When I first got Windows 7, I ranted a bit about the install process. Since then, I’ve had no problems with Windows 7 at home, and I have to say that I like it. It’s getting to the time, though, when we will start rolling out Windows 7 at work, and in the past week I’ve been fiddling around with Windows 7 Pro from a corporate perspective. Once again, I find a few things lacking.
If you are in a corporate IT environment, you know the drill for setting up a computer: install all the software you need, configure everything for the user, make a disk image of that setup, and then distribute it. Pretty simple stuff, and there are many, many tools out there to help you do it. One part of that process is setting up the Default Profile, the profile that all new users start out with. In the past, with Windows XP, setting up the default profile was easy: you get a user profile the way you want it, copy that profile over to the Default Profile folder in Documents and Settings, and voilà! Easy as pie.
Not anymore. Windows 7 has seen fit to change this. It is now impossible to copy a profile to the default profile. Instead, you have to follow an insanely complicated process using the Windows Automated Installation Kit and sysprep and a bunch of other things that are overkill for creating a default profile. I don’t want to create a fancy automatic Windows setup script, I just want to copy over an existing profile to the default!
Microsoft really needs to create a simple tool for users to do this, without having to get involved with WAIK and Windows Images and all that nonsense. Creating a default profile is so common, and so necessary for IT folks, that making it this complicated is a huge inconvenience.
My other beef with Microsoft is this: it took me over a day to download WAIK because the download kept failing in the middle of the process. Please, please release torrents for files like these. Torrents are incredibly useful for legitimate file distribution; they are not just for pirates. Here’s a perfect example: I downloaded the latest version of Open Office the other day. Downloading it from their server would have taken over an hour. The torrent took less than ten minutes. For tiny files, a torrent may not matter. When you are trying to download a 1.7 GB file and it fails an hour later after downloading 1.2 GB…believe me, your users will thank you if a torrent is available.