Rolling out Vista to the student desktop

We’re about to deploy the first Vista desktop for pupil use at our site. The hardware itself is nearly a year old, but has been in storage for most of the year. With 1 GB of RAM, I expect it should give satisfactory performance with this OS. When it comes to cloning this box, there is going to be a bit of work learning how to use the new version of SysPrep, given I’ll be imaging with Ghost Solutions Suite 2.0. So far, there have only been a few small issues to resolve, such as creating a new Vista mandatory profile. Due to our use of Start Menu redirection in the policy and Vista’s use of a different folder location for the old All Users start menu, I think it’s now time to create a hardcoded specific path on C drive for the built in menu, that is never changed between OS versions. With the introduction of Vista will also come the use of Office 2007 for pupils, leveraging the advantages of a new separate profile over previous versions of Windows. As is now the case, Office policy settings will be used to specify that the default file save format is Office 2003 or earlier. I’ll be watching closely to see how well Vista performs with the highly locked down environment that we impose on pupil PCs.