Hi,
My problem are not really vm problem with azure and yet they are. I'll try to explain as best as I can.
I tried to clone my vm but before I could do so, according to an article, I had to run sysprep with a few parameters! That turned out to be a disaster! My original vm is running but I can no longer logging into it! I managed to create a new vm and re-use the hard drive from it, and somehow, it must have cloned part of it as I was able to login with my original username and password that was used with my original machine but nothing else was cloned!! Complete pain in the ....!!!
Anyway, that's the background explained. I'm in the process of re-installing all my various software and trying to reset my websites, web services, etc...
While the above is a slow painstaking task, I'm getting there slowly but surely but I've got a couple of really annoying, yet small things that are bugging me and I'd like to sort them out.
1. "Activate Windows" watermark is constantly displayed on my "Desktop". Why? I didn't have this with my original VM. I'm assuming that no activation key is needed since I'm using this vm and Azure through my MSDN subscription. Is it because it was cloned and used with SysPrep? What should I do? Run slui.exe and use one of my MSDN windows server 2012 licenses?
Another strange thing about the watermark is that it's displaying the message in English but using Greek letters!! Very odd!
Any suggestions on how to sort this out?
2. I use Bing as my search engine and whenever I go to my www.bing.com, or even MSDN, it displays most menu in Portuguese and according to one of the url I've seen, it thinks that my machine has it's country set to Brazil, and thus, its language culture set to Portuguese.
I'm manage to change MSDN to use my country and language (i.e Ireland/English) using ie-en in the url, but it's still not stable where parts are still displayed in Portuguese.
When I open the Bing settings, it says that my country is Brazil. I change it to Ireland but even after changing it, all the larger menus at the bottom of the Bing image are displayed in Portuguese and the ones at the top are displayed in English.
Also when I do a search, no matter what, I can clearly see that it is searching with an emphasis on Portuguese or Spanish rather than English.
I've checked my environment settings and everything is set to English/Ireland, from keyboard, to date/time, to language and country. It doesn't make sense! I've set up plenty of machines over the years and I've never been faced with this problem.
Again I have to assume that this is related to cloning this machine and running sysprep, though I don't know why!
Note that problem did not occur in my original vm!
Any suggestions on how to sort this out?
Thanks.
Thierry