Rolling out Vista to Student Desktops – 3

Last time I looked at this was some 9 months ago. It will become more important as time goes on, but it hasn’t been a priority much lately. The main difference is that with a Hyper-V server I now have some Vista VMs to use as test configurations. If we ever went to a lab of Vista machines there would be a lot of work needed on things like a Key Management Server for activations, for example.

The latest oddity to surface from Vista on some user accounts recently is being unable to browse the Internet unless your account is a local administrator of the machine. I noticed this working on a Vista laptop in our site today and have confirmed it is not confined to that machine. Since the virtual machines have a fairly minimal configuration, we can rule out a lot of things from the extra software that laptop makers typically provide these days (such as security managers or TPM type stuff). At the moment that doesn’t really get me any further except that I have confirmed it is not happening on XP machines so it seems just to be a function of Vista to date.

Just for a comparison I started up one of my Windows 7 virtual machines to see how it would handle a mandatory profile login. There were no issues that I could see. Both the Windows 7 machine and the Vista machine were able to redirect the Documents folder correctly. Both have the same problem in the web browser with what appears to be obsolete proxy configuration settings, meaning that I have to test out what the settings actually are for some of our computers and where they have actually been set up. I have not at this stage attempted further testing of Start Menu redirection which we have used in the past, and I still have to deal with Vista’s dual Document folders (we would want to remove the local folder).


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