Luckily, there is a command in ipconfig to do just that…

• Click “Start” > “All Programs” > “Accessories”
• Right-click “Command Prompt” and choose “Run As Administrator”
• Enter your admin password if you have one, or just click continue.
• Once the command prompt appears, type the following commpand…
  ipconfig /flushdns.. and hit ENTER.

That’s it! You should receive a message telling you that your DNS cache has been flushed. All you need to do then is close the Command Prompt.

The update, which combines both Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 in a single install, is designed to simplify deployment, management and support for IT professionals.

The new service pack includes many updates for both operating systems, many of which can be downloaded separately. However, the convenient “roll up” of these updates into a single package makes deployment, for both home users and network administrators, much easier.

You can read more about the included changes and updates by reading the Notable Changes Document.

Download Vista / Server 2008 SP2 for x86 systems here

Download Vista / Server 2008 SP2 for x64 systems here

The update is of course also available via Windows Update.

It turns out that there is FTP functionality built into Windows Explorer in both XP and Vista. So, no more dodgy versions of CuteFTP or WS-FTP - just connect, and then drag and drop your files, just like you would any other directory. Cool. Here’s what to do.

• Click the “Start” button, and enter your FTP address into the search box (remember to prefix with “ftp://”), then press <ENTER>. Here you can see me logging in to the work FTP…

• The FTP login box (as shown below) will appear, so enter your Username and Password and click “Log On”.

• Assuming you entered everything correctly, Windows Explorer will open with your FTP home directory. From here you can drag ‘n’ drop files, delete, rename, etc - just like you would any file on your machine.

Simple!

This how-to assumes you have a fresh installation of Vista up and working, its connected to your network, you can get online, and your Active Directory system is setup and working. It also assumes you have already know a fair bit about Active Directory, networking, etc.

The first thing you need to do is open System Properties, so…

• Click the “Start” button
• Right-click “Computer”
• Click “Properties” on the popup menu

You should see the System window…

(your System window may look slightly different)

This window tell you all about your computer - the type and speed of your processor, how much memory you have, and more.

The section we’re interested in is “Computer name, domain and workgroup settings”. There’s your Computer Name (as you can see, this PC is called “Rhiannon”) and Full Computer Name (usually the same as Computer Name until you connect to Active Directory). Then there’s Computer Description and Workgroup, which is always “WORKGROUP” until you connect to a Workgroup or Domain.

In order to connect to AD, click the “Change Settings” link. This will bring up the “System Properties” dialog…

(again your System Properties window may look slightly different)

As you can see, here’s where you set your Computer Description (if you want to!), and set your computer up for AD authentication. To do that, click the “Network ID…” button.

This will bring up the “Join a Domain or Workgroup” wizard. So I’ll walk you through the pages

1. On page 1, select “This computer is part of a business network” and click “Next”.
2. The next page asks you (in a roundabout way!) whether your network uses a Domain or a Workgroup. If you’re using Active Directory in your organisation, click “Domain”. If you’re unsure - check with your System Administrator. Once you’ve decided, click “Next”.
3. This next screen just tells you what you need to connect your computer to your Domain. The wizard says you need your username and password. This is your username/password combination in Active Directory. You’ll also need to know the name of your Domain. Click “Next”.If you’re planning to allow hot-desking, or multiple users may log on to this machine, you should your Network Administrator username/password to complete this wizard.
4. Enter your Username, Password, and Domain name, and click “Next”.At this point you mich get a message saying “An account for this computer (”Computer Name”) has been found in the domain “Domain Name”. Would you like to use this?” - if you do, click “Yes”.
5. The next page will ask you to add your Domain User account to the computer. This just gives your Active Directory profile an account on your machine. Everything should be filled in, so just click “Next”.
6. Following this, you will be asked to decide the type of user your Domain account should be created as. There are 3 options: “Standard account”, “Administrator” and “Other” (which gives you a list of types of users from Active Directory). If you are setting your Domain Administrator account up, then select “Administrator”. This will enable this user to perform certain tasks, such as installing new software, etc. If you are setting an individual account, you will probably want to chose “Standard account”. One you’ve decided, click next.Be very careful setting any account as “Administrator” - UAC will only require a “Continue” prompt to do anything, rather than entering a username/password!
7. On this final step, click “Finish” to restart your computer. When it restarts, login as your new user to check everything is working as expected.

And that’s pretty much it! Your computer should now be a member of your Domain, allowing easier networking access, and account control through Active Directory. Enjoy!

]]> http://www.adventuresinvista.com/2009/03/15/how-to-enable-active-directory-vista/feed/ http://www.adventuresinvista.com/2009/03/15/how-to-enable-active-directory-vista/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AdventuresInVista/~3/uhRUAoloGoY/ http://www.adventuresinvista.com/2009/03/10/vista-as-a-business-workstation-os/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:17:44 +0000 Dan Nash http://www.adventuresinvista.com/?p=120 It’s a generally accepted rule that Windows Vista is rubbish when you use it as a client/workstation operating system on a Windows network. This means that the uptake of Vista among companies has been very poor, infact I’d go so far as to say almost non-existent. Certainly in the companies I work in, if you mention Vista you get a very protracted scowl from the IT department.

But why?

I was recently gifted the opportunity to find out just how well Vista performs in an Active Directory environment. And believe me, it was a gift I neither wanted nor enjoyed - my main PC hard drive failed. Big stylee. So in the end I went and bought a new machine.

Now, to be fair, I was all set to just throw XP Pro on and get my system back up and running as fast as possible. But then I got thinking “Is Vista really so bad for business use?!”.

This was the ideal opportunity to find out.. if it all went pear-shaped and I had to reinstall everything (again), I was only gonna lose another day. So after much deliberation, I took the plunge…

And to be honest, I’m glad I did.

Vista performs brilliant under an Active Directory environment, as you would expect being from Microsoft (ok, so I’m using Windows 2003 as my server, but still..).

So what’s the problem? Why all the fear about Vista and AD?!

I think the biggest stumbling block is the “fear” that users are gonna be presented with User Account Control (UAC) everytime they try and do anything. That’s a valid point, but in reality it rarely happens.

Think about it… as an IT Admin, you build the machine, you put all the software on, you connect it to the AD, and then unleash the machine to the masses. VERY rarely - in a hotdesking environment especially - do users have the ability to install new software, or change any system settings. Normally you can’t even play with the soundcard!

As a user, if you need something installing, or a change, you contact IT and they come and do it at their earliest inconvenience ;). For IT Admins, that means logging the user out, logging in as Admin, making the changes, and then getting them to log back in.

And this is where Vista actually scores points against XP with it’s UAC. If you need to make a quick change, you can do it without logging in as Admin, and Vista will present you with the UAC dialog. This has the same effect as XP just giving you “You must be logged in as an Administrator to do this” dialog, but with the advantage that quick changes to a system are possible, quicker.

So… would I recommend Vista in a business environment.

Definitely, as long your machines are all pre-loaded before users get their hands on them, you shouldn’t see any dramatic increase in support calls at all.

I’ll be covering how to enable Vista to use Active Directory accounts in a future post.

I don’t want to repeat what they’ve said, but to give you a brief overview… IE8 is gonna be standards compliant, but there’s still some discussion as to how to facilitate rendering of IE-designed sites with the IE7 rendering engine.

First it was IE7, with a forced “use IE8 Standards mode” meta-tag, then they decided to make IE8 default to Standards mode.

Well, it seems they’ve changed their minds again - opting now for a ‘chips n rice’ approach (”half and half” for those who don’t get that one!), rendering in Standards mode, unless it doesn’t work - in which case the IE7 engine is used. That is unless the meta-tag is present to force Standards mode.

Blimey. You can read the full SitePoint article here.

Personally, I just hope Microsoft makes up it’s mind in time for site owners like myself to work out the best rendering engine for our sites!

Release Candidate 1 (or RC1) is probably the final version before IE8 becomes production code, or the general release version. Therefore, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at some of the cool features now present in the browser.

As well as all the cool features mentioned in my previous posts on IE8 Beta 1 and Beta 2, some new things have appeared, and some upgrades have taken place.

Quick Tabs

One of the coolest features is Quick Tabs, although quite how useful it proves to be I’m not sure. Quick Tabs basically displays all your tabs on screen at once, in mini windows. Here it is in action…

As you can see, the web page views are quite easy to see. And you just click the one you want to be taken to the page.

To activate Quick Tabs, just press CTRL-Q on the keyboard, or click “View” and choose “Quick Tabs”.

Windows Live Integration

There is also a new page button, which when clicked gives you the following options…

This new menu provides several options for the page you’re on. 3 of these link directly to Microsoft Windows Live services… blogging, email, and language translation.

I’m going to cover language translation in a seperate post soon, but I thought the integration was worth mentioning.

In effect, Microsoft is trying to push you towards its own services (as opposed to Google’s presumably) by making it easy to share content from the browser.

It will be very interesting to see whether anyone uses these services (I suspect it will be great for non-techies), and whether in fact they will be allowed, bearing in mind IE8 will be part of Windows 7 (remember the fiasco when Microsoft originally started bundling IE with Windows?!)

I guess time will tell! You can download Internet Explorer RC1 now from www.microsoft.com/ie.

Well, some of you may have noticed the previous post sneaking in about Windows 7 (the successor to Vista). I guess that’s allowed, after all 7 is just a tweaked Vista by all accounts.

However, I wanted to provide more comprehensive coverage of Windows 7 than I felt was acceptable on AdventuresInVista.

So… I’ve started another blog!

AdventuresInWindows7 will provide hints and tips for the new Windows 7, from the public BETA version, right through to final release and beyond.

So, no more Windows 7 talk here thank you very much! To get your Windows 7 fix please visit www.AdventuresInWindows7.com.

You might, however, be suprised to learn that for the first time in it’s history, the company has decided to release a public BETA of the operating system. This working-but-not-bug-free version of Windows has been made available by Microsoft to gauge reaction to the new features, and to get feedback, bug reports, etc. Many companies do this on a regular basis with their software, but you don’t often see it with Operating Systems - can you image ever seeing a public beta of OS X, for example?

So, Windows 7…

Looks a bit different, no?

What’s it like?

The first thing you’ll probably notice are the changes to the start menu. It’s thicker, and shows icons for each window rather than the long icon/text buttons of previous versions. You can however change the settings to show the text (as per XP/Vista) if you want.

A neat feature of the Windows 7 taskbar is a new button on the far right for “Show Desktop” - it’s just a small slice at the end of the taskbar. Click it once, and all your windows are minimised, click it again and they are restored. simple, neat and takes up less space.

The sidebar has also gone - instead, you can place your gadgets anywhere on your desktop. An interesting change, as I (and most people I know) use the sidebar quite regularly. Sadly, I can’t find a way to bring it back, so it looks like the sidebar is no more. On the plus side, gadgets are easily dockable to the right side of the screen, and if you place them in a vertical line, they dock to a specifc distance from the gadget above.

Another feature which looks like it might be quite useful is the Action Centre. This little app (which has a button on the taskbar) alerts you to system problems… lack of antivirus, new updates available, etc. Could be quite good, as long as it doesn’t remind you of so much you turn it off!

Where can I get it?

Well, downloads are limited, but you can still get it direct from Microsoft if you’re quick. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx and signup. It’s free, and takes about 2 hours on a descent connection.

Oh, and remember to write down the product key they give you - it won’t work without it!

So what’s the verdict?

Well, it’s looking good. Certainly running on my VM on the Mac, it seems much faster than Vista. Installation was a breeze on both computers I’ve tried, and it has some nifty tricks up it’s sleeve.

It’s gonna be interesting to watch progress, and how Microsoft deals with the immense amount of feedback they are bound to receive.

I guess time will tell whether releasing a BETA of Windows was a good decision…!

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