Windows Vista SP2

Today I accidentally found out that Windows Vista SP2 has been released! I was going through my WSUS server and noticed that my machine had a lot of updates outstanding. I then say an entry that said: "Windows Vista Serivce Pack 2 Standalone (KB948465)- English, French, German, Japanse, Spanish"

Well it looks like SP2 was released about 2 weeks ago according to this KB Article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948465

Anyway I am waiting for my WSUS server to download it so I can install!

Microsoft Doing it Again with Windows 7?

It looks as though our dear friends at Microsoft are not learning from thier mistakes.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/03/windows-7-skus-announced-yes-your-worst-nightmare-has-come-to/2

According to this article Windows 7 is expected to come in 7 different flavours! ARG !

I wish these guys would catch a wakeup and stick to the good old days of single desktop and server OS releases instead of making life so confusing with 7 versions!

Come on Microsoft catch the hint, no-one wants 7 choices for something as boring as an operating system. Why do you think Linux has been struggeling for so many years?

Recession to fuel Open Source?

With the world economies in a bit of a downward spiral, the demand for Open Source techologies should increase dramatically. Business should soon start to see the value in migrating certain systems to opensource. I have a hard tim justifying Microsoft Office licences when there are freely available alternatives. The only cost a business may incure is some training costs to migrate the users over to the new package. This however should quite easily be justified as it means a lifetime of free and open source as opposed to the pain of being forced to upgrade systems at huge expense every couple of years.

I still think that most businesses will however need to stick with Windows as an OS, but office applications and others can be migrated to Open Office.

Bulk Modify Active Directory Users Accounts

Basically my friend upgraded his old server and migrated active directory to the new server. Active directory pointed their profile paths to the server name or IP address of the old server. So he needed to be able to modify all his users profile paths so that they pointed to the new server. He could do it one at a time, but after doing a couple of hundred I am sure he would have gone insane!

I found this tool: ADModify.net

Snippet from their website:

"ADModify.NET is a tool primarily utilized by Exchange and Active Directory administrators to facilitate bulk user attribute modifications."

This tool is awesome! It does exactly what is says it does! It allows you to bulk edit active directory user accounts. You can bulk modify almost any setting in an AD user account using this tool! I am definitely going to keep this one for future, it makes life so much easier!