With much trepidation I decided to try Window’s 7 on my 16 Gigabyte SSD Acer Aspire One, previous attempts at running XP and Vista on the machine left me feeling kind of numb. The issues with Windows and the SSD made the machine almost unusable for even the most basic tasks, these issues lead me to run Ubuntu on the machine for the last 5 months.
Now that Windows 7 has reached our MSDN account I decided it was time to test it properly, downloading the 32 bit version of Windows 7 Enterprise Edition I began the installation. Disheartened by two failed installs due to bad media (it appears my laptops DVD-RAM drive burns coasters!) I finally got the OS installed.
My initial impression’s of the install process and the system were good, the install took a grand total of 7 clicks to complete, the only slow point was the expansion of the files on disk and the initial configuration. Despite the slow speed it only took 2 hours to install, the first boot time was impressive. It takes about 30 seconds to boot to a usable desktop which doesn’t hang on me when I click and ask the machine to perform a task.
I did a quick scout around the internet for information on making Windows 7 more SSD friendly, I was pleasently surprised to find that the OS had carried out most of the tweaks suggested automatically as it knew it was installed on an SSD – thats a huge step forward from the RC we tried out in the office.
The only downsides so far are the terrible shutdown speed of the machine and the time taken to install Windows Updates – those though are things I can live with for now.
We recently purchased Ghost Suite 2.5 from Symantec.
In testing we noticed an issue where by if you tried to deploy the Ghost Client to a PC in a workgroup it would fail with the following error message.
Failed to install:
\\PC780
(7): Connection: Logon failure. Possible reasons are:
1. Incorrectly specified password and/or username.
2. Simple File Sharing is enabled and the client is running on Windows XP.
3. Incompatible Windows LAN Manager authentication levels between console & client machine.
Please refer to the Symantec Ghost Manual to change the above mentioned windows settings.
The fix was to disable Simple File Sharing on the target PC.
This can be accomplished by navigating to the tools menu in Windows Explorer, choosing Options then clicking on the view tab. The last option on that window is to Enable or Disable Simple File Sharing.
Simply untick that box, and click okay.
You will then be able to install the Ghost Client.
I recently installed the RC of Windows 7 along with it I installed Steam.
What followed was an issue where the software refused to load Steam.dll.
The issue was related to the fact the corporate firewall was blocking steams port, in my case I added the machine to the CMP allow rule which resolved the issue.
In your environment you may need to figure out exactly which ports to open.
~Dan
Today I stumbled accross this amazing blog entry http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2007/10/12/documenting-active-directory-infrastructure-the-easy-way.aspx
It covers a really simple way of documenting your Active Directory setup, it saved me hours spent reviewing everything!
I heartily recommend this entry to other Windows SysAdmin’s out there!
~Dan