I guess not....

I like deli meat. Fresh sliced ham, pastrami, swiss cheese genoa, all very good to me. I went to Food Lion tonight and the first place I went in there was the deli counter. It was 7:PM. The lady was in there, in the cooler, so I waited. She came out and I asked if I could get some items. She said she was done for the night. I asked for sure if there was any way I could get something. She said she had broken the machines down and cleaned them. I understand all that. I have no idea what their schedule is for the deli.

I waited for a second, just to make sure she didn't want to go just one inch of the extra mile......nothing.

I went to the sandwich meat isle and got some sandwich fixins. I proceeded to the meat counter. All but empty. Is this a grocery store? Are they in business?

My point is, they wasted two perfectly good opportunities to excel at customer service....blew it. FAIL.

At a location where there are two print servers, Win 7 was asked to add a printer. XP compatible drivers were loaded on the W2K3 server, but no go. The printer in question was a Toshiba multifunction machine, so drivers are flaky at best.

After going to the support site and downloading Server 03/Vista drivers, everything worked as it should. All that I had heard about XP drivers working out of the box is now just a myth. But it seems that drivers that are/were Vista-ready work just fine.

Keep this in mind during your Win7 rollouts. The thought about printer drivers hit me as I was in the middle of placing this machine on the user's desk...what about printers? Be aware during your testing and make sure that you test any odd printers/faxes/scanner/weird peripherals that you may have, and update the drivers on the spot. So far this is the only thing I have seen that would delay a Win 7 rollout.

This week at work we had a new HP business laptop and a 2 year old engineering desktop to load and deploy. My PC tech and I decided to give Win 7 a try, Business edition. The laptop is a dual core Centrino, 2Gb of RAM, run of the mill laptop. The engineering box is a dual quad core 3 GHz with 4Gb of RAM and very nice video card meant for Autocad.

I have quite a few group policies to manipulate firewalls, add machines and users to various group according to department or job type and of course a policy for WSUS. I run a layered network with multiple gateways and a web filter proxy, and a policy for that. I have an ESET administrator console with push installation.The laptop got Win 7 business x32. The engineering machine got Win 7 business x64.

I have to say that after running through my usual scripts to configure these machines for the domain (and after adjusting one script for the new syntax to control the firewall), these were the two easiest machines I have set up.....ever. I have been doing this same type of setup for 6 years on countless XP machines and even a few 2000 stragglers, but this was outstanding. We will be doing a few more 'tester' machines over the next two weeks, so check back here for my results.

So far, I am very impressed. Let's hope it continues.