The experiences of an SMB IT technician
Archive for the ‘Vista’ Category.
The Microsoft Performance team published a new great article about the Vista eventviewer and saved logs.
With Windows Server 2008 at the door, this is interesting. I would also strongly suggest to read all other articles in the Askperf blog - while updates are rather sparse, the content is extremely interesting and well written.
Windows Vista has been available for consumers since more than half a year - longer for companies and IT professionals.
Are you using Vista on your Desktop yet? No matter what you think of Windows Vista, you should already be using it right now. If you don’t think you’ll ever migrate to Windows Vista, you should start evaluating your alternatives now - and not when mainstream support for Windows XP ends in a few years.
Windows Vista is the next stop in the Microsoft desktop operating system part. I’ll agree that Vista still has some smaller quirks to be sorted out, but the main problem are 3rd party apps made by lazy idiots based upon technology from before 2000. If you’re working in IT, you should start getting used to Windows Vista now, even if you read and heard bad things.
Vista offers many great improvements - none of them are revolutionary, but they definitely make Windows a better platform. These are not the features advertised on TV, or debated in forums - but instead the deployment process which was just awkward under Windows XP and it’s predecessors, and many management improvements.
UAC helps to make privilege separation more comfortable. However, there is no native way to start a command elevated from the commandline. I’ve often found myself to be typing “notepad hosts”, and then getting an error message that i lack the permissions for doing so.
Of course i can launch a cmd window with administrative capabilites (a neat trick for this is to put that at position one in the quicklaunch bar, and then launch it by pressing WIN + 1), but i’ve gotten using to the whole WIN + R, cmd, Enter deal (mostly because it also works on customer’s computers).
There’s a nice Script for elevating a command directly from the commandline. I really, really do wonder why there’s no such command in Vista by default. I’ll make that this is in our standard Image.
Windows Vista brings Shadow Copies to the end users. While this feature was already implemented in Windows XP with System Restore points, only Windows Server 2003 allowed users to access specific versions of files as a sort of online backup (for non-disaster purposes).
With Windows Vista, this feature is now available for the users of the Business, Enterprise and Ultimate versions (the Home and Home Premium use it in the same way as Windows XP did). However, this brings light to new privacy concerns. Files that you deleted and removed from the recycle bin are probably still there. This is actually a good thing as it has saved me more than one restore from backup.
If you delete your browsing history, the files will remain available in their shadow copy form. Of course it is possible to delete all shadow copies, but programs that support secure delete do generally not support scrubbing the respective shadow copies too.
Few end users know about the support, as it is not available in the Home and Home Premium features - Apple brings this technology to the masses, advertising it as a Time Machine. However, many Laptops are sold with Vista Business on them, and many Small Businesses that purchase Hardware from Lenovo or HP might end up with a Vista Business Machine.
End users should learn about shadow copies and that it might affect their privacy - you can no longer be sure that a file you scrubbed and deleted is actually completely gone.
I’ve encountered an interesting problem, where i wasn’t really able to track down the source (but found a solution nonetheless.
It was a new Vista Business machine, running Office 2007, freshly set up by me about a week ago. The problem was that Adobe Flash didn’t work. Or, didn’t work completely. Sites like youtube.com didn’t work, but the flash install site showed the animated bar.
When looking at the add ons settings in IE7, you could see that it was successfully installed. I ran the Flash uninstall Tool, which didn’t work quite right - i had to launch it with administrative privileges manually in order for it to succeed. After that, i revisited the flash install site, the plugin was installed again, and everything worked fine.
And here comes the really interesting thing - the person that was using this machine swore that he never saw the ActiveX installation dialog. I looked at the installed software, and Adobe Reader 8 was part of it. Maybe Adobe Reader installed a slightly broken version of the flash plugin? I didn’t bother to investigate this more closely since the problem was already solved, but this might cause some more trouble down the road.
Yes.
Vista isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. Vista isn’t revolutionary. Vista isn’t Wow. But it is a lot better than Windows XP. It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I’ve been using Windows Vista for over half a year. There are several very cool improvements in Windows Vista, which you might not have heard of. I don’t really care about Aero, but i do care about all the other, important enhancements in Windows Vista.
eventvwr, there are very many improvements to the Vista administration utilities. It’s now also possible to make partitions smaller in Vista, eliminating the need for 3rd Party Partitioning Software.For home users on the other hand, i don’t see much reasons for vista adoption. Of course, when buying a new PC you should buy Vista. But if you’re not interested in the OS itself.
