In my opinion, there are only a few things that are changed for the worse under Vista. One is the replacement of Boot.ini with the Boot Configuration Data Store (BCD Store). Perhaps using an ini file for storing the boot configuration was a bit outdated, but replacing it with the command line tool bcdedit is not really a better solution. It is even standard under Linux nowadays also to offer a GUI tool for this purpose. You can take this post as an example of why I usually try to avoid the command prompt.

Today, I had to change the boot configuration for the first time under Vista. It is a test computer where I have Vista and Windows Server 2008 installed. I wanted to replace a Vista x86 installation with Vista x64, so I deleted the corresponding partition and created a new one. After I installed Vista x64, the Windows Server 2008 installation vanished from the boot menu. That was not very smart of Vista setup, but okay, it is not a big deal to add the entry again, or so I thought. With Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, I would just have edited the boot.ini, which I had done countless times before. Thus, I thought, it shouldn’t be a big deal to use bcdedit this time.

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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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Yesterday, I listed some of Microsoft’s management tools for Windows Vista. This post is the second part.

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I am still doing some research about the improvements of Windows Vista with respect to system administration. This post is the first part of a list about Vista’s new management tools. I will write another article about this topic soon.

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