I suppose, many working with Vista now are considering disabling User Account Control in Vista. There is at least one good reason to do so, but there also some reasons to give UAC a chance.

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Yesterday, I described how to start an application at an elevated level, i.e. with Administrator privileges under Vista. Unfortunately, this won’t prevent UAC (User Account Control) prompts from getting on your nerves. Every time a user or an Administrator runs an application requiring Administrator rights, UAC will prompt you for confirmation to proceed. Microsoft calls this “Secure Desktop Prompting“. These UAC prompts only distract you from your current task and bring no extra security. Therefore, I recommend disabling this feature.

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Some days ago, I promised to write about the different ways of elevating an application, i.e. to run it with Administrator privileges in Windows Vista. If you use Vista already, you have probably noticed these UAC (User Account Control) prompts. Every time you start an application requiring Administrator rights, UAC will bug you with this message: “Windows needs your permission to continue”.

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I’ve tried quite a few desktop managers, and VirtuaWin is my favorite one, so far. The Open Source tool comes with many interesting features.

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I just downloaded VMware Workstation 6.0, and upgraded from VMware Workstation 5.5. The new version has some nice features, but I regret my curiosity already.

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Yesterday, I discussed a case where UAC was the reason why one of Microsoft’s own application, which is supposedly Vista compatible (OSD Feature Pack), failed to run properly. In this post, I am going to explain why this happened and what is its significance to system administrators.

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Before I was just upset by these concentration destroying UAC pop-ups. When I played these past days with the OS Deployment Feature Pack of SMS 2003 SP2 and Vista, I encountered a new “nice feature” of UAC. If you are a sysop, you’ll probably have a lot of fun with this in the near future.

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Some days ago I wrote about the limited support of SMS 2003 SP2 for Windows Vista. Today, I deployed Vista in my testing environment using the OS Deployment Feature Pack for SMS 2003 SP2. My experiences are comparable to the first part of my test.

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I just stumbled upon Microsoft’s latest Group Policy Settings Reference. You probably know the old one for Windows XP/2003. The new one also includes Vista’s new Group Policy settings. If you compare the Excel tables containing all settings, you can calculate the number of new settings that were introduced with Vista.

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FileAlyzer is a free tool that analyzes the properties of a file and its contents. The tool can be accessed from the Windows Explorer’s context menu. So, you just have to right click on the file and select FileAlyzer.

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Windows Connected has six useful tips for admins dealing with Vista’s new imaging technology: Script Everything, Automate Your Installs, Virtual Machines make it easy, Minimize Drivers in your reference Image, Keep a build document, Hardware.

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BDD 2007 is now feature complete. Thus, it is really time to get acquainted with it if you plan to deploy Vista in the near future. The documentation is ready as well. BDD 2007 contains important deployment tools for Vista like ImageX, WSIM (Windows System Image Manager) or WDS (Windows Deployment Services). You can download it at Microsoft Connect.

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Microsoft SMS 2003 SP2 (Systems Management Server) only offers limited support for Windows Vista. You have to wait for SMS 2003 SP3 in order to use all its features. So far, I didn’t find an official Microsoft document with more details about the supported features. I am currently playing with SMS 2003 SP2 to find out how compatible it is with Vista, and if it can be used to manage Vista.

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You might have realized in the past days that 4sysops was unreachable sometimes. There have been content spam attacks from countless different machines resulting in DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service).

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