Thursday, April 30, 2009

Windows 7 RC is out

And they're saying that Win7 will ship well before the Jan-2010 Vista timeframe mentioned before. Well, we kind of expected that. We've also been doing a lot with our network to make it more Win7 (and Vista) friendly, since we know we'll get a LOT of Win7 once it shows up for real.

The biggest concern is that Microsoft still hasn't fixed the issue that makes the Novell Client for Vista so darned slow. This is a major deal-breaker for us, so we've been informed from on high to Do Something so our Vista/Win7 clients can have fast file-serving and printing.

That "Something" has been to turn on the CIFS stack on our NetWare servers, with domain integrated login. The Vista and Win7 clients will have to turn their LanMan Authentication Level from the default (and secure) setting of, "Send NTLMv2 Response Only" to at most, "Send NTLM Response Only." The NetWare CIFS stack can't handle NTLMv2, nor will it ever. Those people who have been suffering through the NCV get downright bouncy when they see how fast it is.

Printing... we'll see. A LOT of the printing in fac/staff land is direct-IP which has no Novell dependencies. There are a few departments out there that have enough print volume that a print-server is a good idea, so I'm hoping there is an iPrint client for Win7 out pretty fast.

All in all, we're expecting uptake of Win7 to be a lot faster than Vista ever was. In this sense Win7 is a lot like Win98SE. All the press saying that Win7 is a lot better than Vista will help drive the push away from WinXP.

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