Army Migrating Computers to Vista

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With the launch of Windows 7 right around the corner, the U.S. Army if finally making the jump to Vista. The mass migration is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

"The Army has been testing Vista since its release and has run it through the Army Golden Master program. The Army Golden Master program is responsible for the release of the Army standard baseline configurations for commonly used computing environments within the Army Enterprise Infrastructure, the team responsible for making sure applications that ran on XP will run on Vista," Good said.
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At this rate, they should just wait a little longer for Win7.
 
Monkey34 said:
At this rate, they should just wait a little longer for Win7.
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No, because they would need to spend three years testing Win 7 as well. Even though it isn't as much of a change, it would still take a while.

It's normal for corporations and government agencies to stay one version behind. While using the previous version, they can be testing the current version.
 
I'm surprised [H] cared enough about this to post, hah. I'm actually in the Army helping test out all of our commonly used software for compatibility issues. We're supposed to start migrating in September, right around the Win7 launch, which I thought was funny. Everyone's dreading the jump :mad:, hah.
 
It should be common knowledge that companies/agencies etc. are always one step behind the latest. There's no reason for them to be on untested software anyway like many I have already said.
 
I wonder if this will affect my work since we've been building web apps for the lowest common denominator (IE5)...

If they all go to Vista it's IE7 or most likely IE8...

Thats going to fark up a lot of web apps....
 
Bigbacon said:
I wonder if this will affect my work since we've been building web apps for the lowest common denominator (IE5)...

If they all go to Vista it's IE7 or most likely IE8...

Thats going to fark up a lot of web apps....
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IE8 has compatibility mode built into it which you can turn on and off. So far, every site that wouldn't work in IE8 natively works fine when I hit the Compatibility Mode button.

Charter One online bank site is one site that doesn't work in IE8 natively, but it works great in Compatibility Mode.
 
I hope they have replaced their computers fairly recently. When I was doing onsite Dell support, almost all desktop systems were gx270s and gx280s Most laptops were d600s and d800s.

Some of the "higher end" systems were optiplex 755s.. but even the default configuration for those is not going to run Vista all that well.
 
I know a guy who claims to be a sys admin for the Army.... He's either a liar or the Army is doomed because he doesn't even qualify as a power user... but then, here are decisions like switching to vista... Maybe he's not lying after all.
 
Deploying Vista now is a good plan, it's normally a best practice to not upgrade to an unproven system. The company I work for just upgraded to Office 2007 due to compatibility issues between '03 and '07. Normally, extensive testing has to take place before you jump onto something totally different that can have repercussions.
 
xrealm20 said:
Deploying Vista now is a good plan, it's normally a best practice to not upgrade to an unproven system. The company I work for just upgraded to Office 2007 due to compatibility issues between '03 and '07. Normally, extensive testing has to take place before you jump onto something totally different that can have repercussions.
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While your theory is generally sound, and we use it here too.... Deploying Vista at all is not a good plan.
 
Ibanezfoo said:
While your theory is generally sound, and we use it here too.... Deploying Vista at all is not a good plan.
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Vista is fine, stop with the ignorant hate. The last I checked the military wasn't too worried that XP was insignificantly faster in games then vista. They only care about reliability, and vista even before SP1/2 was/is vastly more stable then XP ever was.

On the hardware requirements, if my experience with how the AF handles their OS is similar to the Army, then it will be a modified stripped down version that will run on older hardware just fine. The military has very strict requirements for performance and reliability on systems like this and there won't be any fluff included.
 
Dekoth said:
They only care about reliability, and vista even before SP1/2 was/is vastly more stable then XP ever was.
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Really? If you'd care to elaborate, please do...........but in my experience, once you use group policy to keep stupid users from messing with stuff they shouldn't be, XP is immensely stable - and no less than Vista.
 
Monkey34 said:
Really? If you'd care to elaborate, please do...........but in my experience, once you use group policy to keep stupid users from messing with stuff they shouldn't be, XP is immensely stable - and no less than Vista.
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Yeah because your average home user uses Global Group Policy. :rolleyes:
 
What's wrong with still running XP? Why upgrade? If it's working, leave it alone. If it's not broken, don't fix it.
Someone enlighten me on this. Just curious on why.

And I agree with the testing before deploying. Last thing you want is a new system that does not do what you want it to do because it works differently.
 
i'm still bsoding on windows 7 rc1... so went back to xp lol.

most users will continue to use winxp because its easy to pirate and reliable. if they want to buy windows 7 they have to work 10-40 hours to save up for it, fark that.
 
jroe52 said:
i'm still bsoding on windows 7 rc1... so went back to xp lol.

most users will continue to use winxp because its easy to pirate and reliable. if they want to buy windows 7 they have to work 10-40 hours to save up for it, fark that.
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wtf?
 
Ibanezfoo said:
I know a guy who claims to be a sys admin for the Army.... He's either a liar or the Army is doomed because he doesn't even qualify as a power user... but then, here are decisions like switching to vista... Maybe he's not lying after all.
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Well... here is another problem with the "admins"

When I was working as an onsite dell tech, I went to the Army base and replaced a hard drive in a laptop. Ran the hdd test, etc. everything was fine.

The next day they "IT guy" from the office I went to called me and told me that it wouldn't boot into Windows. Come to find out, he didn't know that in order to boot into Windows you actually have to install Windows.
 
jroe52 said:
most users will continue to use winxp because its easy to pirate and reliable. if they want to buy windows 7 they have to work 10-40 hours to save up for it, fark that.
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ROFL

I don't have a lot customers on Vista, (mostly laptop users), however I will say from a security standpoint it is a lot better than XP. What a lot of people don't understand is that Admins look at the whole OS migration differently than home users. First I care if it works with the Apps my clients have. If it does, then I look at whether or not it is more secure. In my case I like the fact that Vista uses more system resources, because then I charge to upgrade their systems as well :). Seriously though, I told most of my clients to wait until Windows 7, in which case they should upgrade both their servers and clients to Windows 7/ Server 2008. The security enhancements are huge and the performance gains are not insignificant either. I have been running the combo on test beds since early the development releases and I now run all my systems on the combo, so once Win7 is gold I will be installing it on everyone who has the budget for the upgrade.

While I do think the Army would be better off waiting, I imagine this upgrade was planned long before they knew about Windows 7 and with their beaurocratic system I imagine postponing isn't possible.
 
cyclone3d said:
Well... here is another problem with the "admins"

When I was working as an onsite dell tech, I went to the Army base and replaced a hard drive in a laptop. Ran the hdd test, etc. everything was fine.

The next day they "IT guy" from the office I went to called me and told me that it wouldn't boot into Windows. Come to find out, he didn't know that in order to boot into Windows you actually have to install Windows.
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Yeah my mom has a friend like that. Her Dell's hard drive was failing, so I told them they need to purchase a new drive and then I'll be happy to reinstall their system. When their new drive came in, they called me over and when I got there, I said ok, let me have the recovery disk and I'll get right to it.

They were like "Recovery disk? Dell said Windows is built into our system" hmmm..

I said no, what Dell meant was you have a recovery partition on your drive. I can try to pull it off, but I might not succeed because the drive is failing. (I didn't succeed. The system bluescreens seconds into booting into Windows.)

But they were swearing on graves that Dell told them their Windows is built into the computer when I was asking for the recovery disk. Sigh.

I used the online form to order a replacement recovery disk for them and came back the next weekend and asked her to sit down with me and watch me as I explain the installation process.

Built into your computer.. yeah
 
jroe52 said:
i'm still bsoding on windows 7 rc1... so went back to xp lol.

most users will continue to use winxp because its easy to pirate and reliable. if they want to buy windows 7 they have to work 10-40 hours to save up for it, fark that.
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Or you're doing too much stupid shit on it to actually break it. I've yet to BSOD with RC1 though. My last BSOD with Windows 7 was with 7068 IIRC. That or you got shit hardware

What makes you think Vista is not easy to pirate?
 
Monkey34 said:
Really? If you'd care to elaborate, please do...........but in my experience, once you use group policy to keep stupid users from messing with stuff they shouldn't be, XP is immensely stable - and no less than Vista.
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Azhar said:
Yeah because your average home user uses Global Group Policy. :rolleyes:
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No, only the smart ones......but most corporate environments (which includes the military) do. The comment wasn't about the average home user.
 
I'm excited to move to WIndows 7 this fall :D

I am curious as to why they chose Vista instead of waiting for Windows 7. I understand there are security concerns but Windows 7 is damn near Vista - so I would think they would just leapfrog Vista for 7.
 
Azhar said:
IE8 has compatibility mode built into it which you can turn on and off. So far, every site that wouldn't work in IE8 natively works fine when I hit the Compatibility Mode button.

Charter One online bank site is one site that doesn't work in IE8 natively, but it works great in Compatibility Mode.
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you are talking about Government workers here... We have to design everything to be soooo idiot friendly that trying to tell them to press a button because it doesn't look like = fail in their eyes, they just won't get it.
 
Kaitian said:
Or you're doing too much stupid shit on it to actually break it. I've yet to BSOD with RC1 though. My last BSOD with Windows 7 was with 7068 IIRC. That or you got shit hardware
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I was wondering the same thing. The only thing that I use that doesnt like Win 7 RC is AnyDVD. I havent found anything else that will break it.
 
I work for a government contractor, we still have to use XP and IE 6.

It doesn't make any sense. We get all critical updates from Microsoft right away, yet the government security people could never find the time to approve IE7? :confused:

Thumbs up their asses... and they wonder why unclassified machines with internet access keep getting hacked. Refusing to use Vista and IE7 would be like our army refusing to wear armor. The sooner they upgrade the better.
 
At the Agency I am at, we will finally migrate to XP SP3 w/ IE7 after almost a year of testing. We also tested Vista and didn't work that well. We still have craptastic HP laptops with P-M, 512 RAM, and overprotective McAfee :(. Its impossible to multi-task with laptop and drive me mad sometime.
 
im really surprised that the army/rest of the armed forces dont use some custom linux distro with specific security settings, and all SELinuxed up....

why would the armed forces use a proprietary OS, where the chances of security breaches are so much higher than the alternative??
 
I am an Army contractor working on this for the unit I support.
We expect to be completed within two weeks. What a lot of you "normal" power users may not understand is that big enterprise networks do not just upgrade to the latest version. They take their time and do a lot of testing for compatibility and for reliability. It is a slow process. We had many compatibility challenges to overcome. We have a Microsoft contractor in the cubicle next to me assisting and I spent a lot of time on the phone with vendors making sure we were good to go.
I am a bit confused as to how this is newsworthy though.
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
im really surprised that the army/rest of the armed forces dont use some custom linux distro with specific security settings, and all SELinuxed up....

why would the armed forces use a proprietary OS, where the chances of security breaches are so much higher than the alternative??
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Because that's your preference and the military would disagree with you and chooses to go with proven software that they have more experience with than going into the unknown. It's too much headache and a massive waste of taxpayer money to start the whole concept over. Microsoft constantly supports their software with instant patching whereas Linux distro's are slow and not that great of an idea to support on such a large scale. Did you miss that presentation on "Why Linux sucks" a while back? I'm going to have to venture that yes you did miss the presentation.
 
Kaitian said:
Microsoft constantly supports their software with instant patching whereas Linux distro's are slow and not that great of an idea to support on such a large scale. Did you miss that presentation on "Why Linux sucks" a while back? I'm going to have to venture that yes you did miss the presentation.
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lolwut... the linuxes do a much better job of patching security holes than MS....

:) would love to see that presentation on why you think linux sucks though...

other than app support, i really dont see where windows has a clear advantage (for the military)... they would be hard pressed to get a more secure and stable platform than a custom military SELinux or OpenBSD...
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
lolwut... the linuxes do a much better job of patching security holes than MS....

:) would love to see that presentation on why you think linux sucks though...

other than app support, i really dont see where windows has a clear advantage (for the military)... they would be hard pressed to get a more secure and stable platform than a custom military SELinux or OpenBSD...
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You're forgetting about the fact that Microsoft has changed Windows for the military unlike their consumer version. So if they have a hole in their operating system, they will be patching them instantly. Your argument is moot here. Consumers like us have a lesser priority because Microsoft is required by contract with the US Armed Forces to ensure that their operating system is patched instantly the holes are found.

Sure you can argue that they should be funding these Linux distro groups but they will not do it as it's like I said A) a waste of taxpayer money to move to an entire new platform B) a waste of time to rewrite protocols that have been years in the making C) retraining all current and future personnel to be accustomed to the new operating system.

Now on the server side, they obviously would use some form of UNIX system in whatever various reasons they do.

Now go google the presentation. It's quite easy to find.
 
IMO it would be better if they had waited a little more for Win7 and switched to that. The long testing and validating process is perhaps a reason, seeing Vista becoming more "solid" by the time. An alternative OS, i.e. Linux, would still maybe be better, though it would also cost and take time because learning and so on.
 
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