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For a long time now we've been listening to the MS guys we work with talk about how great the OS is. They talk about how much the core OS is improved from memory management to the cache manager. Of course these are kernel people so we never talked about the GUI.

My vote? Thumbs up, I'm a fan.As I said, I've installed this on several machines. The install process is good but it still takes longer than I think it should. Vista had drivers for all my hardware, even the custom built machine, except for the SATA RAID driver which I had to download from the manufacturer. One cool thing is that you can choose to put in the product key or not. If you don't put in a product key you get 30 days (IIRC) to eval.

One very intriguing option is a "no GUI" boot mode. I'll have to play with this some time.

On my laptop I have enabled BitLocker volume encryption. This has performed very well. I don't notice it at all. This was pretty much a pain to get set up since I did it after I already had Vista up and running. Supposedly it is easier to do at install time. Also, changing the boot options (like configuring for debug) is more painful with BitLocker on. It doesn't like this and you have to make it happy.

The GUI is excellent. I don't usually worry about this kind of stuff too much, but it does grow on you. Some options that I'm used to are buried and hard to find. For example, I always like to turn off the hiding of file extensions and the hiding of hidden/system files. The only way I could find to do this was to resort to the online help until someone showed me that pressing the "alt" key will show the old menus in an explorer window.

The online help is excellent. I've never used this feature in Windows before so I don't know how to compare to previous OSs. I've been able to find information that I've needed very quickly and it's been very helpful for the most part.

Performance has been good for me although I'm running on relatively new hardware. The only thing I wish was faster is my video perf on my laptop. It scores about a 3 on the Vista benchmark. It does aero pretty well but I notice it being sluggish sometimes.

I heard people complaining about the constant security prompts and thought for sure this would bother me. It hasn't. This is very useful for me but I wonder how non-power users will like it or if they will even know what is going on.

I haven't used a ton of applications on Vista yet. I have imported and used layers created on XP with great results. Office 2003, Google Earth, Picassa, Firefox, etc. The only glitch I ran into was that I had to remove a MSVCRT71 dll from the Google Earth package to get it to work. We don't have support for Vista with our corporate AV solution yet so I've been using Windows Live OneCare. I don't have an opinion on this yet other than it installs fine and doesn't appear to impact perf too much. The other missing piece of software is that our corporate VPN client doesn't support Vista yet.

I am also waiting for Dell to provide network print drivers for my all-in-one home printer.

Waking up from sleep mode is blazingly fast. This is literally no more than a second or two. But it does take longer to reconnect to the network. Also my home-built machine has trouble staying in sleep mode. Apparently this can be caused by improperly working hardware drivers (maybe my SATA RAID?)

Something else I really like is much better support for things like connecting to WiFi networks, entering presentation mode, etc. I used to have to install 3rd party pieces to get this functionality and now it is just built in.

Some other things I'm looking forward to experimenting with are the DVD creator and the Media Center features.

In summary there are many things that I like. MS has done a good job with this OS. When a few more of my critical apps show up I'll be able to move over permanently.]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=33 Sat, 9 Dec 2006 13:53:14 -0700 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=32
MS doesn't keep any information around that could be used to identify a machine or user. I know this because we were looking at some particular crashes with the OCA team and trying to determine if it was the same system or not.

MS provides a nice web interface for accessing this data. We can view the data by crash type, version, etc. We can also download any mini-dumps that we want to analyze. Most of the time Mike can figure out what we did wrong by looking at these. We have been able to find and fix many issues that were never reported by any customer.

By focusing on these we have been able to make SVS super stable in a relatively short time.

So when you are prompted to send data to MS, say "yes".]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=32 Mon, 6 Nov 2006 18:55:00 -0700 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=31
AppStream has a very cool product that is used to quickly and reliably do software delivery using file streaming. They have added SVS support so now they can easily stream SVS virtual software packages. Besides streaming they have some big value around license management.

Scense is coming out with a new user-based software delivery system. They have also integrated complete control of the SVS system into this product. Another big thing they have done is allow SVS to be used in a Citrix environment.

One of the more interesting new things that I saw being done with SVS was presented by Fujitsu Siemens. They are offering a service where they will pre-load new machines with specified applications in SVS format. There were two reasons that they gave for this. The first was that install times for the applications was much faster using SVS. The second was that they wanted to give the customer the ability to safely "turn off" applications on their systems without reinstalling the whole OS.]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=31 Fri, 3 Nov 2006 18:43:00 -0700 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=30
It is always a good time for us to network with MS devs. It is always helpful to be able to fire off an email to the dev of a project at MS.

This event is a "Vista only" event. Kind of makes sense since Vista is pretty much done at this point.

The MS Office team invited us up to do some testing in their lab with SVS and 2007. We're pretty excited about this. We arranged to do it the same week as the plugfest, so there will be quite a few of us in Redmond for the week.]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=30 Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:43:03 -0700 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=29
It is available from the Juice.]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=29 Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:01:04 -0600 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=28
We need some people who have solid development skills. C and C++ are the languages currently used for these components.

We have a great existing team. We are working on software that will, over the next few years, have a major impact on the computing industry.

Software Engineer and Development Team Lead
http://jobs.altiris.com/altirisjobs/default.aspx?ID=450

Software Engineer
http://jobs.altiris.com/altirisjobs/default.aspx?ID=448]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=28 Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:00:18 -0600 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=27 General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=27 Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:35:18 -0600 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=26 WINDOWS IT MEDIA NAMES “BEST OF MMS 2006” WINNERS

Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager won the Overall Best of MMS 2006 award, and Altiris’ Software Virtualization Solution won the Best New Product award. Argent Software’s Guardian, DesktopStandard Corporation’s PolicyMaker Application, and Softricity’s Virtualization Platform all received Runner Up awards. Other finalists were Quest Software’s Vintela Authentication Services, Centrify’s DirectControl, eXc Software’s MOM and SMS eXctender Event Provider for non-Windows, NetPro’s ChangeAuditor, and Iconclude’s Repair System.

Winners were announced on April 26 at the Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine booth #525 during the exposition at 7:00 p.m. These top Management products will gain industry recognition from the prestigious award and be deemed as an industry leader.

Winners of the “Best of Microsoft Management Summit Awards 2006” will be published in the July issues of Windows It Pro and SQL Server Magazine.]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=26 Wed, 3 May 2006 15:41:41 -0600 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=25
Wise Package Studio 7.0 release contains several new features, including extensive support for the Altiris Software Virtualization Solution. You can now use Wise Package Studio to create, edit, and manage virtual software archive (.VSA) packages which enable applications to run in a virtual environment when used in conjunction with the Altiris Software Virtualization Solution.

Read the full announcement here]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=25 Wed, 3 May 2006 14:05:35 -0600 http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=24
We also showed our ability to virtualize what IE does. Basically we start IE and tell SVS to treat it as if it is running from a particular layer. Then everything that IE does (cookies, cache, history, user config changes, etc) are all put into the layer. Delete the layer and it all goes away.

The big ticket item though was SVS on a stick. I had a laptop that did not have SVS or MS Office on it. I plugged a U3 enabled USB 1 GB stick into the laptop and stepped back. Twenty-five seconds later MS Office was activated and available. Big applause. I then launched Excel. The cool thing about this is that it comes up at what I consider to be native speed. You can't tell that it isn't installed. What happens under the covers is that the registry data is loaded from files on the USB stick (this is a mount, not an import), the SVS driver is loaded from the stick, the layer is activated. Shazaam, a fully functional version of Office that performs at near native speeds and that appears to the user as if it is installed on the system. Shutting down is just as cool. Simply a deactivate, unmount of the registry files (fast), and Office was never on the system.

To demo the SVS on a stick thing, I uninstalled Office from my laptop and had no way to re-install it. So for the rest of the conference I've been running it off the stick. It has worked flawlessly for me during this time.

Supposedly this was recorded and we'll be putting the video up on the Juice.]]> General http://www.cookfamily.org/randy/blog/index.php?itemid=24 Thu, 13 Apr 2006 11:21:56 -0600