You can disable the—sometimes annoying—User Account Control (UAC) prompts for members of the Administrators group, while leaving them active for limited user accounts. This is great if you don’t want others accessing or changing system settings. Disabling the alerts, however, requires editing the Windows Registry:

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Name: ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0 Enable, 1 Disable

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A useful trick in Vista is being able to right-click on an item, select Send To, and then send the item to your Documents folder, a mail recipient, a USB drive, and so on. One thing I’d like to do however is be able to send an item to Notepad. For example, if I want to view an XML file, I’d rather view it in Notepad than in Internet Explorer. You can add a shortcut to Notepad (or to anything else) simply by opening Explorer and navigating to the hidden folder C:\Users\your_account\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo, then create a new shortcut to Notepad.exe in this location.

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Windows PE is a fully-functional (though scaled-down) version of Vista, and as such you can modify it using scripts and other techniques. One popular modification is creating menus in Windows PE to ease the task of deploying Vista. To make doing this even easier, check out PMenu, a third-party tool that makes it easy to create menus in Windows PE.

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Vista’s Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) lets you capture and deploy Windows Image (WIM) files using the imagex.exe command. Unfortunately imagex.exe is a command-line utility whose syntax can be somewhat cryptic at times. Well, where there’s a UI, there’s a way, right? Check out this third-party tool which is currently under development, and keep your eye out for it once it’s finished and hosted somewhere for download.

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Vista’s new image-based Windows Image (WIM) file format lets you do some cool things. For example, you can edit the registry of a Vista image you’ve already captured from a reference computer. Here’s how you do this:

• Mount the image using a command something like this:
• imagex /mountrw install.wim 1 c:\mount
• Load the registry hive you want to edit using a command something like this (which loads the HKLM\software hive):
• reg load HKLM\temphive c:\mount\windows\system32\config\software
• Open regedit.exe and edit the keys and values in HKLM\temphive as desired.
• Unload the hive you previously loaded using a command like this:
• reg unload HKLM\temphive
• Unmount the .wim file and commit the changes using a command like this:
• imagex /unmount /commit c:\mount

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Planning on manually upgrading your Windows XP workstation to Vista? Here are four things you must be sure to do:

Run the Upgrade Advisor to see whether your hardware configuration will support upgrading to Vista. You may need to beef up your machine for it to run Vista, or you may decide to ditch it and buy a new, more modern computer.

Back up everything. EVERYTHING.

Check for viruses on your system, then disconnect from the Internet and disable your antivirus software prior to upgrading.

Use Windows Easy Transfer to copy your user data and settings to your new machine (if you bought a new computer for running Vista).

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The Vista Upgrade Advisor is useful for checking individual Windows XP computers to see whether their hardware configuration will support upgrading to Windows Vista, but what if you have hundreds of thousands of computers to check? For that, you need the Big Brother to Upgrade Advisor, the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment Solution Accelerator. You can use the Hardware Assessment SA to an inventory, assess, and report which computers on your network are ready for upgrading Vista, and also whether they can support running the 2007 Microsoft Office System. You can get the Hardware Assessment SA from the Microsoft Download Center, and see here for a good explanation of how it works.

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Say you’re planning on deploying Windows Vista and you’ve prepped your reference computer and are ready to capture its image. You try using the following command:

imagex.exe /compress fast /capture c: c:\image_name.wim “Blah” /verify

Then you get the following error: “Windows cannot access the required file image.wim”

What’s wrong? You forgot to specify which edition of Vista you’re capturing! The correct command should look something like this:

imagex.exe /compress fast /capture c: c:\image_name.wim “Blah” /flags Enterprise /verify

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Sometimes having the right driver is critical for being able to perform an unattended install. For instance, your system may need special mass storage drivers in order for Windows PE to see your RAID hardware. Or if you’re performing a network install, then you obviously need to have a working network card driver on the system, right? Here are several ways you can add boot-critical drivers to Vista during unattended setup:

Use the Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsWinPE answer file section to add drivers to the winPE pass.

Use the Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsNonWinPE answer file section to add drivers during the offlineServicing pass

And if you need to add non-boot-critical drivers later during the installation process (for example, a video driver) then you can use the Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsNonWinPE answer file section to add them during the auditSystem pass.

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Windows Deployment Services requires that you create two answer files instead of one to perform automated deployment. The first answer file is used for the Windows DS client when Windows PE runs, and the second answer file is used during the OOBE phase. To configure your unattend.xml file for your Windows DS client, open the properties of the Windows DS server and select the Client tab and browse to select the unattend.xml file you want to use.

The trick is when you want to use different unattend.xml files for different target machines. To do this, you need to use the wdsutil.exe utility to pre-stage them. For more information on how to do this, type wdsutil /add-device /? at a command prompt.

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