@Carnival-Boy said:

I think I'm going to stick with 7 and then jump straight to 10 as I expect users will find the transition from 7 to 10 easier than 7 to 8.1. Plus, it means I'll only have two OSs to support (7 and 10) rather than three (7, 8.1, 10).

At this point definitely a good plan. Windows 10 is not far away and looks like it is going to be a really good release.

My understanding was that just as many of the vulnerabilities came from the fact that Microsoft released their source to China in order to get into their market in the first place. I forget where I heard that but I could be wrong.

@scottalanmiller said:

So this interesting. We have our first desktop added into InTune that is running Windows 10 Tech Preview. In InTune it does not display as "Windows 10" as I would have expected. Instead it displays as "Windows 6.4" which is slightly confusing as the kernel is "NT 6.4" and the name is "Windows 10." Blending the two is odd.

Just found it interesting.

I've seen this behavior before - I think it was WSUS - windows 8(.1) was reported by something than it's normal name.

Sure, but it appears that Chocolatey is now installing applications mostly into their original location (Program Files). That location can't be messed with by anyone buy local admins.

@scottalanmiller said:

It's OpenVPN and IPSec, I've used both a ton. No concerns there at all. But it doesn't do what Pertino does. While both are VPNs, they are completely different things. Pertino is a hosted full mesh. Ubiquiti, like any hardware VPN, is a site to site VPN. ** There are very few times that both would be an option for the same network.**

Really? I could see this being useful in my case where I have 4 remote locations using Site to Site, and for my mobile users they could use Pertino.

@Mike-Ralston said:

@Dashrender said:

If you are booting from UEFI mode (not legacy mode), you must use FAT32 as UEFI won't boot from NTFS.

I haven't had this issue, I can boot from UEFI into a NTFS configured drive. Possibly a special UEFI designed around that, I have no idea.

Exactly.

The UEFI specification explicitly requires support for FAT32 for EFI System partitions (ESPs), and FAT16 or FAT12 for removable media;[20]:section 12.3 specific implementations may support other file systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Disk_device_compatibility

@Dashrender said:

Wow.. so somehow this shim was causing you problems.. I wonder what happened to break it in your case?

Did formatting and starting over solve your issue?

And what media did you use to reinstall?

Yup, the problems that we had looked exactly like someone using a shim to proxy data somewhere else (aka a man in the middle attack.) Most man in the middles will break socket.io that MangoLassi uses. This is the same thing that used to cause Untangle and Watchguard devices to break.

Formatting and installing a non-Lenovo Windows 10 image fixed things.

@JaredBusch love it!

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2834414/microsoft-windows/what-you-will-love-and-hate-about-windows-10.html

My feeling is that Windows 10 (which does not make me happy as a name) will likely be a make it or break it moment for Windows. Mac OSX and Linux are taking Windows to task big time but people are mostly playing a waiting game to see what Microsoft will do with their upcoming release. They are giving them a chance to course correct now that Ballmer is out on his ear. Can Microsoft turn things around with someone new at the helm? Or will they continue to steer into the iceberg?

Windows 10 appears to be well situated to have a good recovery trajectory for Microsoft. But we will just have to wait and see. If they botch this like they did with Windows 8, they are going to lose market share very quickly. I think that they have to make this work.

@Joyfano said:

@nadnerB said:

Looks like a mix of Windows 7, 8 and Linux.

I hope they rename it in Australia to Windows Mongrel.

Hmm why Mongrel Sir?

Mongrel
A mongrel or mutt is a dog that is not the result of breeding and belongs to no breed. Wikipedia

Well, windows can be a bit of a dog. Windows 9 is from such a mixed background, it going to have an identity crisis. It seems to be random parts of other OS's slapped together. However, in saying that, no one will really know until the official announcement event comes around when there will be better information.

It may lose mongrel status but Microsoft have to be 100% sure of their direction AND stick to it

Thanks guys for all the help! I'm going to fix this...except I somehow lost access to the vSphere lab...I opened a helpdesk request but likely it'll be tomorrow before I can get access again. The helpdesk here, internally, is not particularly quick...

It is funny that I had nothing but a good experience with ME. It worked great for me and I really hated giving it up. No, that is not sarcasam....it was stable for me.

Vista did have issues for me...namely, if I multi-selected files and then went to right click for a context menu, it could "sit there" for 2-3 minutes before giving me the menu. And it was bloated.

I had a NFR version to test out 6 months ago but was buried in work and couldn't get to it before the time ran out!

@scottalanmiller said:

@JaredBusch said:

@scottalanmiller I don't use Imaging.
I guess I should break down the costs of buying the box without windows and using VL instead. probably a decently close comparison.

VL is upgrade only. It can't be used on a machine without OEM. You buy one VL license to get imaging rights so you don't need to track OEMs. Buying more VLs is for upgrades.

Exactly - Imaging rights is about the only nice/gime that MS has done with their licensing.

You buy ONE VL upgrade and you can apply imaging rights to all computers in your company with that exact same version. I.E. If you OEM licenses are all Windows 7, and you buy the VL upgrade for one of them, you can use the Windows 7 VL media to image every one of them.

There's no point in buying VL for the rest of the computers unless you plan to upgrade them to the next OS. (yeah I know this is the long winded way to say what Scott just said)

Pretty basic but about on par with many Chromebooks. Microsoft has been vowing to fight the Chromebooks hard. This appears to be the beginning of a major attack on them. Will be interesting to see how this works out for them. Maybe this is the beginning of Windows being free.

Lots of good tools on that list. Thanks for the share!

@scottalanmiller said:

Makes sense. They've been heading in this direction for a while.

You see this alluded to in a lot of PowerShell literature too.