This post is the first of a series about the changes in Group Polices in Windows Vista. You might have heard already that some of the changes are quite fundamental. In this post, I am introducing a relatively unspectacular change: Group Policy event logging. If you’ve just started playing with Vista’s Group Policies, this new feature can be quite helpful. Thus, it is a good point to start with.

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It seems that Ed Bott has a new hobby. What will Windows Vista cost? Yesterday, he found the Windows Vista prices on the Canadian Microsoft site, today he offers another interesting source: Amazon. What’s even more interesting is the fact that Amazon is planning to start selling Windows Vista on 30^th of January.

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If you are fast then you can now download Windows Vista Pre-RC1; kind of a RC1 beta. Only the first 100,000 will be able to get it; after that, Microsoft will deactivate the site. I downloaded the 2,58 GB file in 20 minutes which is quite fast.

Ed Bott reports that Microsoft Canada accidentally published the prices for Windows Vista. Microsoft already removed the prices, but you still can check them out in his blog. The prices are in Canadian Dollar.

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You’ve probably heard it; Internet Explorer 7 RC1 is now available. It seems the whole blogosphere is talking about this at the moment. So I can’t help myself and contribute a word or two about it, too.

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I always liked the functionality of WSUS, Microsoft’s patch management tool. However, in my view its web-based user interface is a mess. Recently a colleague told me that WSUS 3.0 will get a “real” user interface, i.e. one with a “normal” graphical user interface. Now, I saw some screenshots of WSUS 3.0 Beta 2 at Windows Connected. I don’t know yet about the new features of WSUS 3.0, but I am already prepared to bid good bye to WSUS 2.0.

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Yesterday, I listed some of Microsoft’s management tools for Windows Vista. This post is the second part.

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I am still doing some research about the improvements of Windows Vista with respect to system administration. This post is the first part of a list about Vista’s new management tools. I will write another article about this topic soon.

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According to Microsoft, you can apply a Windows Vista image to PCs with different Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). You only need different images for computers with 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. This sounds like a revolution for Windows imaging and deployment. So I was quite curious to try this killer feature of Windows Vista.

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Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is the successor of Remote Installation Services (RIS), and can be used to deploy Windows Vista and older Windows versions. In this review I’ll be discussing the experiences I had with WDS.

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For every installation of Windows Vista, you need an image in the WIM format. One great feature of WIM images is that you can mount and inject them with device drivers or other files. In this post, I will be explaining how to mount an image in a WIM file with ImageX. ImageX is the tool for capturing and applying images. But it can also be used to modify an image. This article is based on Windows Vista Beta 2.

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In this post, I am going to introduce some important concepts of Windows Vista’s imaging technology. Every Windows system administrator has to learn about this sooner or later since imaging is the only way to install Windows Vista.

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I am currently playing a little with Windows Vista Beta 2. I guess many system administrators will wonder how to map a network drive or access the folder options in Windows Vista when they open the Windows Explorer for the first time. Basically, it works the same way as in Windows XP. You go to tools in the menu bar and click on “map network drive” or “folder options”. The only question is where is the menu bar? Well, you have to press “Alt” to see it. I wonder what’s the sense in this?

I am preparing an article for a German magazine about Windows Vista’s new features from a system administrator’s point of view. I would like to share some of the results of my research here. In this post, you will find a list of Microsoft’s free deployment tools for Windows Vista with short descriptions.

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Preston Gralla reported that during the Black Hat security conference hackers managed to crack into Windows Vista. He acknowledged that any new OS is more prone to security leaks. The longer an OS has been made available, then the more of its security holes are found which are then patched.

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