Vista: Is it here to stay?

[cookie_monster]

@: SYNACK yeh what the hell went on with Office deployment it seems to of regressed.

 

@tmcd35: Ms will go to unhealthy lengths to undermine a competitors products rather than out manoeuvre them. What more can i say, this is why IE6 was stale for years then a competitor came along and bang

Edited April 17, 2008 by cookie_monster

[tmcd35]

@tmcd35: Ms will go to unhealthy lengths to undermine a competitors products rather than out manoeuvre them. What more can i say, this is why IE6 was stale for years then a competitor came along and bang

 

I know, won't stop me belly aching about it thou At least the European Court won't stand for this sort thing! (although that did lead to even more confusing versions of Windows being released).

[Dos_Box]

Now why on earth are M$ doing this? It's not to make money else they'd sell IE. By not including a web browser with the OS they won't be losing any functionality of the actual OS itself. So why? Answer, they didn't want Netscape to make money? Why not? Could Netscape have grown to challenge M$ in either the OS or Office markets had M$ not released a sub-standard browser, I think not. If the IE7 UI was usable and the browser itself standard compliant I wouldn't have a problem.

 

Quite correct. What you lefty out however is that like most Microsoft product it was not initially created by them

I'll do a quick (and lazy cut-and-paste from Wikipedia) to fill in the background).

 

The first Internet Explorer was derived from Spyglass Mosaic. The original Mosaic came from NCSA, but since NCSA was a public entity it relied on Spyglass as its commercial licensing partner. Spyglass in turn delivered two versions of the Mosaic browser to Microsoft, one wholly based on the NCSA source code, and another engineered from scratch but conceptually modeled on the NCSA browser. Internet Explorer was initially built using the Spyglass, not the NCSA, source code[1] The license to Microsoft provided Spyglass (and thus NCSA) with a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's revenues for the software.

 

Note that the license said that Microsoft was to give payment for the revenues it gained from their product. What Microsoft did then was to give it away for free!!

Spyglass saw little or nothing. If we ever get approached by Microsoft I'll spend 3 weeks going over every single page of anything they would ever want me to sign.

[Geoff]

If we ever get approached by Microsoft I'll spend 3 weeks going over every single page of anything they would ever want me to sign.

 

Even then they'd still find some way to screw you over.

[Geoff]

If we ever get approached by Microsoft I'll spend 3 weeks going over every single page of anything they would ever want me to sign.

 

Even then they'd still find some way to screw you over.

[cookie_monster]

@Geoff: you're repeating yourself like a crazy man, "Microsoft will always get you", "Microsoft will always get you", "Microsoft will always get you" :-)

 

 

@SYNACK: I thought the whole point of the new Vista imaging format was that you could patch it offline.

 

Want SP1 integrated with Vista, you'll need the new media as you can't slipstream the OS installs anymore.

[Gatt]

cant vLite (Vista's nLite sibling) slipstream SP1?

[SYNACK]

@cookie_monster "I thought the whole point of the new Vista imaging format was that you could patch it offline."

 

Yes that it the theory but it doesn't wash with SP1 unfortunately. It is unsupported for offline integration as it updates the built in update layer as well. They even discourage people from updating pre-sp1 deployment points and resealing them as this apparently leaves trash behind.

 

@Gatt "cant vLite (Vista's nLite sibling) slipstream SP1?"

 

Theoretically it can but it does not update the OS with the correct data for it to know that it has been patched so the first thing that it does is download all of the pre sp1 patches anyway which is kind of pointless. Well this was the case when I tried it. Also as it is not a supported deployment method we don't know whether it will cause any problems in future with say sp2.

[Gatt]

Is M$'s moto "If it ain't broke - break it good!" :|

[Pete10141748]

Did they fire everyone with an ounce of common sense

 

Yes, 4 people were let go. It was a sad day for M$

 

[gshaw]

Yeah the Office 2007 deployment is a shambles, was tried here and ended up running around fixing the mess it made, as a result I now use SMS for all software deployments - don't trust GPOs now lol

 

The Vista deployment sounded good but from reading above seems like the plan didn't match the reality. There's also all the ideas of it pulling drivers, apps etc over onto a base image but it seems so awkward and fiddly that by the time you set it up you could've made the separate ones anyway

 

Also removing the AD integration from Exchange 2007 seems dumb to me, cba with 3 line long PowerShell commands gimme the GUI back

[cookie_monster]

"Also removing the AD integration from Exchange 2007"

 

Why have they don't that it sounds like a backwards step?

[CyberNerd]

"Also removing the AD integration from Exchange 2007"

 

Why have they don't that it sounds like a backwards step?

 

Sounds like a great idea. Why should you need to potentially change the entire back end directory service of an organization just to install an email server!

Decoupling the two will open the market to organisations that don't use AD and keep regulators happy too.

[cookie_monster]

As Active Directory is built on the Exchange directory service it seemed an odd move, why not have an install option for different directory services. I haven't used Exchange since 5.5 so i'm not really sure of the impact i'm just surprised by the move.

[john]

Its more an annoyance switching back and forth, unless you work the other way, if you add users on your Exchagne box it will also make then an AD account

[cookie_monster]

Well this guy thinks no to the 'Is it here to stay question', it's an interesting read.

 

Prediction: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com

 

I was on the Microsoft campus in the fall of 2005, and I got a vibe from the Windows development team that really surprised me. They were not very happy with the direction of Longhorn or the team’s leadership. They seemed to think that it was time to blow up Windows and start over with something stronger and simpler.

 

Obviously, they didn’t get their wish. At the time, they probably didn’t realize that Jim Allchin would have preferred to do the same thing. Now, it’s very doubtful that they will get the opportunity to start from scratch with Windows 7, but at this point, I think it is very likely that they will get the opportunity to simplify and streamline Windows.

[sparkeh]

Interestingly XP might go on for longer than was planned

Clicky

[Trapper]

Frankly I think Vista is a great home/home office operating system. If you have a decent rig with plenty of RAM and decent graphics hardware.

 

For standard business machines the performance is noticeably worse than XP. For that reason alone I doubt it will take off in the business world, let alone education where we can't replace entire suites with top spec machines at the drop of a hat.

 

With XP Service Pack 3, extended support and the next version out by 2010 I think a lot of organisations will plan to leap frog Vista.

 

It is in my opinion not the new Windows ME as many commentators have said. It is a stable, rock solid OS, with the UI brought into line with Mac OS X. It just requires a big leap in hardware, perhaps more than Microsoft anticipated!

[cookie_monster]

I think a lot of organisations will plan to leap frog Vista.

 

One problem here is that loads of companies and schools had that plan for XP so they're still on 2K.

[torledo]

Believe it or not, you CAN make a business case for Windows Vista | Decision Central | TechRepublic.com

 

check out this devils advocate argument for vista linked in cookies article....

 

it makes a lot of huge assumptions, and identifies those, so i don't want to give the author a total bashing...

 

but even in this hypothetical ideal IT environment the only case for vista is with the advanced features available with vista enteprise/SA. I tend to agree with that, but i would go so far as to say that some of the advanced features are irrelevant in an enteprrise setting.

 

The key question for IT depts. are;

 

will it run well on all our hardware, even our modest Pentium 4's with 1gb or RAM ?

What are the new deployment features/how easy is it to deoply ?

Will our applications run in the new OS.

What is network performance like ? What is the user experience for users when they're accessing network resources ?

 

answers;

question1.............nope

question2.............cool new deployment features with enteprise/SA and in conjunctoin with win2k8. But we can use BDD with xp. hurrah. And anyway we're old hands with RIS/sysprep/Altiris/SMS/ and xp.

question3.............still testing.

questoin4.............perofrmance sucks, and the user experience can best be described as confusing.

 

XP gui needed a design refresh....it's looking old in the tooth. But for business it's all about being familiar with somethign and being productive. Users hate change more than anything...a few bells and whistles aren't going to convince them - particulalry with the performance issues surorunding vista.

 

Plus he talks about companies moving wholesale to vista ??? Most large companies won't have the dual core, 2gb ram latest and greatest machines he's recommending throughout the org to do that.

 

If you'e a company with SA then the advanced features available with win2k8 and vista enteprise could be compelling, particularly if you've got the hardware. But Vista business is the replacement product in most instances for xp pro. The question is, if the hardware can run vista business what is the compelling deployment feature with vista business/win2k8 that isn't available with xp pro/win2k8.

 

I don't know enough about all the new stuff with vista deployment to answer that, but i don't believe there is anything that cant be done with xp clients.

[Guest Guest]

^ Totally agreed.

 

 

All MS needed to do in regards to deployment IMO is add Autoimage/nLite/RogueSpear/etc to the RIS "interface". I say interface but was there actually an interface? lol

 

For me RIS was great. I have two 1gb images which contained all the drivers for every PC in the school (2 because the new batch of PCs have sata HDs which didnt like the first image). Updates are handled by WSUS (although i could have used Autoimage to add them). Software is handled by GPO.

With all of the above i can have any PC in the school up and running in around an hour, alot less if they dont need Macromedia or the big multimedia science software. So thats dozens of differant combinations of hardware and software all handled by 2gb of images as opposed to several hundred gig of images if i were to do it the a-la-ghost way.

 

 

Oh and why the hell did MS have to make SP2 for server 2003 kill RIS? I forgot all about it and blindly installed SP2 on our RIS server (yeah probably my own fault) but hell, why break something which was working just fine in the first place!

[cookie_monster]

I wasn't aware that it broke RIS it just upgrades it to WDS.

[Guest Guest]

I wasn't aware that it broke RIS it just upgrades it to WDS.

 

Im not sure what you have got to do to make it work again, maybe just add the Vista Boot image, but it certainly doesnt "just work"

[cookie_monster]

Yes you're right you do have to alter a setting after the install, i needed to change the x86 boot loader to OSChooser\i386\startrom.com in the WDS console.