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Managed Software Installation in Windows Vista and 7

In Windows XP, a domain client computer would display messages like “Installing Managed Software Windows Defender” “Apply Computer Settings”.

In Windows Vista all of this disappeared and was replaced with “Please Wait”. In my opinion this was a bad move because users can get anxious that something is wrong quickly and sitting with the Please Wait message is tempting users to hit the power button.

I noticed sometime ago that Windows Server 2008 displays the correct messages to the user at start-up such as “Applying Default Domain Policy” and “Installing Managed Software X”

I didn’t realise however that it was possible to get this functionality back in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Open your GPMC and navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System

In here you will find a policy named Verbose Vs Normal Status Messages. Enabling this policy has the following effects according to the GMPC information:

Directs the system to display highly detailed status messages.

If you enable this setting, the system displays status messages that reflect each step in the process of starting, shutting down, logging on, or logging off the system.

This setting is designed for sophisticated users that require this information.

Note: This setting is ignored if the “Remove Boot / Shutdown / Logon / Logoff status messages” setting is enabled.

PXE Boot Errors When Using a WDS Client

Whilst configuring my WDS server to deploy Windows 7 in an unattended fashion, I’ve been using a VMware virtual machine to test the WDSUnattend.xml file and the ImageUnattend.xml files.

I ran into a problem whereby the VMware machine was reporting the following error whilst trying to PXE (Pre-eXecution Environment)

PXE-E55 ProxyDHCP: No reply to request on port 4011

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Windows 7 RTM

Well I got my copy of Windows 7 RTM yesterday and I installed it during the evening.

The experience was really good.
I installed 64-bit Ultimate after toying between Ultimate and Enterprise, but I wanted to be able to play with Media Center.

Including the time to install a Dell BIOS update the whole process took less than an hour from a DVD – More like 45mins.

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