I've moved!

Short lived blog here, but I'm going to continue it over on the Lockergnome Nexus site. The new URL for this blog is http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/deepfriedtech/.

Farewell Windows Media Player 6.4

Windows Media Player 6.4, an old standby for quickly playing or streaming media is not included in Windows Vista. I just tried to use it in Vista and Windows Media Player 11 came up. Farewell WMP 6.4, you served me well...

Business games

Not really work related, but when you install Vista Enterprise or Business, you don't have games installed by default. This can be a good thing for most offices, but if you miss Solitaire and Minesweeper, they’re still there. In control panel, search for “features” and click “Turn Windows Features on or off” and the control panel that comes up will allow you to check a box to add the basic Windows games back.

Vista's improved search

If you’ve been playing with Vista and started to change things to the classic look, you should at least give the new interface a chance. The search features are really good. For example, if I open Control Panel and want to manage my printers, I’d have to click through a few levels of icons before getting to it. With the search box that is in the top right corner of all explorer windows, I can type “printer” and it will show all the control panels that have to do with printers.

WebDAV connections

Since there's no more "My Network Places" in Vista, it took a while to find how to connect to my work's WebDAV server. In XP you add it as a "network place," and I found that if you right click on an empty area in Computer you can get the familiar dialog box, now calling it a "network location." This gives me an error trying to connect to the WebDAV server. I initially thought it was because it was a https connection, since XP had problems with that before SP2. However I discovered through the microsoft newsgroups that some people were connecting to WebDAV servers through the "net use" commands. I tried that and sure enough, I had z: mapped to my server. The GUI for mapping a drive works as well. While it wasn't exactly the solution I was looking for, I'm happy because it's functionality I have used third party software to get in XP.

Vista good for mobility? Not if you're in a domain!

The most frustrating part of using Vista so far has been a problem that isn't noticeable unless you're using a computer that's in a domain, but not connected to the network that has the domain. When using my notebook at home and I open a file/open or a save dialog box it takes 30 seconds to a minute to come up. Mark Russinovich explains in detail the problem in his blog. It's a stupid thing and I hope a fix comes out soon. This bug is a showstopper for installing on any users laptops in my organization. All the laptops I setup are in our AD domain. I'll deal with it for now, but my clients won't.

Vista and Active directory

Some issues I've run across with Vista and Active Directory. Login Scripts configured with Group Policy are broken. There's a workaround here that halfway fixes it. The login scripts run but they aren't hidden any longer. This doesn't work for me. When we had scripts run visible before, my clients clicked the close button for the DOS window when the script ran. I have implimented it in a test gpo though, and the drives do map.
The Server 2003 Adminpak doesn't install properly. It looks like it does, but some DLLs don't register with the system. This page has a fix. I guess this is the workaround until a Longhorn Adminpak is released

Vista, Dell, and AMD

We buy exclusively Dell PCs at work and apparently they are trying to get AMD chips on their business desktops. Today my boss gave me an Optiplex 740 that Dell gave us to try out. So far I've updated XP (they sent it with the 32 bit version), installed AV, and put it in our Active Directory. I also used gparted to resize the XP partition to 75GB to install Vista Enterprise (64bit). I'll use this blog to chronicle my testing of this PC and a place to take notes I run across in my use of technology in general, including Vista, Office, XP, Linux, Macs, and whatever else I happen to find.