may never have paid close attention to pathping’s (somewhat confusing) output…

If you look carefully (ok, not that carefully – I’ve circled the section in red) you will see the ASCII art bars “connecting” each host. What’s interesting is pathping shows you both the packet loss between yourself and the host, as well as packet loss on the links between hosts (the bars). As you can see in the screen shot above its perfectly possible to have a host (telstra310) that is not directly reachable, yet is perfectly able to forward on packets. There is an example in the the full pathping documentation that describes such a result like this:

The routers [snip] are dropping packets addressed to them, but this loss does not affect their ability to forward traffic that is not addressed to them.

One thing I still haven’t figured out is what the value in the “This Node/Link” means in a row that has a “Source to Here” entry. I am assuming it means routed packets that entered the host but never left. Answers on a postcard.

If you ever need to check if a TCP port is open or reachable, one easy way to do it is using a telnet client.

A telnet client actually comes with Windows, but for some annoying reason it is not installed by default. To install the windows telnet client you need to add it using the “Turn Windows features on and off” like so:

Because Telnet is essentially just characters sent over a TCP connection, you can use the telnet client as a poor man’s TCP port scanner. To manually check if TCP port 80 is open or reachable on a server you can type telnet myserver.com 80.

As an example lets see if Google.com has port 80 (HTTP) open …

If you get a blank screen with a blinking cursor you have successfully connected to that TCP port.

In this example, if you are feeling particularly sadistic you can now engage in a HTTP conversation. Type GET index.html HTTP/1.0 and press enter and you will see Google’s home page being sent to you. Same idea would apply if you connected to most other TCP-based protocols; POP mail server etc.

On the other hand if the TCP port is not open or not reachable you will see this:

Troubleshooting ports and firewalls can be a pain. This is the simplest and quickest way I know for checking connectivity.