Best of Questions and Answers for the IT Manager Community Talk with Kevin – Windows 7 “What’s in it for you?” (Part 3 of 3)
Attention IT Managers!
The other day we had a fantastic chat with Venky Chandrasekharan, and nearly 200 live attendees, all about Windows 7 and what it provides you in your IT organization and for your business.
(You can listen to that recorded chat session HERE.)
As I like to do with these, I promised that I would take the Q&A log from the event and expand upon the answers we gave, as well as answer the more technical questions that we didn’t have a chance to get to. And we had so many wonderful questions that I is taking me quite some time to get through them all.
So, here is PART THREE of our three parts.
My apologies if you don’t see your question here. It’s either coming in a later post, or it simply was too technical (or off-topic) to be worth addressing here.
I hope you find these question, answers, and resources useful!
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Questions and Answers (Part 3 of 3)
“When running Virtual XP on a Windows 7 computer and you connect to a server do you need two licenses? One for Windows 7 and one for Windows XP?”
My understanding is that, no, your Windows 7 machine CAL will cover you for the XP installation and its access to your server. (Please, if you have heard otherwise, let me know. Like you, I’m finding information on this very hard to find.)
“The option you were talking about connecting to your PC remotely. You need to have Server 2008 R2, with Windows7 to do this?. So if I have the Server 2003 I cannot do this? & what is the security risk involved?”
For DirectAccess, you need to have Windows Server 2008 R2 as your DirectAccess Server – the machine that your Windows 7 clients connect to/through to get to your internal network. But that doesn’t restrict what servers or resources you can then connect to on the internal side.
“You mentioned earlier about ‘capturing’ problems in Windows 7 - do you have a link to info outlining how to do this? I am currently experiencing failures with Word and Excel 2007 trying to print to my Dell network attached printer. I would really like to generate a ‘log’ and get assistance to solve this.”
The Problem Steps Recorder is really just a simple screen-capture-with-every-action kind of a tool, so it’s not recording anything in the way of items that might be captured in the event log. Which I suppose is also to say – you already have a log. J It’s the Windows event logs. Errors related to application failures or devices can be found using the event viewer.
“What version of IIS supported by Windows 7?”
Well.. if you’re asking “What version of IIS is available to add to and run locally on Windows 7, the answer is IIS 7.5 (same as with Windows Server 2008 R2).
The first and best place for IIS-related information, plus forums where you can ask questions or search on other people’s answers is at www.iis.net.
“Would you briefly explain how Windows 7 will be easier to deploy? Create and manage images?”
https://www.microsoft.com/deployment - get the MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit). It has great documentation and step-by-step instructions.
“Can I use Problem Step Recorder in Vista or XP? If not, can you recommend any tool?”
No. Unfortunately the Problem Steps Recorder is only available as a part of Windows 7. There may be other tools out there that will work for XP or Vista. Sounds like a good opportunity for someone to develop a useful shareware utility…
“Anti-Virus that would run are Windows 7 could be find in this link https://www.microsoft.com/windows/antivirus-partners/windows-7.aspx . Windows Anti-Malware Engine improved a lot in Windows 7 and it is different from Windows XP and Windows 7 one. So user encourage to use only anti-malware which are ready for their platform. user should not use compatibility mode to run incompatible antivirus (same apply to other system tools).”
Thanks for sharing that!
“Can you give an overview of Problem Steps Recorder and how and when it should be used. Are there any security concerns to be aware of?”
As we discussed in the live chat, the only security concerns I could see would involve the fact that the PSR is taking screenshots, which could potentially include confidential information that is somewhere on the desktop or within the applications visibly running at the time. You’d be wise to include that warning when instructing your users on using this tool.
“I set up Virtual XP on Win 7 and ran into a NAT issue, similar to ICS. I could not add the virtual PC to the domain. Was I doing something wrong?”
By default XP mode does indeed do NAT for the sake of the XP running virtually on Windows 7. You can change it and essentially let the XP machine connect directly to the network through the Windows 7 machine’s NIC.
See this excellent blog post on working with networking in Windows XP Mode.
“I am finding that win7 don't like some of my newer network dirve and can become very un stable i and wil just sit and do noting and have to be rebooted before it will work with the app you trying to load. is this to be addressed”
That's a little hard to troubleshoot in a live chat, I'm afraid. :) My advice would be (if you haven't already) to look at the event logs and see if there are any clues there. It also could be a network issue - timeouts on connections that aren't able to be maintained.
“Can you name two or three of the specific positive comments made by the business community for the deployment of Windows 7?”
You can find those all at https://www.microsoft.com/windows - and go more specifically down to any items "for business".
“Can Windows 7 be installed on an Intel Mac at this time?”
Yes. https://www.bing.com/search?q=install+windows+7+on+mac&src=IE-SearchBox&FORM=IE8SRC
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