Month: May 2007

Earlier I described the saga of getting printer drivers that work under Vista without crashing the spooler subsystem. I am pleased to say that after loading the Vista drivers onto the server and deploying them through a custom GPO that only deploys those Vista compatible printers, the first machine I joined to the domain after…

I have just managed to get a dedicated PC that I will use solely for imaging, both for Vista and XP. This one has the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset (onboard X300 graphics) in an Intel D101GGC motherboard, so it supports Aero, unlike anything older that we have here. The fun started when I tried to install XP…

Changes in the Vista print driver model means your existing server shared printers (especially if pushed down from a WS2003R2 server) may cause the local spooler subsystem to crash, disabling printing. Some printer manufacturers have updated their Windows built-in drivers but have not made them available for general release. Use the following procedure to install…

I see that Longhorn now has a proper name… it is Windows Server 2008. Everyone sort of knew it would be called Server something – the only reason to hold this up must be that they didn’t know which year to release it 🙂 Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing it in action on our…

I had better luck with my second attempt installing Vista Business. For this trial I chose a Pentium III/800, about a 6 year old PC, fitted with 512MB RAM (the minimum needed to run it) and a 20 GB HDD. The install went smoothly but the Intel 815 onboard graphics are not supported meaning I could…

This is a list of updates that we are having difficulties with at the moment. This list will be updated as it changes. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2: Most scheduled tasks no longer execute (Shadow Copy system generated tasks still work fine). [NOW FIXED – if you install a UPS, be careful because now…

Well, this is a real big one, just about everyone who is running a big network and using WSUS will know about this one. Today I had numerous calls from users about their PCs running slowly. Probably this has just happened since I got time Monday to sit down with WSUS and make sure all…

Last week I obtained an evaluation version of Windows Vista Business Edition (requires activation in 30 days). I try it out first of all in a VPC2007 virtual machine, where it installs successfully, but runs quite slowly. Buoyed by this success, I decide to try it on an actual machine. A one-year-old Intel D915GAG motherboard equipped…

Right now I’m working on my second RIPREP image. Even though we have WDS, we will still be using RIPREP (legacy) images for a while, probably until Vista rolls into town. I have, however, started looking at the transition, installing Business Desktop Deployment 2007 and Windows Automated Installation Kit on my desktop. Since we don’t…