On this page....
Recommendations on adopting Vista and Office 2007 (Windows) and 2008 (Macintosh) below were approved by the IT Governance Executive Committee on May 2, 2008. The text of that recommendation follows.
Background
The IT Governance Executive Committee approved a campus-wide position in February 2007, that suggested faculty and staff wait before upgrading to Vista and Office 2007. That information was published on eHelp and Polycentric and updated in September 2007.
Recent Developments
Since the published positions, the following developments have occurred:
Recommendations
Prior to upgrading their university computers to run Vista, users should check with their department, college or division technician, who needs to determine:
Please note that Microsoft will continue mainstream support (patches, small upgrades) of Windows XP until April 2009 with some support extending to April 2014. For a list of supported and outdated operating systems, see http://www.intranet.csupomona.edu/~ehelp/software/os-support.html.
An important concern in upgrading to Vista is the user’s total technology environment. For example, a user may have an $800 color graphics printer that the manufacturer has not yet made Vista compatible. So, if the user were to upgrade to Vista, s/he would not be able to print.
Although many printer, graphics card, monitor and other vendors offer new drivers that make Vista run the older equipment, some do not yet support Vista. For an interesting view on a user who bought a new machine loaded with Vista, then had to “go backwards” to XP to run his older equipment, see http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-bzdolside055319588aug05,0,5522422.column.
The I&IT Help Desk staff is using Vista after attending the July 2007 technical support training. Help Desk personnel will support students carrying Vista laptops to the Help Desk for service on wireless and other issues. The same level of support will be provided to faculty and staff at the Help Desk. However, for specific issues involving College and/or Departmental applications, faculty and staff will be referred to their local technician. For a list, see Find Your Tech.
Microsoft has released a converter that converts Office 2007 files to Office 2003 files. This is helpful when two users exchanging documents are not on the same Office version.
To get this file, go to converter (you will be prompted for your BroncoName and BroncoPassword).
For steps on how to use and install this converter, go to steps (double click on the Read Me text document).
The inter-divisional Vista testing team has researched as many software applications as possible for Vista compatibility. For the extensive list, see http://www.csupomona.edu/~ehelp/software/vista_applications.html.
Since end users are more likely to encounter Office 2007 before Vista (unless they buy new personal machines or are given them in a refresh cycle by campus technicians), I&IT has presented a brief overview of Office 2007. To view, see Brief Overview of Office 2007.
With the rollout of Vista, Microsoft completely changed the licensing process. Basically, there are two forms of licensing:
A self-activating key that confirms legitimate licensing by “calling home” to Microsoft periodically.
A “key server” that allows Vista users in an enterprise to obtain and update licensing from a central key server.
The team of Marcy Gates, Rich Leonard, Dennis Tilford and Dave Drivdahl set up a Vista key license server in August 2007. Early results indicate success, but more testing is needed before significant portions of the campus move to centralized Vista licensing.
The CSU-wide agreement with Microsoft entitles faculty and staff to use Vista Ultimate. We currently offer technicians the ability to download and install Vista Enterprise and Ultimate.
Faculty and staff are entitled to receive one license each for Vista and Office 2007 for campus use and one each for home use. Details on how to obtain these are not finalized. For now, contact your campus technician if you want Office 2007 for a new machine recently purchased for home use. Office 2003 is also available for one home license for faculty and staff. Contact the Help Desk at (909) 869-6776 to arrange home licensing.
I&IT will continue to offer Office 2003. Users running Windows XP will most likely be able to run Office 2007. However, it is advised users apply the Microsoft Vista machine compatibility checker.
A key factor in having Vista-capable machines is hardware compatibility. Basically, most computers purchased new since late 2006 are probably Vista-capable. Older machines will require hardware upgrades, especially in the areas of graphics cards and random-access memory (RAM) to achieve the full “Vista experience.”
Dell 620 laptops issued to faculty in fall 2006 are 100% compatible with Vista. The Dell 610 faculty-issued laptops, distributed in 2005, will not efficiently operate Vista. Dell 630s being distributed to new, fall 2007 faculty are Vista compatible.
Microsoft has published a Vista compatibility checker that can check individual machines. To utilize, click check.
By Denny Mosier - Director, I&IT Support
While we’re on the subject, I want to relate my Vista upgrade experience. I spent most of the Labor Day 2007 weekend upgrading my two-year-old Dell Dimension 3000 to Vista and Office 2007. I hope this will help others in deciding when to upgrade to Vista. Please note that I spent more than 10 years as a technical support specialist, supporting more than 175 users at one time on everything from DOS to Windows XP (as well as Macintoshes). However, most of my efforts in the last several years has been in IT management, so I don’t do support daily (but my super staff does). Exceptions to this are my own machines on campus (mostly) and my home machines, including those of my wife and sometimes my son who is away at another CSU. Oh, and friends who buy me dinner when I service their PCs.
I learned much from our Vista Testers team and got particularly good advice from Marcy Gates and Gio Arteaga of my staff. Marcy has been testing Vista from its inception and Gio has provided some key research in his testing.
First, I determined I needed to buy a power supply that was beyond the 250-watt supply that came with my Dimension because of the graphics card I eyed. At least I thought I did. But as it turned out, I didn’t when I went to another card (see below). But I kept the new power supply; after all, as the Dell techies told me, it won’t blow up my 3000 and one never knows where one’s power supply will fail.
Since it’s been several years since I swapped a power supply, I got a little confused with the P2, P4 labeling on my current power supply cables. Would I mess it up installing the new power supply, the cables of which were not labeled? It turned out to be easier than I thought. Today, all you have to do is find common male-female connections and test your installed devices (CD ROM, floppy disk, hard drive, etc.). I tested all the parts (hard drive, CD ROM, floppy disk drive – yes I still have one – and USB connections). They all worked.
Earlier, I had upgraded memory to the full 2 GBs allowed in my Dimension because Microsoft’s Vista checker said I needed more memory and a graphics card. I bought a graphics card. I wanted a Radeon card. That’s why Dell and ATI, Radeon’s manufacturer, recommended the new power supply. I went to Fry’s and bought my desired graphics card, which had 256K video memory so it wouldn't’t slow down Vista performance.
Whoops, my Dell Dimension has a PCI1 slot for the card, not the PCI Express slot the Radeon card required. Back to Fry’s for a refund and return and then back to the drawing board to look for a new card. Gio recommended the PNG 5200. I bought it online and installed it easily.
Now I’am ready! However, second thoughts rang in my head. After all, I now had a P4, 2.8GHz, 2GBs XP machine that was suddenly screamingly fast. How much would Vista slow it? Was it worth it to get alleged better security and the spinning, blue Vista ring? But heck, I’am an IT person. I’ve got to be on the bleeding edge.
Vista installed from a CD Marcy gave me. The installation allowed me to choose to either upgrade or wipe everything off my Dimension. I chose the upgrade, but I heeded Microsoft’s advice and backed up my documents and pictures first to a CD just in case. I got to eat lunch and clean up around the house during the installation, since it lasted for more than two hours.
Most of my old programs and utilities, although they were in different places inside the front end to the new OS, were fine. I like to create desktop shortcuts. Vista does this completely differently from XP, but it wasn't’t hard to learn. Mapping network drives is also different in Vista than in XP.
I wanted to install Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) 2007 (personal purchase; it’s not allowed at home through our campus licensing) but when I did, it closed all my network connections. Call to support in India. The young lady, “Annie,” was very nice and basically informed me that NAV 2007 has issues with Vista and that I should go to NAV 2008. She set up my download so that my newly renewed 2007 license would be a 2008 license for one year. It installed easily. One of her supervisors, in New York, called back 30 minutes later to check. I told her all is well with NAV.
I knew Contribute 3 wouldn't work so I uninstalled it from my Dimension. I knew this from my new machine on campus that one of my staff, Lori Okamoto, procured and installed for me. That machine, a Dell Optiplex 645, works great because it’s a new machine, not two years old. I also took Vista’s advice and uninstalled a Dell Sonic media program on my Dimension 3000. Go for all the Windows updates, re-boot after re-boot. This took another hour. I got the latest Vista drivers for my HP printer, my Kodak Easy Share camera and my graphics card. All tested and worked fine.
Now it’s time for a break from a computer intense day that went late into the afternoon after starting around 10 a.m. Wait, something is weird here. Every time I want to shut down, my Dimension flashes a quick white lettering on blue screen error. I tried to take a picture of it, but only got a flash from my camera. My computer wants to re-start in safe or other modes. I could only safely shut down by re-booting in safe mode, then logging off. When I started up again in regular mode, I get a message - something like, “Windows has experienced an unexpected shutdown. Click here for a solution. ..Sorry, no solutions found.”
So, I made the call to Dell’s Gold Tech support (a major reason I like Dell). After putting me on hold and making me repeat the errors, the young lady asked how I installed Vista. I said from an upgrade disk, not a boot-up disk.
“Well, you did a dirty install,” she replied.
“Baloney,” I said. “We’ve done 25 Vista Enterprise installations like that on campus.”
“Well, then call Microsoft because it’s not our problem. Have a nice day,” she said.
Since the balance of my credit card has been rather high lately due to some home re-modeling, I didn’t want to deal with the folks from Redmond (or Bangladore).
Enough of this. I’ll go mow the lawn and take the rest of the day off.
The next morning, Sunday, I installed Office 2007. I chose upgrade over Office 2003. All went well. I tested Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Since most of my computer friends are still on Office 2003, I set the default document save feature to Word 97-2003. I repeated tests and default saves with Excel and PowerPoint.
By the end of Sunday afternoon, more testing proved everything worked fine except for the inability to shut down properly. I spent most of Monday (Labor Day) researching on-line (and installing Contribute CS 3, which worked very well). Yes, folks around the world are having similar issues. No, I haven’t found a fix yet. Do I have the latest Dell BIOS? Yep, the last one made for the Dimension 3000 was published in March 2006, A03, and I remember installing (and verified on Labor Day) that I had that on my machine.
Then interesting network issues appeared. I received connection log-on screens when I was already connected to the Internet. I think I’ve disabled them by now. Don’t ask me how. I think Vista and IE are trying to tell you when you can’t connect to a web page. I don’t need this notification; I’ve been using the web long enough to understand a 404 error.
I use IE 7, the latest Mozilla Firefox and Safari. Which is the most reliable browser under Vista? It’s Safari. I never got the broadband connection log-on message while in the middle of an Internet session. I tried this with the same pages I tried to connect to in Firefox and IE. Go figure.
Getting desperate, I put out my draft of this article to my Vista testers’ team. I offered lunch to the first person on the team to solve my shutdown problem. Gio came back within 45 minutes with several possible solutions. I tried two and one of them, or both, fixed the problem. He advised me to disable my modem (who needs that with a broadband connection on a desktop machine) and change defaults on how Vista shuts down. It seems Vista wants to, by default, shut down all of your components (hard drive, floppy drive, USB connections, network connection, etc.) one by one rather than all at once. It’s an issue, Gio explained, of a new OS trying to work with old hardware. I switched to the “just shut it all down” mode and VOILA! I owe Gio a lunch.
I solved the last two minor issues I had by finding solutions on the Microsoft online forums.
First, an update to Microsoft .net 1.1 SP 2 would not install.
Solution: remove it (Microsoft has a Windows installer clean up utility, which works well. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 to get the download), remove the SP, then download and reinstall both from Microsoft.
Then, see if you can take the update. Finally, it worked after about 30 failures through the automatic update.
In Outlook 2007, about 3 minutes into each new session, I received a notice that an old fax manager (probably from the XP registry or Outlook 2003) wouldn’t work and should be disabled. Since the message was annoying, I found the solution, again, on the Microsoft forums:
Tools > Trust Center > Add-ins > Manager > Exchange Client Extensions. Uncheck the name of the file that appeared in the error message.
VOILA! No more annoying messages about a service (faxing) I never use at home.
Vista is different, but has some cool features. For example, services like mapping a drive are different but easier. Office 2007 is great, but its front-end look has greatly changed. I’m still learning where everything is now, getting a sore finger using the F1 help key a lot. Outlook looks a little nicer, or maybe it’s just the way I set my desktop background.
If you get a new machine with Vista, it should work fine. You’ll still have to tweak some of your favorite applications and utilities. Computers purchased in December 2006 and onward should be OK to upgrade (assuming you have enough hardware). If you try to upgrade a two-year-old desktop or laptop, you may end up with problems similar to mine. The reader can determine the time I’ve spent on this.
I’m looking forward to Vista Service Pack 1, expected in early 2008. But in the bleeding edge world of gamma testing, I’ll have to work my way through problems and find solutions. Does the average user want to go through everything I've had to endure?
Oh well, it was a good Learning Centered experience for me.
I&IT has published an extensive report on Vista. This report, by Support 2nd Tier's Marcy Wright, contains many compiled technical notes and reports on testing Vista within the campus environment. To view Marcy's report, see Vista Report.
Here are links to the Microsoft Get Started Tabs and some other help locations that might prove useful.
Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 interactive command reference guide
PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 interactive command reference guide
Note: some of the below training selections contain quizzes as learning tools. However, users should not get frustrated if they can’t remember everything.
This page was last updated on May 7, 2008.
