Great talk Gabe. Thanks! I am going to have my students watch your video in my computer class as we celebrate Windows 7's release today.

Best.

Gabe writes:

Lara,

In Windows 7, a change was made to only allow Copy To to copy the Default profile.  Once the Default profile is customized, it can be copied to be used as, among other things, a Mandatory profile.  Instructions on how to do this are in this KB:  support.microsoft.com/.../973289.

That said, if you already have a Mandatory profile, it can be copied manually with these steps:

1. Copy the profile to the desired location

2. Grant Everyone, Administrators, and SYSTEM Full Control of the profile folder

3. Delete the AppData\Local and AppData\LocalLow folders from the copied profile

4. Rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man

5. Add “.v2” to the end of the profile folder (for example \\server\mandatory.v2)

6. Load the registry hive for the profile and do the following:

a. Give Everyone, Administrators, and SYSTEM Full Control

b. Delete the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER,"Software\\Microsoft\\Active Setup\\Installed Components\\{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4340}", L"Version"

While I have used and continue to some extent Windows (remember the man setup for 95 before there was an installer) I keep getting pushed off by the "We Know what you want better than you" attitude. Yes I used Vista and was dismayed, '2008' and '7' are not bad but still leaves one wanting (still testing both)..

I work with control systems and a myriad of other 'high reliability' needed systems and have been let down on numerous occasions... these systems have no I-net connections or a 'MOM' server and never will for the reasons of security and ridiculous costs. We are now working on rolling out GNU/Linux infrastructure and associated applications.. 1- in order to meet security and up time 2- need to meet hardware, software and manpower budget requirements (since we are not the government, a bailout company or government contractor budgets are real) 3- We value innovation and time to market with products and given the history and experiences (costs) associated with several MS products, hence they were relegated to front end non critical deployments.. better suited for home users / gamers not soc or long range hardened equipment you need to depend on      

I have experienced the scenario Gene Corbin documented.  My computer is a much older HP Pavilion 7935 with an Ashlon 1.30 GHz processor running on Nvidia Geforce FX5200 PCI video card and system 512 GB maximun RAM.  It ran perfectly fine the first few days.  Any idea why this should happen?  Thanks.

Hi Gabe,

I have a question regarding Windows 7 RC. I installed it on my spare computer and was very impressed with the speed and compatibility of the OS with my older Intel 945GTP/D3200 system. However, after a few weeks of operation all of a sudden I started getting these errors every morning when I fired the system up. It would get to the Windows Starting Color Logos and then restart and go into the system startup repair. Only if I elect to restore to a previous time does it go through it's startup routine and then go to the OS. I thought perhaps I had a hard drive problem and so installed a brand new WD 500GB serial drive. Same problem. Do you think this is a Windows 7 problem or do I have a hardware problem. I thought maybe I might have a memory problem also as I installed 4 GB of OZ high performance PC2-5400, but after running the memory test it found no problem. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Gene

genecorbin@comcast.net

I am a network administrator of 2500 users. We use mandatory roaming profiles. My experience with Windows 7 in a Domain environment has been troubling. The biggest issue that I haven't been able to solve is that I cannot make Mandatory Roaming Profiles with Windows 7. Manually copying them doesn't work properly even if the permissions and the registry permissions are reset.

The "Copy" button is greyed out when trying to copy a Windows 7 profile I have built (I can delete though)

If I cannot create mandatory profiles like I can with Windows Vista then I won't be able to deploy Windows 7 in my domain ever.

Windows 7 seems to be written from the Home OS point of view. There is limited support for network environments with all the profile issues.

I am hoping Microsoft finally fixes these issues.

Cheers,

Lara

I'm running windows 7 build 7100 and i have to say i love it, but then again i also loved Vista. They are both amazing OS's but alot of people didn't like Vista for some reason i don't know why i love it...but thats just me i guess i love microsoft never had a mac never will.

Responding to Jim B's comment:

The scenario you describe; allowing PCs to sleep aggressively to save power but be woken reliably by a Remote Desktop connection, is something that we are working to enable.  With Windows 7, we have added the software support in the network stack and RDP but hardware support for Address Resolution Protocol offloading in the NIC is required as well in order to have an end to end solution.   Our HW partners are working to provide this, with the Broadcom NX-I NICs being some of the first.  We expect to see broad support for this in the future from NIC vendors.

Ok OK

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