One of the things that has appeared with Vista in a domain is that the selection box that you woudl normally use to be able to log onto the machine locally is no longer appearing on the login screen.

 

So .. how do I log onto a Vista box that is joined onto the domain using a local acount?

 

If I wanted to logon with a local user account called Kyle I would type into the account name box:  .\kyle - this then logs on using a local account rather than a domain account.

I have been travelling around the country again with Microsoft presenting on Business Desktop Deployment.

 

One of the questions that regularly comes up in discussions is "How much is this going to cost?" and then following that is "How do I justify the expense/time?"

 

I was looking for some "facts" to back up my belief that the short term pain of getting BDD implemented was offset by the benefit long term and came across a Gartner study commisioned by Intel and Microsoft that has a few case studies based around the Gartner Total Value of Opportunity. Click Here to read it.

 

 

 

 

So - basically not a lot of assistance - I was speaking with Andrew Dudgell about it and he came up with a few suggestions.. all to do with the fact that I was running Virtual PC on a laptop. I did have hibernation turned on and that can cause troubles. Applied fixes and still no success.

Then further digging found a utility that was mentioned on the VirtualPC Guy's site. Basically what it does is turn off all the funky processor saving type functioning that processors seem to have nowadays. So - after having Virtual PC crash every couple of minutes - now it is working fine. So check it out if you are having the issues that I had. (oh.. and set it to Maximum Performance to ensure that there is no stepping taking effect that might cause you problems)

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/index.html

To all the people that attended the Vista infosessions in Brisbane.. thanks!

 

The feeback was great and it seemedlike a number of people learnt something about Vista - and maybe got a little more interested than maybe previously.

 

In the next couple of weeks I will be posting more details on the public beta (once it is released).

 

In the meantime I will be posting some useful links that might be of interest to further investigate Vista and its use for you.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Vista Airlift in Seattle.. basically an opportunity to further investigate the up and coming release of Windows Vista - the version we were looking at was 5270 - the December CTP.

 

A lot has been said about Vista and the change to CTP - basically it means that in the ramp up to the end product there is a lot of smaller releases to the beta test community.. so bearing that in mind -and the fact that it was all still in beta.. I liked it..

 

There have been a lot of cosmetic changes - changes to the desktop look and feel that will take a little to get used to. Things like Aero, integrated searching and the like.. they do improve the workability but as I said.. take a little to get used to.

 

From the back end though there has been great improvements - Group Policy, MMC, Firewall, Deployment - you name it there has been a thorough workover.

 

I will be filling out further details as I can - but I am eagerly awaiting the next release (Feb CTP) and will report back more after that .

Writing from Coolum on the Sunshine Coast, QLD - ahh True Queensland weather - beautiful!!

 

We have bought over 40 Labs to Coolum for the Partners to try out so that they can see what MS technology is all about.

 

A range of Labs on a range of Technologies.. from Sharepoint to SBS to SQL to MBS - a smattering of everything.

 

3 instructor lead MBS labs to keep people occupied.

 

And then once I am finished here it is all systems go for Teched, Gold Coast - 2 TB worth of labs to prepare - should be fun!

 

If I don't see you here - then hopefully I will see you at the Gold Coast.