Windows PowerShell is finally available for Vista, too. Download and installation took me only a minute or so. It is interesting to note, that WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) already checks Windows before the download. If you download it with Firefox, you have to install a plugin first.

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If you are a native speaker and a regular reader of this blog, you probably have noticed that my English sounds a bit odd at times. I live in Germany, and English is only my second language. I also write for German computer journals sometimes and often find this more time consuming since I know most technical terms only in English.

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One of my biggest worries with the upgrade from MS Office 2003 to Office 2007 is that our users will keep the helpdesk busy with questions about the new user interfaces of Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. The changes are really big. Microsoft now offers a very useful and easy-to-use tool which allows users to find the new locations of commands they know from former Office versions.

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Microsoft published the Internet Explorer 7 Deployment Guide, a 67 page Word document, discussing how to plan and carry out IE7 deployment. I just skimmed over the document, but it seems to me that more things have to be considered than what I thought before.

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If not, you really should check them out. WindowsSecurity.com just finished a series of articles that discusses them in detail. The PsTools consist of a couple of command line tools, allowing you to view and manage many important Windows functions.

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Microsoft’s official recommendations are 512MB for a “Vista capable PC” and 1GB for “Vista Premium Ready“. Of course, nobody takes such recommendations seriously, anymore. Steve Row, a Microsoft employee, just posted an interesting comparison with the memory requirements for Windows XP.

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I just read this now, but the Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 SP3 Beta has been available for download at Microsoft Connect for some days. Most importantly, regarding its Windows Vista support.

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You probably know that Microsoft Word 2007 is using a new document format. Every time Microsoft makes such a change it usually causes many compatibility problems in the beginning. If one of your users sends a Word file using the new format to someone still using an older Word version, he will not be able to open it. So it might be a good idea to change the default setting of Word 2007 to the Word 97/2003 document format.

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This is what you get when you enter “xcopy /?” on a Vista command prompt. Of course, you can still use xcopy, but it isn’t wrong to move to Robocopy now. It has many interesting features.

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BDD 2007 is an essential tool and documentation set for deploying Windows Vista. Almost two months after the release of the business edition of Vista, its final version is finally ready for download. BDD 2007 contains important tools like ImageX and Windows System Image Manager (WSIM). I’ve been writing about some of the tools before. Please check out the Related section below.

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There are two versions of XXClone, a free one and a pro edition. The pro edition has some additional features which are useful if you want to be able to schedule the creation of images.

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British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) warns (PDF) British schools and colleges from deploying Vista and Office 2007. In their interim report, they concluded that Vista and Office 2007 don’t have must-have features that would justify their early deployment. In my opinion, their estimation neglects some important factors.

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FTCheck is a very simple but usefull tool for sys admins. It searches for compressed files, EFS encrypted files, Alternate Data Streams, Sparse Files, Offline Files, and Repare Points. It lists all its findings in a text file. FTCheck has a German user interface. That means, you have to know a few German words to use it:

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There are many good autostart managers available for Windows XP/2003. The most comprehensive one is, probably, Sysinternals Autoruns (now Microsoft). Runalyzer from Spybot Search & Destroy, however, offers an interesting feature that is quite useful if you’re afraid of having spyware on your PC that make use of rootkit technology: You can autostart programs on Windows installations using attached hard disks.

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If you are working with roaming user profiles (server based user profiles) in your organisation, then be prepared for big changes. Windows Vista and Windows XP user profiles are not compatible! However, you can use folder redirection to make XP and Vista roaming user profiles interoperable. Even if you are only working with local user profiles, I recommend reading on.

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