The Federal team is a big fan of Windows Deployment Services (WDS). We have used WDS for large scale deployments, but we recently ran into a problem using WDS to install x64 builds of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Beta 3. We imported the boot...

At FOSE, the annual government IT conference at the DC Convention Center, Windows Vista was awarded GCN Best of FOSE Awards in the software category. I've been at the event Tuesday and Wednesday and it has been great to meet all the people genuinely interested...

This blog post outlines the process to setup the Key Management Service setup on a Windows Vista system. The Federal Vista Team would like to thank Joel Yoker for providing this content. Those of you not familiar with the new Volume Activation 2.0...

Last week Vista RC2 (build 5744) was released. This week I spent some time testing RC2. One interesting aspect to testing Vista is seeing the different installation times. With RC2 I was seeing sub 20 minute installs from DVD, so I did some more thorough...

Check out the link below for a great set of Windows Vista documents. Note that many of these were recently updated. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=311f4be8-9983-4ab0-9685-f1bfec1e7d62&DisplayLang=en Here’s what...

The steps below outline how to create a custom Vista DVD. The idea here is that you can manually install one Vista machine with all your software and settings, and then easily capture an image to install other machines very simply. If you have more than...

I would like to point out a new Microsoft Windows blog that recently came on line called Shell Revealed . There is a blog section as well as forums, downloads and galleries. I think it is great that the core UI design team has started this channel of...

Aaron over at the IEBlog posted a great compilation of IE 6/7 keyboard shortscuts back in February, but with the recent availabillity of IE7 Beta 3 I thought this would be a good time to remind people about it. Enjoy! Cheers, p.

It's hard keeping track of what is being written about Windows Vista in various media outlets but I would like to take the opportunity to point to a recent article from Computer World called 20 Reasons Why Windows Vista Will Be Your Next OS . I think...

First off, I need to apologize for not having any new content up here in a while, but with the release of Beta 2, we've been swamped here internally. All things aside, someone on the team should have found the time to post before now, but that said, I...

Our colleague Jesper Johansson has a great post up on Windows Vista Firewall - definitely worth checking out. p.

Recently Microsoft made available to select TAP/Beta testing groups a new build (5365) which I just finished installing. All in all, I've say that things have progressed nicely from my pervious build (5348) and the previous public release (5342). I'm...