Alan Durham and Russell Field received our heart felt thanks for their dedicated work along with a token of our gratitude having decided to call it a day and not seek reelection.
We now have a new committee member and Vice President, Bill Parry.
After coffee, Microsoft's "IT Pro Evangelist", Jeff Alexander, gave us all a good look at Microsoft's next Windows operating system, Windows 7
Jeff gave us a practical demonstration of Windows 7 by installing the new operating system on a Lenovo Core 2 Thinkpad with 4 gig of memory.
Using Windows Deployment Wizard he backed up 5 gig of data and then started the installation.
5 gig of date to back up.
Jeff then started started the Windows Deployment Wizard
The simple setup instructions
With the preliminaries completed Jeff started the instillation. Alex started the timer. The first thing windows did was to back the data up to the 16 gig USB drive which also had the installation data on it.
The back up to the USB starts
The backup completed and Windows starts, its about 10 minutes into the procedure.
Windows 7 is up and the wizard is intalling the backed up data.
While this was going on Jeff ran through the development process Microsoft used to make sure we got the system we wanted.
With lots of customer input and liaison with hardware developers Jeff assures us we will should not see the same driver compatibility problems that Vista experienced.
Jeff also spoke of some of the advanced features like Federated Search, Libraries, Bitlocker To Go and "Problems Steps Recorder”.
Libraries will allow us to group together all the links to all the files we need in creating that project or book etc.
As an example we may have a spreadsheet, some diagrams in Illustrator, some photos in My Pictures and a word file. Using a Library we can group all those files together. Now to find a file we simply open our library and click on it.
Federated search will search your computer, a network or the World Wide Web.
“Bitlocker to go” extends the encryption protection in Windows Vista to USB drives and other portable storage devises, no chance of work being stolen if you lost that vital drive on the train home.
The Problem Step Recorder is a great way to find out exactly what the client has done when they tell you the program wont load. It records the steps they took so you can tell what steps they missed
Microsoft have been always been generous in providing raffle prices. Tonight was no exception. While Jeff couldn’t provide a copy of Windows 7 Microsoft agreed to supplied a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition
and a mystery hardware price, it could be ?
Stephen South won the Office 2007 Ultimate.
and Pentti Kivela is looking forward to a surprise package of hardware from Microsoft.
