I was happily moving along doing windows automation tonight, when suddenly sysprep broke. I'm sure I killed it by accident, or something. Googling around for the error found this knowledgebase article explaining that there is no way to recover and, quote, "When you experience this error, you must re-create the image. You cannot correct the problem with the image."

Fuck that.

If you read the docs on using sysprep/wsim/windows aik/whatever, they all point you at building a 'reference computer' which entails lots of manual work modifying settings and installing things. Sysprep can make useless all of your precious work? Sweet!

I'm just glad most of the things I've done to this system were automated so I can just reinstall and rerun the scripts.

I have a confession: I actually like Vista. It has some nice new features.

Vista beats the pants off of XP. Both my work laptop and a recently-purchased workstation at home run Vista (business and home premium, respectively) and I've never looked back. I can't tell you if it's slower, or if it eats more memory, because I haven't thought about it (because it's not a problem).

I didn't like it at first. They moved everything. Normal control panel operations were totally moved around, icons changed, start->run went away. It took me atleast a week to stop looking for folders like "My Computer" or "My Documents" which had been renamed simply "Computer" and "Documents".

The two best things so far are search related: the start menu search box and the search box in the control panel are both awesome. Forget futzing around with %PATH%, the start menu search box will just search for things in the start menu as you type (and perhaps other areas); certainly a nice touch.

The control panel search is awesome, and actually helped me stop asking "Where the F is network configuration?"-type questions. I type 'disable uac' and get this result - so useful.

Aero is meh, but it's not displeasing. The task switcher showing a thumbnail of the actual window is kind of neat and slightly helpful, too. I installed virtuawin to give me multiple desktops and everything's been peachy.