07.30.08
Posted in General Stuff at 9:53 am by Administrator
I suppose the din of Vista haters has been increasing lately to the point where I’ve actually noticed it. Lastw week, I read a blog post from my good buddy Jackson Shaw, who expressed his frustrations over Vista and IE7. And of course the technology press and analysts have been all over the apparent lack of "goodness" in Vista, what with analysts trying hard to outdo each other about recommending or not recommending organizations go to Vista. Well, and then there are those silly Mac ads that have been on forever. I like the Mac, but come on.
In any case, I figured I would break from my summer blogging hiatus to briefly blog about my own Vista experiences. Of course, as a Windows technology person, someone who writes and and develops for Windows, I’m going to have a particular viewpoint about things, but I wanted to try and blog as objectively as possible about my own experiences. I’ve been using Vista now for almost two years. I think I first installed it on my primary desktop machine when the first RC came out and have been running it steadily ever since. Here are some highlights
- I’m running it on a Dell server box that has a 16-bit video card wedged into an 8-bit slot (don’t ask). In all the time I have had it on this box, I have not had one crash, or blue screen. And I install a heck of a lot of crap on my machine (add/remove programs currently reports 197 applications installed!)
- Application incompatibilities have been minimal. For those apps that did not work, I was generally able to work around it or get updates for the apps
- Driver availability has been good. The only thing I was not able to get working, was an old Motorola bluetooth adapter, and frankly I haven’t tried it again since SP1.
- The biggest gripe I’ve had with older versions of Windows is that, over time, they would get what I called "bit rot". Basically with more stuff installed and more crap on the hard drive, they would get slower and slower, to the point that I would typically have to re-image every year or so, which, I can tell you, is no fun with the amount of stuff I have on a typical system. I have not yet re-imaged my Vista system after almost 2 years and, while its not as zippy as it first was, it is still performing quite well. I will likely re-image it sometime in the near future, just to clear out some of the flotsam, but it won’t be because it has slowed to a crawl.
- From a usability perspective, I turned off Aero Glass a while back, after I got over the gee-whiz factor, and have not seen a need to have partially transparent windows since then. In fact, most of the whiz-bang UI things I rarely use or need. The things I need the most, which are apps to just run and for the desktop as a whole to respond quickly, happen consistently. The big thing I hated about XP, were those inexplicable hangs where the whole desktop would just decide to take a lunch break. I have had little to none of those on Vista. The only thing it occasionally does, which bugs the heck out of me, is fail to respond to my urgent requests to end some task. It seems to have to think about it, then try to tell Microsoft all about it before letting me do something. I would prefer a little less of that and a little more kill, kill, kill.
- Perhaps my biggest gripe of Vista is UAC and mostly because of the kind of work I do. I don’t like that, even as an administrator, UAC seems to block me from doing certain things unless I elevate privileges. And, whenever I build software intended for Vista, I have to worry about and work around customer problems with UAC. Usually, if something isn’t working, I tell the customer to make sure they are doing whatever they are doing from an elevated prompt, but that’s a pain. They need to make it easier for me to build apps that do that for them. Also, installations–I don’t want to have to always fire up and elevated command prompt whenever I want to make sure an installation is really working. Frankly, some of this may be my own lack of knowledge about how UAC works under the covers, but its just too complicated for my tastes.
- The other dev related issue I have with Vista is very particular. They have made it too hard for applications to store per-computer application-related data that a normal user can write to. If I don’t want to put app data in per-user locations then I’m stuck trying to work around the tighter permissions and UAC. That’s a pain and I don’t like it.
So, that sums up my Vista experiences. Overall I think Vista is a big improvement–from a speed, stability and security perspective, over XP. Just a few tweaks here and there and I think it would be a great OS. What do you think?
Tags
Windows Vista
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07.14.08
Posted in GPOGUY.COM at 5:15 pm by Administrator
Just a quick note to everyone out there that if you visit www.gpoguy.com as of today, you will see some pretty big changes on the site! We’ve partnered with the guys over at activedir.org, home of the very popular and very cool Active Directory mailing list, to make gpoguy.com a much better resource for Group Policy information. I hope you all like the new look! Drop me a line if you have any comments or feedback on it. I’ll be fleshing it out with more content over the next months as well. We’ll also be introducing a cool new service soon that anyone with a need for Group Policy information will really appreciate. More information on that soon!
Darren
Tags:
Group Policy, GPOGUY.COM, ActiveDir.org
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07.02.08
Posted in PowerShell at 2:37 pm by Administrator
Well, we’ve released a new version of our GPMC PowerShell cmdlets–version 1.2. This new version represents a significant updgrade to the existing cmdlets. The biggest change is that we incorporated new functionality that became available in the version of GPMC that shipped with Vista, SP1 and Windows Server 2008. As a result of those significant GPMC changes, we had to break the cmdlets into two separate download packages–one package for Vista, SP1 and Server 2008 users and the other for earlier platforms. In general, the main differences between the two downloads is that the package for Vista, SP1 and 2008 supports some features like managing "Starter GPOs" and some other new capabilities that the older version of GPMC does not support. But both packages have added some cool new features, such as better pipelining support between cmdlets and support for creating GP Settings and RSOP reports. The pipelining support is especially interesting for those of you out there looking to fully automate your GP Management tasks. In earlier versions of the cmdlets, whenever you got a reference to a GPO or created a new GPO, you could not easily pipe the output of that to another cmdlet. The reason for this is that the objects that the cmdlets emitted were COM Interop types that did not appear as useful objects to the PowerShell pipeline. As a result, we have modified the default output of many of these Get- cmdlets to emit custom objects that are more easily piped to other cmdlets. For example, now you can create a GPO and link it in one fell swoop, like this:
new-sdmGPO "Marketing Stuff" | add-sdmgplink -Scope "OU=Marketing,DC=Cpandl,DC=com" -Location -1
If you do still need access to the COM interop types, then there is now a -Native parameter on cmdlets that emit these custom objects so that you can revert to the old 1.1 behavior if needed.
The following are the rest of the release notes on the new 1.2 version. Check them out and let us know what you think!
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Release Notes for SDM Software’s GPMC PowerShell Cmdlets, v1.2
July 2, 2008
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#Added -Native parameter to a number of the get- cmdlets, including get-SDMGPO. In version 1.1, these cmdlets emitted native GPMC COM Interop types, which could not be sent to the pipeline successfully. As a result, all of the cmdlets in this release that support the -Native parameter now, by default, emit custom object types to work better with the pipeline. If you need the native GPMC object types, then use the -Native parameter.
#Add 9 new Cmdlets, including:
Add-WMIFilterLink: Links an existing WMI filter to a GPO
Copy-SDMStarterGPO: Copies an existing Starter GPO to a new Starter GPO (Server 2008 and Vista, Sp1 only)
Get-SDMStarterGPO: Retrieves a reference to and information on a named Starter GPO (Server 2008 and Vista, Sp1 only)
Get-SDMWMIFilter: Retrieves a reference to and information on one or all WMI Filters in a domain
New-SDMStarterGPO: Creates a new Starter GPO (Server 2008 and Vista, Sp1 only)
Out-SDMGPSettingsReport: Creates an xML or HTML GPO Settings report
Out-SDMRSOPLoggingReport: Creates and XML or HTML Group Policy Results report
Remove-SDMStarterGPO: Deletes a Starter GPO (Server 2008 and Vista, Sp1 only)
Remove-SDMWMIFilterLink: Removes any WMI Filter linked to a particular GPO
#Added a Name parameter to Get-SDMGPLink. This new parameter lets you search for links by GPO name in addition to SOM. So, you can provide a GPO name and get a list of all the places its linked.
#Added a GPOID parameter to Get-SDMGPO. This new parameter lets you search for a GPO by GUID instead of by name. With this new parameter, you can use this cmdlet to effectively translate from GUID to Name and Name to GUID.
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Tags:
Group Policy, PowerShell, GPMC, SDM Software
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