Some days ago, I discussed a couple of features that only come into play if Vista and Server 2008 work together. Today, I stumbled across another Microsoft page listing several of these features. Unfortunately, it also contains features that are available as extensions for Windows XP. However, some of them seem to be Vista/2008 only features.

First of all, I should note that I was quite surprised how difficult it is to find out what these “better-together features” really are. Microsoft’s marketing texts give hints, but they also do their best to disguise the real benefits of Vista+Server 2008. Journalists tend to just copy Microsoft, often without really understanding what it is all about.

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The adoption of Windows Vista in corporate environments is probably not as fast as Microsoft had hoped for. The question is, can Windows Server 2008 accelerate Vista adoption after it’s released? This certainly depends on the features that can only be used if you deploy Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista together. In this post, I examine all these features I am aware of.

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Just in case my blog post on Monday didn’t convince you that it’s is worth to upgrade to Vista, you should have a look at this impressive feature list at Microsoft. I don’t know if it is new, but I just saw this in a Microsoft Newsletter. I think this site confirms what I said before. Vista has no wow features, but so many tiny improvements which when summed up makes your daily work more productive. And I bet that you’ll find at least one feature that might turn out as your personal wow feature. This list could also be useful if you want to convince your boss to upgrade to Vista in your organization. For this, you only have to find her or his personal wow feature.

I am somehow surprised how many Google users come to my blog searching for Vista keyboard shortcuts. It seems it is widely unknown that Vista has an excellent help file. It lists all shortcut keys. Since I can’t link to this list, I just copied all shortcuts to this post.

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Microsoft published a couple of step-by-step guides for sys admins. I think I saw some of them on Technet before. This page lists many important guides as Word files. When I skimmed over the titles, I realized that there are quite a few new things to learn for sysops. This reminds me of a remark Bill Gates made some years ago. He said that in the future Windows will be so easy to manage that there will be less need for system administrators.

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Update: If you are interested in improving Vista’s performance you might be interested in this post, too: 50 ways to speed up Vista

SpeedyVista has a comprehensive list of Vista’s services accompained by some explanation regarding their purpose. The list distinguishes between the different Vista editions: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. You can use this list to disable unnecessary services to speed up Vista and, more importantly, as reference guide.

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Vista comes with a new indexing service which improves desktop search. It not only makes search faster, but also adds some nice features. The one I like most is that it allows you to search very fast for mails in Outlook. There are, however, cases where you might want to disable Vista’s search indexing.

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VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta 3 (build 39849) has been available for some days now. I tried it today on a Vista host because VMware Workstation 5.5 runs quite unstable there. Since version 6.0 promises Vista support, I was hoping that I could use the Beta instead of version 5.5.

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You probably know that the C:\Documents and Settings folder doesn’t exist anymore in Vista. It was replaced by the C:\Users and C:\ProgramData. Vista uses symbolic links pointing to these new folders for compatibility reasons. However, many guides still refer to the old folder structure. There is a simple trick for using the old folder name in Windows Explorer, though. This way you can find configuration files easier.

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I like Vista. Really! Some of its new features are very nice! I only wonder, when will the final version of Windows Vista be available? Wait a minute! Didn’t Microsoft just release it? Yeah, they did. Still I continue to wonder, when the final of Windows Vista will be available.

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