Anything about IT

Be aware of the upcoming End of Support for Windows Vista (RTM) and Windows XP SP2. More details here. Also read End of support for Windows 2000 and Extended Support phase transition for Windows Server 2003 here

Is your application vista compatible ? The Windows Vista Application Compatibility List for IT professionals might give you the answer. The list contains all applications that have the status “Certified for Windows Vista” or “Works with Windows Vista”.

This list might be helpful as well in planning for Windows7, since “most” applications that work for Windows Vista are supposed to work on Windows7 as well.

Mark Minasi has put together a nice overview on Windows7. “the next Windows: Lucky7?”

The Windows Vista footprint is quite large, so my current thoughts are “how to reduce the Windows Vista footprint ?”. I hope to come up with a complete overview at some stage, for now i have found the following interesting references:

Uninstalling Drivers and Devices in Windows Vista a Microsoft white paper primarily intended for driver developers, but why not use the same methods described in there and reduce the driver store size ?

Reduce size of installed Vistasome tips how to remove a couple of unnecessary things like wallpapers etc.

The reason for looking into this is not that there is an issue with already installed clients, since usually there is enough disk space available, the objective is to get the customized windows vista images smaller or let’s say as small as possible.

According to a blog post on the Windows Blog from Mike Nash, Windows Vista SP2 will be made available on TechNet Thursday December 4th.

Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) Customer Preview Program (CPP

The current plan is to ship Vista SP2 in the first half of 2009.

….. in fact it’s already available on MSDN now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx

I wrote about BITSADMIN earlier, use the below command line to directly download Vista SP1. Note that you have to create the c;\download folder yourself or define an other path.

BITSADMIN /TRANSFER VSP1 http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/a/9/3a9b72c2-527d-4694-8a49-84c056d4c34d/Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave0.exe C:\DOWNLOAD\Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave0.exe

Until last week we have just seen rumours around the Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista. The only visible thing from Microsoft was a placeholder KB number on their Support page.

On October 24, Microsoft has droppped some more information on their Windows Vista blog about the Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista.

While most people again seem to get excited about Microsoft’s next operating system and waste their time with rumours and guessing when it will be released, let me continue with promoting not to skip Vista

An interesting article about “Five Reasons Why Skipping Windows Vista Could Backfire” was posted yesterday on www.cio.com

I found the arguments good enough to mention this article here.

To be honest i haven’t gone into the details of the Windows Integrity Levels myself but wanted to mention the chml.exe tool that can be downloaded from Mark Minasi’s web site.

More details about the Windows Vista Integrity Mechanism can be found here:

Instead of manually searching the web, i have created some Google Alerts. This is very useful as it does simply send me an e-mail every day with the found results.

Of course like many others i’m also interested about what is going on around Windows 7, but to be honest, i really am not interested on how “Paint” will look.

What annoys me most is all the rumors going around about the possible release date for Windows 7, first we heard 2010, then some argue 2009, but today i even see messages speaking about Summer 2009 and of course Microsoft is not commenting on any of those messages.

But they should, because it’s about money and time being invested. In an earlier post i had argued not to wait and move to Vista, but if i would put myself into the seat of A CIO i would get concerned on what decision is to be made.

Again, i would wish to see some clear statements from Microsoft, especially what customers can do that have adopted Vista or plan to do in the very near future. Will there be an easy upgrade path , just like adding a service pack ? In the past an in-place upgrade was rather a no-go when doing serious IT management, i have seen very few companies doing in-place upgrades on clients as it is rather messy, however considering the new modular way the OS has been build we might want to re-evaluate such an approach if that would be provided to get a Vista client up to the next level. Well let’s see Microsoft plans to tell us more in November at the PDC. Just hope they are aware of the following, in many companies IT spending budgets are being planned in these days, not in december !

All those being pessimistic about Windows Vista, book some time and carefully read this:

http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html

In 2006 Microsoft acquired the company DesktopStandard known for its extending Group Policy products GPVault and PolicyMaker.

While GPVault has become part of Microsofts MDOP suite that is available only for Enterprise customers that have a Software Assurance contract, the Policy Maker features have been available to everyone.

The PolicyMaker GPO extensions are now called GP Preferences.

GPO Preferences can be managed directly from a Windows 2008 system that has the latest GPMC installed or through a Windows Vista client with RSAT installed.

With GP Preferences you can now manage Windows 2008 server, Windows Vista, Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP SP2.

What can I do with these GP Preferences ? Well, GPO preferences go beyond what we used to do with Group Policy settings today, furthermore while GPO policies are being enforced, with GP Preferences a user might still have the possibility to change things.

With GP Preferences, you can now customize all those things that you would typically do through a logon script, software packaging or by putting the settings into an image.

The big advantage is that now you can do this all from the same management console where you manage your Group Policy settings.

To give you an idea of what GP Preferences can do:

• Configure Power Settings
• Drive Mappings
• Map local / network printer
• Create / Change Folders, Files and Registry settings
• Configure Applications through extensions.

Furthermore , and I found this an extremely useful feature, you can target the GP preferences. As an example, you can first define power settings or power schemes and then add a query so that the GP preference is only being applied if the query matches that device or user, let’s say, only apply the power settings if the system is a notebook.

Give it a try, if you already have a test environment available all you need to do is the following:

Install a Windows 2008 server or RSAT on Windows Vista SP1

Open the Group Policy Management Console and create a new GPO Object.

Within the GPO object create a new Preference, for example an environment variable that is set at system level

Link the Group Policy object you just created to the OU where you have your test machine computer objects stored

On the client machine run gpupdate /force to pull down the new GPO settings.

If you are using a Windows XP client, you will first need to install the client side extensions that can be downloaded from Microsoft.

Resources:

A Guide to Group Policy Preferences for Users of PolicyMaker Standard Edition

Group Policy Preferences Overview

Group Policies on TechNet

Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP (KB943729)

Microsoft has published a Windows Vista Performance and Tuning Guide focusing on the following:

• Making configuration changes that help a computer feel more responsive when you use it.
• Using hardware to boost the actual physical speed of a computer.
• Making configuration changes that help a computer to start faster.
• Making the computer more reliable may help increase performance.
• Monitoring performance occasionally so that you can stop problems before they get too big.

Although you usually don’t read IT related books from page 1 and end it on the last page, I consider having finished reading Mark Minasis’ Administering Windows Vista Security – The Big surprises.

While many IT books can end up being a bit annoying, i found this one very nice to read as it does include the authors own opinion and practical experiences and it does real fluently.

The book gives you a good insight into Vista’s UAC, File and Registry virtualization and other security related topics.

Furthermore the books contains some practical examples including demonstration tools that can be downloaded from Marks’ website to better understand how registry and file virtualization is working.

In my earlier post "Automating Regional Settings configuration" I described how to script the Regional Options settings for Windows XP using a rundll command.

For Windows Vista there is a similar trick using the following command:

control intl.cpl,, /f:“filename.xml”

Details on how to populate the filename.xml are documented on Microsoft Technet – Guide to Windows Vista Multilingual User Interface.