Datasheet

WHAT’S NEW IN WINDOWS VISTA?

Photo Gallery

With so many people getting digital cameras, it’s no wonder that Microsoft added this feature.

Photo Gallery helps you manage your digital pictures. You can view them, sort them, add infor-

mation about them, print them locally, or send them to someone else. Chapter 12 provides com-

plete information on this new tool.

Startup Repair Tool (StR)

The StR is Microsoft’s attempt to combat some of the most common issues that cause system boot

failure including incompatible drivers, missing or corrupted startup configuration settings, and cor-

rupted disk metadata. The premise for this tool is good. It reduces the chance that you’ll end up with

an unbootable system. If you can at least boot your system, you can often fix any problems it might

have. It remains to be seen how well this tool works in reality. Most tools of this type depend on the

developer’s preconceived notions of what can go wrong. However, after seeing several blue screens

of death during the beta cycle, I’ve come to appreciate that this tool does at least some of what it

claims. After the blue screen of death, the system displays a message stating that you just experi-

enced a blue screen of death and offers to look for a solution. Clicking Look for Solution didn’t find

much of value for many of the errors, but I was surprised to find that even during the beta, the sys-

tem returned a message stating that Microsoft had already fixed the problem in an upcoming build.

You can explore this tool in detail in the “Startup Repair Tool” section of Chapter 29.

Group Policy Management Console (GPMC)

The old method of configuring group policies required that you create your own custom Microsoft

Management Console (MMC) snap-in setup based on the configuration you wanted to modify. The

GPMC provides a means of managing group policies with significantly fewer setup requirements.

You use a tree view setup to move around the domain instead of configuring specific domain ele-

ments. GPMC makes it possible to see the Organizational Unit (OU) connections and the individual

Group Policy Objects (GPOs) so you don’t have to configure each GPO separately. In addition,

GPMC offers these valuable features.

◆

Backup and restore GPOs

◆

Backup and restore of filters

◆

Create HTML-based reports of all of the settings in a GPO

◆

Script some group policy management actions

GPMC comes installed with Vista. However, you can also get it for your Windows XP and

Windows 2003 systems at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=

0a6d4c24-8cbd-4b35-9272-dd3cbfc81887&displaylang=en

. Simply download and install the

product following the prompts. You can discover more about this administrative tool in the “The

Group Policy Management Console (GPMC)” section of Chapter 23.

Group Policy Templates Are Now XML

If you’re responsible for managing security on a large network, then you’ve probably run into

the administrative (ADM) template file. The ADM template file first appeared in Windows NT

4.0 as a means to define and implement changes to the Registry. When Microsoft introduced

46155book.book Page 13 Saturday, March 17, 2007 2:58 PM