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 not increase the screen resolution above 640×480. A Matrox PCI graphics card in one of the slots soon fixed that enabling me to use the full 1280×1024 resolution of my screen.
Overall it has been a smoother experience but there is still a lot of work to do to get Vista running properly on our network. The folllowing are significant issues:
- Printer spooler subsystem failures due to non-Vista compatible drivers being pushed down from the server to the PC – need updated drivers from MS.
- Compatibility issues with the proxy server client service.
- Sync Files (former Offline Files) is not turned off by our policy settings.
- The whole client PC security restrictions model which is even more locked down than XP (which in turn was a lot more strict than 98). Lots of fish-hooks in that.
And then there’s a lot of changes between Vista and XP that will take a while to figure out. It’s unlikely any pupil PCs will see Vista for a good wee while, the main priority is to deal with new TELA laptops coming in later this year. Pupil PCs have lots of lockdown stuff that demands a whole new approach from Vista.