I wasn’t sure if I should blog about this. You probably wouldn’t find such a post in a traditional publication. But, I think, this is one of the differences between blogging and publishing. Blogging is something personal, whereas publishing is mostly about delivering information.

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I blogged about this stealth update issue two weeks ago. Now, Scott Dunn reports on Windows Secrets that it conflicts with the XP’s repair option. This feature allows you to recover an XP installation that became unbootable. It seems that the new Windows Update agent is not able to install the 80 latest patches if the system was recovered with the XP repair option.

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Microsoft offers new Group Policy templates for Vista. You probably know that in Vista the Administrative template files (ADM) were replaced with the XML-based ADMX format. Please, check out this article for more information about ADM and ADMX. I compared the new templates with the ones which come with Vista.

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12,000 private testers received Vista SP1. Although there is much stir in the blogosphere and on the news sites about it, I must admit it isn’t really that exciting since there are no revolutionary new features. More interesting is an interview at Channel9 with Mike Nash, corporate vice president in charge of Windows client operating systems product management. His interviewer, who is also a Microsoft employee, was cheeky enough to ask if Vista is a failure.

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You’ve probably heard that Windows Server 2008 RC0 is now available for public download. The most interesting new feature certainly is Windows Server Virtualization (WSV). I didn’t try it yet, but I’d like to share some new information I got from Paul Thurrott’s article about WSV.

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Keith Comb has a nice screencast about Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) in his “Blahg“. If you only want to get a quick impression, you could as well have a look at the screenshots I made from it and if you want to learn about the most important features of WSV, you can check out my recent summary.

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I just read in the German print magazine IT Administrator (08/2007, p. 12-13) that Vista heats-up hard disks more than XP does. Hard disks in idle mode have a five to seven degree Celsius higher temperature and hard disks in operation are seven to nine degrees warmer than under XP. The hard disk’s temperature can get ten degrees higher than the vendors’ specifications allow. This could cause hard disk failures eight times more frequent than with XP.

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Office 2003 SP3 is available for download. The main new features are better Vista support, better interoperability with Office 2007, and improved security. It might make sense to rollout this service pack together with Office 2007 since it is possible to run both Office versions on the same computer.

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VMware Workstation 6.0.1 can now be downloaded. The new version supports a couple of additional operating system versions. Most noteworthy for 4sysops readers is probably that VMware Workstation 6.0.1 adds experimental support for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Server 2008 as host and guest operating systems.

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I already reported some days ago that a complete installation of VMM is available as VHD file. Just to remind you, System Center Virtual Machine Manager is Microsoft’s new management tool for centralized deployment and management for Virtual Server machines. Now, you can also download a 180-day trial version. The compressed setup file has 1.5 GB. I installed and played a little with SCVMM today.

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