If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know my favorite worst Vista feature: UAC. Now, I found my second worst feature, and I feel the urge to tell the world about it.

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SearchWinIT has a good article summarizing arguments for and against Vista migration. What I like is that Bernie Klinder, the author, doesn’t mention Aero and similar things, as an advantage. He focuses mostly on technical arguments; most of them are relevant for system administrators.

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TrackWinstall is a free tool that informs you about the changes a setup program made to your Windows installation. It shows you what files where added or removed and which files were changed by the setup program. It also lists all Registry changes.

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Microsoft released Remote Desktop Connection 6.0 for Windows XP. Remote Desktop Connection 6.0 (RDC) is already part of Windows Vista. The new RDP client has a couple of new features; some of them seem to work only with Terminal Services in Longhorn Server:

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I just stumbled upon Microsoft’s technical guidance for Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0. Oh my! Taking the length of the documents into account, this seems to be more complicated than deploying Vista.

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Paul Thurrott wrote an excellent article about Vista’s new security features. After reading it, you might get the impression that Vista’s improved security is reason enough to get rid of your XP machines as soon as possible.

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Recently I read that one of the new features of VMware Workstation 5.5.3 is that it has better support for Windows Vista. It is still experimental, though. Since I am testing Vista mostly in a virtual environment, I was curious to know, if all the problems I had with Vista RC1 and RC2 on VMware Workstation still persist.

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I read an interesting article in the German magazine Chip (11/2006). They tested Vista’s performance on different kinds of hardware. All in all, they confirmed my expectations and also my fears.

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Microsoft published the Windows Vista Product Guide with 316 pages. Many of the information there can also be found on the Web, but with this guide, you will have it all in one document. I just skimmed over it and found some information I didn’t see before anywhere else.

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In this last post of my series about Backup Exec 11d and Continuous Protection Server (CPS), I will sum up my view about Symantec’s CDP solution.

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Backup Exec 11d now offers CDP functionality for Microsoft Exchange. In this third post of my series about Backup Exec 11d, I will explain how one can backup Exchange with Symantec Continuous Protection Server (CPS).

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Update: The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Vista SP1 replace the Adminpak.

A while ago, I liked to an article that explains how to install the Adminpak on Windows Vista. Meanwhile I found out that there is a much easier way.

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Today, I started preparations on my own desktop for Windows Vista. I know, I am late. Windows Vista RTM has been available on MSDN for a couple of days already. And I know that many admins have moved to Vista RC2 sometime ago. My post about the Adminpak for Windows Vista is the most often accessed article on this blog for some time now. Obviously, many sysops could not wait until the final version of Vista is out.

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Last week, I introduced Symantec Continuous Protection Server (CPS). Today, I will discuss, how CPS interacts with Backup Exec 11d.

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Windows Server 2003 SP2 RC is now publicly available for download. So it might be time get prepared for Microsoft’s latest Server Service Pack. There are, however, no major changes in SP2, like in SP1. Microsoft has a list of top 10 reasons why we should deploy SP2.

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