Posted by Adam Ruth on Mon, Jun 14, 2010
Photo by DraconianRain
Infoworld has an interesting piece talking about how IT infrastructure can become a house of cards. Most of the article is about applications that aren't being kept up-to-date with newer technologies such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. The ending paragraph sums up the author's opinion:
So what's the fix? Anyone involved in IT products or processes needs to stop tying ancient code and frameworks together with bailing wire and duct tape and take the time to do it right. Software vendors must bite the bullet and rewrite that 15-year-old application from scratch using modern platforms. It will require a sea change in Windows, with Microsoft jettisoning a wide range of internal hooks that exist solely to support Jurassic-era apps.
No, I don't expect it to happen either. But I can dream.
I think that the author makes some good points about how all of these older applications can cause havoc for system administrators, but I also think he's only got part of the picture. I've been on both sides of the fence and I can understand where the application vendors are coming from (most of the time, sometimes vendors are idiotic.)
Like it or not, the real world is an exercise in compromise. Whenever a vendor decides to change something in an application, whether it's adding a new feature or adding support for a new platform, it must come at the expense of something else. Either another feature is bypassed, the price of licensing or support goes up, or new bugs are introduced.
Why would a vendor choose not to add support for Windows 7 in a product? There are a number of reasons, and one of the factors to be considered is what kind of requirements can be pushed to the IT staffs of customers. If IT can use some bailing wire and glue to make it work then that gets factored into the cost/benefit analysis. It doesn't seem all that fair if you're in that IT staff, but then that's why you get paid the big bucks. A staff that has the ability to make these various applications work together has a great deal of value, since it opens up the organization to more possible vendors than they would have had.
It's like automatic vs. manual transmissions in a car. A manufacturer can choose to put in a manual transmission, which pushes the requirement for shifting down to the driver. There are plenty of reasons why a car may only come with a stick, and it's not unfair that you need to do your own shifting but rather a trade-off that you may not understand or agree with. It's usually easy to see the trade-off, though, because the performance and cost differences between manual and automatic transmissions are pretty well known.
A vendor's decision to not yet (or ever) support Windows 7 may seem stupid to us, but that's just because we don't get to see all of the myriad choices in the past that led up to that trade-off being taken. It still may be a stupid decision, but we can never be sure what we would be missing out on if the decision had gone the other way. Perhaps the time needed to support Windows 7 would have been so much due to poor architecture decisions in the past that it would have killed the product entirely, or at least some mission critical feature that you need. Is it better to deal without Windows 7 or the entire product?
Regardless of all of this, though, is the fact that administrators who can patch together the house of cards and keep it up will always be in high demand. There will always be the need for spit and bandages in any high-tech infrastructure, so we should be glad for the experience.
Need to deploy software to Windows 7 computers? Try Admin Arsenal for free.
Posted by Adam Ruth on Mon, May 17, 2010
Photo by carl simourd
Admin Arsenal has a feature to run some of its functionality as a service in the background. This is handy, for example, if an administrator wants to keep their systems' inventory scanned and up-to-date without leaving their workstation logged on all day.
For more information on the value of computer inventory, read our white paper
Normally, this service is set to start automatically with the computer so there's minimal interruption to the tasks it runs. Some users noticed that it wasn't starting up with the computer even though it could be started manually after the computer was running. It was a bit puzzling until we discovered that they were all machines with UAC enabled. A little more investigation showed that the service was starting, but taking longer than the 30 second time limit to come alive and was being terminated.
New to Windows is an option to set services to start with a delay. This was added in Vista and Server 2008 as a performance option to speed up the boot process by reducing the contention for system resources early in the boot cycle. We're not certain why UAC slowed down the loading of our service, but it may have to do with the .NET Framework which does take quite a while to load for the first time. It's possible that UAC introduces a delay in the .NET Framework and subsequently any service that uses it.
So our latest build of Admin Arsenal sets the delay start option automatically. If you have noticed this problem, then simply switch to delay start and you should be good to go.
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Posted by Adam Ruth on Mon, Apr 05, 2010
Photo by mkis
Microsoft recently announced
Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. They didn't provide any dates, but they did say it was coming soon. There won't be many new features, mostly bug fixes, but that's what I've come to expect from service packs.
What I can see this meaning for most organizations is the removal of the last big objection to migrating to Windows 7. It is a prudent stance to wait for the first service pack before migrating to give time for any problems to be ironed out, but SP1 is usually the event that signals the end of that waiting period. With Windows 7 SP 1 available there really won't be many reasons left to not take that final step away from Windows XP.
One thing that I'm looking forward to trying is the new
RemoteFX remote desktop functionality in SP1 (pretty much the only new feature.) I don't think I'll have a lot of use for it myself since I mostly use remote desktop for administrative purposes, but I can see possibly using it for development work since the current remote desktop is a bit too sluggish for me to run Visual Studio on a regular basis. This may finally bring the potential of centralized computing to the masses.
Posted by Adam Ruth on Mon, Mar 29, 2010
Photo by geowomble
Steven Warren over at Train Signal Training has a good tutorial on using the Virtual PC optional download for Windows 7. I have always been a fan of virtualization and I really like what Microsoft is doing here. This gives them a new choice of how to deal with backward compatibility that they didn't have in the past, that is to simply ignore it.
Backwards compatibility is a double-edged sword. It keeps people from abandoning your platform when things break, but it makes it more difficult to innovate because it requires that you maintain the bad code as well as the good. It's a good thing to retire old APIs and tools when better options exist, but if you can't get rid of that
second copy of notepad then it puts a lot of pressure on future versions to maintain all of the cruft.
Apple broke ground in this area with first running
OS 9 on top of OS X and then
Rosetta to run PowerPC apps on Intel chips. Apple certainly leans a different direction than Microsoft in the backwards compatibility arena. Which model is better in the long run is up for debate, but it's nice to see Microsoft taking the cue and accepting the compromise of virtualization. It will be good to see some of the deprecated interfaces in Windows finally disappear.
Want to deploy Virtual PC remotely? Get a 30-day free trial of Admin Arsenal today.
Posted by Adam Ruth on Mon, Mar 22, 2010
Photo by tanvach
Microsoft's recent confirmation that
Internet Explorer 9 won't be available on XP gives one more reason to finally move up to Windows 7. At the same time it highlights the interesting position that many people and companies are in. The missteps of Vista (real or imagined) following the long development cycle have gotten many very comfortable with XP and opposed to upgrading. Don't fix it if it ain't broke, as it were. I can certainly understand this view. It used to be that finishing a migration to a new OS entailed a turn around to immediately planning the next one. Getting out of that habit was nice, and a couple of years where the next migration kept getting pushed off gave us some breathing room that is difficult to give up.
We all know that the world keeps moving too fast to let us stay safely ensconced in one OS forever, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. Perhaps one day OS updates will trickle out slowly and continuously allowing us to move from an XP to a 7 over the course of a few years without even thinking about it. From an OS vendor's standpoint such a move would require something more like a subscription model, but consumers have been reluctant to go that direction. One advantage of the model is that it could flatten out the upgrade cycle, with migrations being more like today's service packs. Microsoft, and other OS vendors for that matter, may have to move that direction anyway because they're running out of new things to put into an upgrade that warrants the pain and cost of a massive migration. Microsoft may have inadvertently demonstrated this with XP lasting so long and users realizing that the OS is becoming a commodity.
If XP lasts 10 years, how long will Windows 7 last? What could be following on that compelling enough to make the next upgrade? I think users are going to be wary of moving again now that we've seen it's not as necessary as we thought.
Posted by Shawn Anderson on Wed, Feb 10, 2010
In the coming weeks and months we're going to be spending some time with some of the features of the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7.
These are the scripts, tools, and nice-to-haves that you hear about but sometimes don't take the time to sit down and learn. We're dedicating a portion of our lab to disecting these tools and showing some of the more practical uses.
Server administration is key to a system administrator, and getting these tools on Windows 7 is important for those admins who have made the move.
We're looking forward to bringing you videos, screenshots, and lessons learned from managing your Windows 2003 and 2008 servers. If there's a toolset that you've been wanting to test but haven't taken the time to do so, let us know and we'll add it to our queue.
Posted by Shawn Anderson on Mon, Dec 21, 2009
Our friends at HelpDeskGeek.com have provided a step-by-step to create jumplists in Windows 7 by using a free Jumplist tool (Jumplist-Launcher) from Hedgehog.
This is a great feature of Windows 7 that allows users to reduce the number of steps to certain actions. Hedgehog's tool allows you to not only customize your Jumplists, but allow provide a more dynamic approach to doing so.
The example given by HelpDeskGeek uses Firefox and Chrome browsers, and allowing you to not only launch these apps but to select from a list of frequent pages to jump to (hence the dynamic approach).
I suggest giving it a read. Don't forget to install Jumplist-Launcher.
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Wed, Dec 02, 2009
Photo by emrank
Michael Pietroforte over at 4sysops has put up part 1 in a series on why to not skip the upgrade to Windows 7. I whole heartedly agree. He and I don't quite line up on whether Vista was all it should have been, but I think we can both agree that Windows 7 is a suitable replacement for XP.
At this stage in the game it's time to move on and take the plunge. Of the four items that he brings up, I am most concerned with #2, Compatibility. Especially in the enterprise, it won't be long before XP drivers and support will be sunset. Where Windows 2000 is today Windows XP is soon to follow, and I don't think anyone wants to be caught with their drivers down.
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Fri, Nov 20, 2009
Photo by mandj98
Christina Warren reports on Mashable that according to StatCounter, early adoption of Windows 7 is just under 3%. WinXP is holding at just under 50%, Vista at 37%, and Mac OSX flirting with 12%.
It appears that more users are moving from Vista to Win7 than are moving from XP, though XP did show a decline over the past two weeks. I think it highlights a huge advantage that Windows 7 had over Vista; namely it doesn't require hardware upgrades from Vista's requirements.
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Mon, Nov 16, 2009
Photo by Mai Le
Over at the Train Signal Training blog, Brian Nelson has an excellent post on what lessons from Vista have been rolled into Windows 7.
Personally I would never say that I hated Vista, but I did choose to go back to XP after trying it for a few weeks. Was I being manipulated by the bad press? Possibly, but I doubt I would ever know for sure. What I do know, however, was that it just didn't "feel" right to me. The interface seemed sluggish and clunky, probably all my own perception (I know I felt that file copies were slower, even though they were demonstrably faster.) I was always of the opinion that Microsoft's missteps early in the development of Vista caused them to lose so much time that a bunch of corners had to be cut.
Well, Windows 7 feels to me like it has all of those corners filled in and the sharp edges rounded off. I clicked with it quite immediately. Again, it could have been from all the good press, but I don't think that's a complete explanation. I do believe that Windows 7 brings back a lot of goodwill that was spent on Vista, and it proves that Microsoft isn't quite as incompetent as the popular perception leads.