Is Vista ready yet for prime time? 4

[johnk]

We are a small application develoment shop. Recently we had our first experience where a customer bought a new workstation with Vista. On it our application runs only for users with Administrative permission, and the Vista workstation cannot work with a printer.
Is your experience different?


John Kisner

 

[johnk]

My customer has boght a couple of new notebooks with Vista Home Premium and installed them on a business LAN using Windows 2003 Server.

Do you think upgrading them to Vista Ultimate might remove some problems?


John Kisner

 

[markdmac]

Let your customer know that the word Home is there for a reason.

Yes, upgrading them to a business version should help you out with some limitations of home versions.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[dilettante]

Has anyone suggested looking at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296264

for this shared file lock issue?

As that article suggests, Vista tries hard to use it's SMB2 first with any file server. I think I also saw a hint somewhere on how to force Vista to use SMB1 off the bat too, since some servers had fits with Vista's negotiation process, which may be somewhat hackish.

 

[adamc1115]

Applications should not be designed to only run with administrative rights.... bad security model, to give users way more access than they need.

 

[Excalibur1701]

>>try the unlocker utility before you try the reboot next time.

Out of curiosity, I installed it on the server. Sure enough, after a few hours, we had a Vista user with a "locked" file. I ran it against that file, and it couldn't unlock it. The option was to "tag" it for deletion, only after a server reboot. lol

Thanks for trying though.

 

[markdmac]

Ouch. Thanks for reporting back.

 

[Excalibur1701]

I found the culprit! Mcafee Virusscan Enterprise 8.1 was locking those files for some unknown reason on the server. I ran across a neat utility called "Process Explorer" that gives very detailed info on the server and handles.

Anyways, I shutdown the Mcafee service, and bingo, those files became available.

Next phase is to see if there are any updates for Mcafee!

Thanks for everyone's help on this and my apologies for Microsoft for bashing Vista.

 

[markdmac]

Within Microsoft ETrust AV is used with Vista and there are no problems.

Glad you got to the root of the problem.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[Excalibur1701]

Thanks Mark.

Just to clarify though....this was the anti-virus running on the file server (Windows 2003), not the client. In case someone has this same issue and was wondering.

Regards

 

[johnk]

Well, in my original post my customer was running Vista Home Premium on an office LAN with Windows Server 2003 server. I upgraded them to Vista Business. Now our application will not even load. So I reinstalled the original Vista Home Premium and our application runs with only one minor issue.

Anyone have any ideas?


John Kisner

 

[markdmac]

Sounds like a poorly designed program. To begin with I would try running the application under WinXP SP2 compatibility mode and see if that rectifies the issue.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[cpjust]

Sounds like a poorly designed program.

Well I agree that the app isn't quite Vista compattible yet, but I think his point (or question) was that Vista Business makes the app behave differently then Vista Home Premium.

Johnk: Did you check if that Vista Defender (or whatever it's called) is enabled on Vista Business as well as Home? Maybe it's enabled by default on the Home version but not on the Business version?

 

[Stevehewitt]

Hi all,

I work for a web dev company as the net admin and rolled out Vista to a couple of backoffice machines as a trial in December.

It went so well (support requests dropped to a nearly non-existant volume for the new Vista users) I rolled Vista to all backoffice.
Dev machines won't upgrade yet due to IIS version changes (use VM's for dev on Vista)

I rolled out Vista Business on most machines, with Enterprise on a couple of laptops where we need to encrypt the HD's with BitLocker. All models have been 32-bit.

Our network is based on Win2k3 with either SP1 or SP2 installed, and we use CA eTrust on both workstation and server (8.1)
Also (FYI) we have an application 'Certified for Windows Vista" after being tested by VeriTest. As such I can strongly recommend a single document for Vista testing apps to ensure they meet the recommended 'standard':

http://download.microsoft.com/downl.../CertifiedforWindowsVistaProgramTestCases.doc

Gold dust!

I can confirm that the security behavior between editions of Vista is non-existant. The same throughout, although x64 has a cut-down version of the PatchGuard feature.

Regarding if Vista is ready yet, i'd have to say yes. Along with our entire backoffice function (from telesales through to MD) I also have 2 machines at home with it on. Enterprise and Business at work, (although my work desktop is Ultimate!) and a Home Premium and Ultimate at home.

I'm still really baffled by the whole 'performance' issues being raised in forums. We have a mix of Dell, HP and Evesham machines, both laptops and desktop spanning 5 months old through to 3 years old. All machines have a gig of RAM, but other than that the spec's haven't changed from the default config provided when we brought them. RAM usage (I'm confirming this now after just intalling Ultimate on a test box) is 483Mb - post Windows Update. No AV, no Office, no Apple iTunes or Adobe Reader.
Performance both on and offline for my users has never been raised as an issue from anyone (touchwood). I've also been very happy using my 3 year old 512Mb Vista Ultimate machine as my Media Centre device (extended to my TV using a Xbox 360). Some old 2Ghz Athlon installed and the minimum RAM required - but it runs Media Centre without an issue. (2 IDE HD's on it too)

I think the main thing is to throughly test Vista out in your environment before making a judgement. I haven't had issues with software or drivers yet, execpt eTrust AV didn't work until April and Fujitsu Siemens document scanner is still pending Vista compatible drivers. Shame on them for not following the MS guidelines for compatible apps and drivers that have been out since 1999.

UAC doesn't seem an issue. In fact it's nice to get a dialogue box asking for credientials on user workstations rather than just 'access in denied'. Makes my life easier to just type in my cred's rather than logoff/logon or using runas.exe etc...

IE7+ is nice as well. Not bothered about features or anything, but from a security standpoint the protected mode finally makes sense, and until Firefox uses the same technology my backoffice will be using IE7+.
Additionally, the security on Vista in terms of exploitable holes that could actually be used in the wild with my current security setup is nearly non-existant. For example the windows cursor issue a few months back. Yeah, it works on Vista - but it gets stuck if the user is running IE7+ on it's default settings.

There's some issues still, but these are mainly due to 3rd parties being unable to write propper code rather than Vista bugs.
Security seems to have jumped on a huge amount, user 'experience' seems to be much better (dev dept. are green with envy) and the management of Vista machines also seems much easier than XP.

Overall I highly rate it. Maybe i'm just luck, but I can't see what all the fuss has been about...!

Cheers,




Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[johnk]

Steve,

Thanks for your thoughful and thorough reply. And I'm glad you have had such a positive experience. I expect you are totally right about our not being prepared for Vista.

Sounds like you are inthe position of being paid to learn and prepare for using Vista. Our position is quite different. Our small application development firm (32 years in business) is paid to understand our customer's application needs and develop cutomized applications to satisfy those needs. We are competent in VB, SQL Server, and various other development tools.

We started with Windows 3.1, then Windows 98, and on through XP. We never experience much trouble as new Windows came along. That is until Vista.

So I guess our lesson is that we must spend the unpaid time and effort to master Vista. We really can't keep it our of our customer's networks because they will buy what Dell and others ship.

Can you see my point? Microsoft has burdened us with a significant task that noone is paying us for, and to get features that we saw no need for.

Thanks again for your response. It will help us get where we need to be.



John Kisner

 

[Stevehewitt]

Hi John,

It's the same with any version of Windows though I guess. Drip feeding test machines was my first way of going about it - although I had a test Vista workstation for me only running Beta 2 for a while.

Although I haven't got it installed on dev machines yet. We also have SQL, IBM DB2, IIS etc. all installed locally on dev machines - intersting to see what happens when we roll it out to the dev's.

However I strongly recommend ugprading backoffice to it. Will help you learn slowly in terms of support ready for the dev roll out.

Good luck!




Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson