Reflective Blog, Round 2 - The Days of Vista

I was given the (quite enviable, if daunting) task of producing all sysprep images for the company. I've not done much on this than 1 trial run, as I only had a spare PC for a while and found it hard to work with the Toshiba laptops, but we're moving to a new office, with a server room almost bigger than my flat, so all the spare PC's will be in there, and I'll get more time to play. Studying sysprep was relatively easy to fit in while studying the degree, but I'm sure when it's hands on time, I'll need to make time to find answers to problems that arise.

The most enviable task, as I do the images, has been doing Vista testing. Found a Beta copy, didn't work too well, got a RTM copy and it's working much better, the Aero interface is really slick to use, much more intuiative than XP. But now I get to study up on the new version of Sysprep, which seems roughly the same but has it's own imaging and deployment software. I'm just wondering whether the Vista Version will also work on XP. As it basically uses a boot CD, I'm starting to think of other ways to improve it, as the boot CD looks like it could hold extra features, such as recovery utilities. It could also be made available over a network through RIS, so the guys wouldn't need a CD either, we could have a full recovery and deployment suite available within a few button presses. I just hope I can knock something together quick enough to show the bosses that it could be a fruitful exercise. I'd need to ensure the CD wasn't too big.

Got a presentation on Vista Testing to attend next week, where I'll need to fend off some scaremongering sales company (Vista has it's own compatibility features, called Virtual PC, which can mimic XP), then a visit to Toshiba HQ next week to see the roadmap for new hardware. Should be fun