• It seems that the video about Windows 7 I showed in my post on Tuesday is a fake. http://snurl.com/28×7k #
• There is an updated version of sysprep for XP SP3. Does anyone know why it is needed? http://snurl.com/28xcu #

It is time for the next round of the Vista vs. XP match. In my view, Vista won the first two rounds (Security and Manageability) by knocking out XP within the first few seconds. If this were a boxing match, XP would have been counted out already. But because we are fair sportsmen, let’s give the old champion another chance to regain its title. As before, the text in italics summarizes Kennedy’s arguments.

With Vista, Microsoft introduced some enhancements under the hood that improve reliability. Examples include improved heap management, power management and support for low priority I/O tasks. During day-to-day operations, however, these new features don’t have much impact (expect low I/O priority). When it comes to stability, Windows XP SP2 has proven to be rock solid, and SP3 might even improve the situation. Vista has little room to score in this area.

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I just launched a short survey with a couple of questions that will help me know more about you, my dear reader. I know, IT pros are busy people and so I am glad that GFI agreed to sponsor this survey. GFI is a software company focused on network and content security. If you can spare just ten minutes of your precious time, you’ll have the chance to win one of five GFI products, each worth about $400 - $1,100. There will be two lucky winners. I’ll give you more details about the prizes below, but first let me tell you why I am conducting this survey.

Actually, most of the survey questions are from IDG, the publisher of Computerworld, PCWorld and countless other magazines. I am a member of the IDGTechNetwork and they are interested in promoting 4sysops. In order to do this, they have to know more about your professional background, and this gives me a chance to learn more about my readers. The last two questions will allow you to tell me what kind of articles you would like to read on 4sysops in the future, and you can leave personal comments. For example, you could tell me what you like or dislike about my blog, or just who you are and what you’re doing.

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Windows 7 is still far, far away, but the interest in Microsoft’s next operating system is growing steadily. I think it is not because people are disappointed of Vista, but because Windows 7 could be the beginning of a new type of desktop OS. Today, I found a couple of interesting posts about Windows 7. One is a demo about some new features of Windows 7, then there are some new comments from Bill Gates and Mary Jo Foley has some news about the interaction of Windows Live and Windows 7.

The demo just shows some basic enhancements of Windows Explorer, a Screen & Animation Capture tool, a new Disk Usage Analyzer, an enhanced Task Manager, a short demo about Virtual Drive and the new Website, Blog and Portal Designer.

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When I started reading my RSS feeds this morning, one of the first headings that caught my attention was this one: “Microsoft lies about Vista being the most secure Windows ever”. Since it is from a Vista blog that usually has good stuff, I clicked into it. After reading about the meaningless data that is supposed to support the claim of the heading, I just thought, okay, good job, you lured me to click on this. Very funny, really! Then I moved ahead and was quite surprised how many news sites took the same bait. So my second thought was that I am missing something here.

So what is behind all this? The source of this new Vista bashing campaign is Simon Clausen, CEO of PC Tools, a security vendor. This is how InformationWeek cites him:

Ironically, the new operating system has been hailed by Microsoft as the most secure version of Windows to date. However, recent research conducted with statistics from over 1.4 million computers within the ThreatFire community has shown that Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37% more secure than Windows XP.

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This is the second article in my series about the Vista v. Windows XP issue. In my last post I replied to an InfoWorld article by Randall C. Kennedy, who claimed that Vista did not really improve security. Today I will discuss Vista’s new capabilities regarding manageability. The text in italics summarizes Kennedy’s view.

Vista has a couple of features that improve its manageability, such as the ability to restrict access to external media devices, easy deployment of printer drivers and, most noteworthy, the image-based installation. However, myriad third-party tools also offer those features for Windows XP. That’s why moving to Vista provides little or no ROI from a systems management perspective.

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I have been asked to write an article about the Windows Vista vs. XP issue for the German magazine Computerwoche. They translated an InfoWorld article by Randall C. Kennedy which is one of the best Vista bashing articles I read so far. After reading it, I was attracted by the challenge to defend the Vista pro stance. I agree with some of Kennedy’s views, but quite a few of his claims distort the real picture, in my view.

His article addresses eight fields: Security, Manageability, Reliability, Usability, Performance, Hardware compatibility, Microsoft software compatibility, Third-party software compatibility, Developer tools support, and Future-proofing. Today I will only cover the security aspect. In future posts I will blog about the other fields. Not all of them deserve a single post though.

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Some days ago, I was rumbling against the confusion regarding the availability of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. After that, the confusion continued. One of our admins mailed me an article about Microsoft’s decision to pull SP3. He wanted to tell me that this service pack might not be ready for prime time and that we’d better wait some time before we start deploying it. What I found interesting is that he didn’t notice the reason why Microsoft stopped delivering XP SP3. There is an incompatibility with Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Well, we don’t use this software and that certainly also applies to 99.99% of all Windows XP customers.

I think, my colleague was not the only one who perceived Microsoft’s back-and-forth behavior this way. It just makes an unprofessional impression if a company has to withdraw a new product because of technical issues. Some commentators wondered if Microsoft doesn’t test Windows service packs with their own products.

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The feature complete Beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM 2008, sometimes you read SCVMM 2008) has been available for some days now. Microsoft’s new management tool for centralized deployment and management for Virtual Server 2005, Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX can be downloaded via Microsoft Connect. Today, I had a quick look at it. This post will also give you some tips on how you can test VMM 2008 if you are already working with Virtual Machine Manager 2007.

Considering the fact that VMM 2007 was released in September 2007, VMM 2008 has quite a few interesting new features. Most prominently are its Hyper-V and VMware ESX support. I will probably blog about the new features in another post. Today, I am just sharing some experiences I had when I played a little with VMM 2008.

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Every new Microsoft server operating system brings Active Directory related enhancements. It seems to me that Windows Sever 2008 introduces even more of such new features than its predecessors. I have already covered Fine-grained password policies, Read Only Domain Controllers (1) (2) (3), Active Directory Auditing, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Active Directory snapshots in detail. Some of these new features work with lower DFLs, i.e. Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. The four new features discussed in this post require upgrading to DFL Windows Server 2008.

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