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UPDATED WEEKLY

February 10, 2009

Windows 7 is now the way to go!  If you can't get it yet, go for Vista, it will prepare you.  Be brave and take the plunge or your career will go stagnant.  I've installed the Beta and it seems to be a great product.  As I see it, it's Vista all fixed up with a few performance tweaks.

 

January 2nd, 2009

 

 

 

 

Microsoft Vista ,Cisco VPN, missing Hyper Terminal

Last updated - July 1, 2008

This is the latest, Vista with SP1 is all good now.  If you business software or games and apps don't play well, it's time for you to ask them to get on the ball!  Apply thes next settings to get your Vista to scream!

Turn theme to Windows Classic
Move Swap file to another drive is available
adjust performance
remove User Access Control
Control Panel, user accounts, turn user accounts on/off
Uncheck box

Click Start and then open Control Panel.
In the Control Panel, click User Accounts and Family Safety.
Click User Accounts.
Click Turn User Account Control on or off.

Apply SP1

Below is from February 2007

We Installed Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Vista Business this week.  Both programs are incredible.  You really don't need to go crazy and upgrade too much hardware to use Microsoft Vista, we did not upgrade any hardware and Vista is running just fine.

We used a 1.7GHZ CPU with less then 1GB RAM.  An old PC and an IBM ThinkPad R51e, both preformed great.  Remember, we use the business edition.  Be sure to have 15GB of hard drive space free.  Clean up your drive of old and temp files, then perform a defrag.  Next, check your BIOS and upgrade if needed.  Check your installed programs to see if they are compatible.

We did not check and only had a few small, correctable problems like, Symantec antivirus had to be upgraded to 10.2, and Cisco VPN client also had to be upgraded.  Both are available to download.

Lastly. after installation, you may want to tweak the performance setting to remove some of the bells and whistles and fluff.  We use both PC all day for business with no problems, and some of the new feature are useful and fun. PS: no blue screens showed up yet.  Check out our links on this page for more performance tips and advice

Problems with Cisco VPN and Windows? The latest version of the Cisco VPN client that will work with Vista will not support Stateful Firewall.  That is a problem for me right now. This is a short falling of Cisco Systems I would say.  One last thing, the upgrade took a long time, like 3 hours or more.

Directly from a Cisco Rep:

The 3rd party firewall module that we utilize does not operate on Vista, so unfortunately this wouldn't be an option.  The head-end device will need a group that does not require the FW to be present.  Cisco does
offer companies other solutions through NAC Framework & NAC Appliance that the IT department could use as an alternate way of enforcing their
required policies.
 

Where's my HyperTerminal?

Vista does not come with Hyper Terminal and it removes it during the upgrade, that's nuts!  Considering it still works!  You will have to download this small utility and install it, then it will be right back and working fine.  Many sites have this utility to download so I didn't include a link for it, just Google it.

RSC, MCSE 2003, Citrix CCNA