Windows Vista

Incredibly irritating error when you go to install under your user account when you’re using mapped drives for your documents. All our domain users have a userfolder on the server, it’s mapped as z:\ and there is a folder redirection set up. It’s pretty standard in a corporate/domain environment, so why does it cause so many Vista installations to fail?   This is something I’ve run into time and time again and There are a couple of things you can try…sometimes they work individually, sometimes not!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, that’s for various reasons, one of which was that I have been preparing for, and taking, my MCSA exams. So here it is… MCTS Windows Vista, Configuring (70-620)  MCP Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment (70-290) MCP Implementing, Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (70-291) CompTIA Security+ (SYO-101) Which all add up to an MCSA Windows Server 2003 Security+.

I had an odd problem today, I logged on to begin my day’s work and plugged in my iPod as per normal. iTunes crashes, Vista tries to recover. iTunes closes. iTunes opens. iTunes crashes. Vista tries to recover. As you can imagine that gets tiresome, so I tried repairing iTunes, reinstalling iTunes, installing older versions of iTunes, all to no avail. The solution in the end was to remove Quicktime and do a fresh install.

I’ve finally cracked the installation problems with VS 2003 SP1 on Vista. The problem seems to be that the SP must be installed under the same credentials that Visual Studio was installed. I.e. I installed Visual Studio under the domain administrator credentials, but I run my day-to-day under a standard user credential. When installing the SP1 I was elevating my standard user credential rather than running as the domain admin. I don’t know what difference that makes to anything, but it’s worked!

If, like me, you want to administrate your Windows 2003 servers from your Vista workstation, you may find that you recieve an “MMC could not create snap in” error when you open one of the admin tools, it also manifests as corrupted graphics within some MMC Add-ins. It appears that the dlls are not registered correctly, there’s a KB article from Microsoft that contains a script to reregister the dlls. It’s a simple fix: Copy and paste the following script into a text document, save it as RegisterAdminPack.

It’s not as easy as you might imagine if you’re going to be developing on a local machine. The pre-requisites include IIS and FrontPage Server Extensions which will need installing. Install IIS on Vista Go through Control Panel, Programs and Features, then select “Turn Windows features on or off” on the left hand menu. The basic installation of Vista from the control panel will not be sufficient for a VS install, you must add IIS Metabase Compatibility (you’ll see why later), .

I recently installed Vista as a dual boot with my old XP installation, while I transferred things over and made sure I could do all I need to do with my new Vista install. It came to the point when I needed to remove XP and solely rely on Vista. Some might say that’s brave, others foolish, others still insane. Whatever your opinion, I needed the HD space and was having no problems with Vista, so I bit the bullet.