Anything about IT

This week Jeremy Moskowitz wrote about a Vista/Win7 GPO bug in his weekly newsletter you should know about if you are transitioning to Windows 7.

If you are a systems administrator dealing with Group Policies I strongly recommend to sign-up to Jeremy’s Newsletter.

If you use Vista as your GP management station, and are transitioning to Windows 7 policy definitions, be careful of this bug !

Kai Schmerer from ZDNet Germany has done some benchmarking with Windows 7 , Vista and XP. The full article can be found here

In part one of “Windows Services, What changed from Vista to Windows7”  I highlighted the new, renamed and removed services that come with Windows7.

Some Services are not quite new, but are now just installed by default. One example is the ActiveX Installer Service.

The below table lists those Services where the startup mode was changed from Automatic (Vista) to manual (Win7).

Note that the “Status” for some Services on your system might be different. The list was produced right after having installed both the  Windows Vista and Windows7 client within Hyper-V guest machines.

Looking at the table below, we see that in Windows7 less services are configured to start automatically. This is most likely one of the reasons why Windows7 shows improved boot times.

Today I took a closer look at the Windows Services running on Windows7. A lot of the performance improvements with Windows7 are related to the way how and when services are being loaded so i thought it’s worth to see what’s happening there.

I first installed a Windows 7 build 7077 and a Windows Vista SP1 client on my Hyper-V server. Because I am primarily interested in what’s happening in an enterprise environment, both clients were joined to a domain.

To obtain the services data from each system, i executed the following PowerShell command:

gwmi win32_service | select Displayname, Started, StartMode, State  | format-table | out-file c:\data\services.txt

I then imported the data in excel and then the painful work actually started… , comparing…. I compared the services that were installed including the start mode and current state. I will talk more about the start mode in Part2.

New Services / New Default Services

• Application Identity
• ActiveX Installer (AxInstSV)
• BitLocker Drive Encryption…
• Bluetooth Support Service
• Disk Defragmenter
• Encrypting File System (EFS)
• Windows Media Center Recei…
• Windows Media Center Sched…
• Fax
• HomeGroup Provider
• Media Center Extender Service
• BranchCache
• Power
• RPC Endpoint Mapper
• Adaptive Brightness
• Software Protection
• SPP Notification Service
• Storage Service
• Credential Manager
• Windows Biometric Service
• Parental Controls
• WWAN AutoConfig

Some of the above services are available in Vista as well, but aren’t installed by default.

Renamed

It looks like all “Terminal Service…” type Services  are now called Remote Desktop…..”

Removed*

The below Services exist on Vista, but I haven’t seen them on Windows7.

• removed
• DFS Replication
• ReadyBoost
• Software Licensing
• SL UI Notification Service
• Microsoft Software Shadow …

* well possible that some of the above “removed” services have been renamed or integrated within the above “new” services.

Read Part 2

Although I don’t agree with everything Gartner writes the “Getting Off Windows XP Is More Important Than Windows Vista vs. Windows 7” article describes some thoughts to be made when planning the move from Windows XP to the next OS.

Microsoft Press is celebrating their 25th anniversary and is therefore giving away the “Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition” E-BOOK.

You can download the complete E-Book (44 MB) from here.

I’ve just spend an hour in gathering some additional information around Windows 7 Application Compatibility. Till now when we moved to a new operating system version a significant amount of effort was required with regard to application compatibility. So will companies that invested in Windows Vista Application compatibility have to do all that work again for Windows 7 ?

Unfortunately not, on almost any Microsoft source i found around Application Compatibility, the following statements are being made:

“The key is, if you are ready for Vista, you will be ready for Windows 7”

“if your application can run in Vista, it can run in Windows 7”

An updated version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) for Windows 7 will be released in the coming months, but according to a comment of one of the Springboard Series participants, it would only have one additional check related to Windows 7.

Those who took a look at the Windows 7 internal version number might have noticed that this is 6.1. This is important for application compatibility as well, since many applications would check for the major operating system version number (as seen when moving from Windows XP version 5.1 to Windows Vista version 6.0.

So the conclusion is that those companies who want to accelerate their desktop migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, could actually start testing their applications against Windows Vista and / or the Windows 7 Beta version.

Additional Resources:

Be ready for Windows 7: Application Compatibility Jay Paloma, Deployment Technical Specialist from the Microsoft Singapore Office explaining Windows 7 application compatibility.

Windows 7 Application Quality Cookbook

Springboard Series

Application Compatibility and User Account Control

When you are logged on to a Vista Client through a remote desktop connection, you don’t see the option to shutdown or reboot the system within the Start Menu.

But if you are within the remote session and press CTRL+ALT+END you get the following screen

allowing you to Restart, shutdown or putting into sleep the system.

Another option is to enter the shutdown command at command prompt like shutdown /s that will shutdown the system.

In October 2008 I dropped a post called Don’t wait for Windows 7. Well during the past days I have changed my mind and I guess many others did as well concerning waiting for Windows 7.

When Windows 7 came up on the horizon last year, we heard statements like “it isn’t expected to begin for Windows 7 until at least mid-2011” also at that time, nobody expected Microsoft to provide a public Beta of Windows 7 that early. So far Microsoft seems to receive a lot of positive feedback, first because they made it look like “Hey guys we know you’re all waiting for it, here it is, Surprise !!!” and secondly because what they gave us seems to be quite stable. But now that they have made us all happy in providing us something we can put our hands on, to me it looks like we are now entering into the second phase of speculations about when Windows 7 will go RTM.

I’m not joining those that are negative about Windows Vista, in my view it’s being “talked” more worse than it really is. But fact is that with a possible release date of Windows 7 already this year, why would one that had planned an OS migration not wait for Windows 7 that now seems to be that close ?

Just before Windows Vista was being released we had of course had the same thoughts like “why not wait and deploy Vista”, the reason then to continue or move to XP was mostly related to hardware requirements and application comparability. The required hardware upgrade investments often couldn’t be justified over the advantages Windows Vista would bring.

Today things are a bit different. All hardware we have bought in the past 2 years will be capable of running Windows 7. I was just told today that Win7 would even run ok on a HP nc8000 that is more than 5 years old now. Related to application compatibility we have all had the time to familiarize ourselves with UAC as well.

I personally think it would be great if Microsoft would be more precise about the current plans, knowing that communicating dates can be a risk and if they aren’t met will raise new speculations, but just based on what we have seen in these days from Windows 7, I am pretty sure that in the next couple of weeks, Microsoft should have a pretty good idea on where they stand with Windows 7.

Should it become realistic that Windows 7 is being released this year, those who do plan an OS migration can start planning now and execute shortly after it has been released and because we are all that positive that this time Microsoft delivers a great OS, we wouldn’t wait for Service Pack 1 to deploy it.

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

If you have installed Windows Vista SP1 on top of your first Vista installation and have no plans to uninstall it, you might want to give the following command a try “VSP1CLN.exe”.

The Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) Files Removal Tool (VSP1CLN.exe) can be used to remove the files that are archived after Windows Vista SP1 is applied. Running this tool is optional.

Installing Windows Vista SP1 increases the amount of disk space that is used by the operating system. This space is used to archive files so that SP1 can be uninstalled. Typically, you should run VSP1CLN.exe if you want to reclaim this disk space after applying SP1 and if you will not need to uninstall SP1.

More details on Microsoft TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709655.aspx

I just read a blogpost from Michael Niehaus i think those deploying Windows Vista are interested to know about. The article describes how to shorten the OOBE process. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/958011

I just recevied an updated paper from Microsoft regarding Windows Vista and some statements why not to wait for Windows7.

There is no need to wait for Windows 7. It is a goal of the Windows 7 release to minimize application compatibility for customers who have deployed Windows Vista since there was considerable kernel and device level innovation in Windows Vista. The Windows 7 release is expected to have only minor changes in these areas. Customers who are still using Windows XP when Windows 7 releases will
have a similar application compatibility experience moving to Windows 7 as exists moving to Windows Vista from Windows XP.

Historically, mainstream deployment occurs not when Microsoft releases a product but 18 months later. While the mainstream deployment cycle is beginning for Windows Vista now, it isn’t expected to begin for Windows 7 until at least mid-2011. With Microsoft set to release a new version of Windows every three years, there will always be a new version on the horizon during a typical evaluation period. This means that customers should not base their deployment decisions on the anticipated release-to-market (RTM) date but on an “evaluation completion date,” sometime after RTM and dependent on the
customer. For more information on deployment lifecycle, refer to Gartner’s report, “Don’t Skip Windows Vista entirely”, Gartner 2007.

Not deploying can also have implications for security, support, and regulatory compliance and reduce flexibility in the face of changing business requirements. Due to the lag time between typical OS evaluation and deployment, as well as the fact that many businesses deploy slowly following better hardware attrition cycles, companies who skip an OS release may end up relying on outdated software

as third-party vendors stop supporting older systems. For the vast majority of companies, deployment, application, and device support are well-established for Windows Vista, making it an operational best practice to begin migrating now.

In both work and private life moving to Vista becomes a dominating topic. Of course there are reasons to stay on XP and hold on for another 2 years and then move to Windows 7, but should Microsoft release Windows 7 as planned in early 2010, it then still takes at least a year until enterprise users will see it, as from experience, enterprises don’t adopt new operating systems quickly and there is still this myth of waiting for the first service pack, to give Windows 2008 server a boost , it was released initially with service pack 1 included (just kidding here).

Although Microsoft has confirmed to continue support for Windows XP until 2014, I would definitely not recommend to wait moving to a next operating system until that deadline because at some stage both software and hardware vendors will have less interest to provide support for Windows XP, we see this happening today with Windows 2000. Today most hardware vendors don’t provide official support anymore for Windows 2000 and if, only with limited warranty not to mention the fact that in some cases device drivers are not being provided.

As mentioned above, enterprises don’t adopt new operating systems as quickly as private users, considering at least 9 months to 1 year of preparation prior starting deployment, the earliest date enterprise users would see Windows 7 is in 2011. Unless the company decides to do an accelerated big bang migration within a short time frame, it will take at least another 12-24 months until all users have been migrated.

Just imagine in 2012 we are going to deal with 3 “supported” Microsoft operating systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. In personal environments this might not be so of an issue, but for enterprises I foresee this as a big mess e.g. a scenario to be avoided. Gone will be all the cost savings promised with using the latest OS, as managing 3 different operating systems will cause a significant overhead and will drive up operational  complexity.