The Vista content is coming thick and fast - and I have moved it to a seperate blog site: Vista PC Guy

 

It has been running for about a month already and is well and truly getting some good hits - please - come and visit!

 

Kyle

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.

Overnight Microsoft released the public beta of Virtual PC2007. You can get it from Microsoft Connect.

(if you are not a member of connect .. you should be - there are some betas that require invites from product teams but the majority are open betas which give you an opportunity to test and influence upcoming MS products)

 

The benefits of Virtual PC 2007?.. firstly it runs on Vista (as a host) and also it supports Vista as a virtual machine. But don't think the benefit stops there.. the hardware virtualization has been updated and you can also still run it with XP as the host machine.

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

For Mike from the SPS class this week..