Deploying and Administering Windows Vista® Bible

Chapter 10. Administering Workstations

PCs are usually quite reliable. In fact, the best PC is the PC that just runs and runs without any major maintenance requirements. Many PC technicians dream of finally obtaining an operating system that will vastly reduce their workload by proving to be reliable and providing constant operation. Unfortunately, as most technicians know, this is rarely the case.

When issues arise, you need to have ready access to the tools of your trade so that you can mitigate the downtime that a broken PC can cause. With the arrival of Windows Vista, Microsoft once again endeavors to create an operating system that will provide a sound foundation for productivity workloads. It has achieved this goal to some degree, but despite it's best efforts, there will always be issues with PCs — be it a problem with the system's hardware, a problem caused by an application, a problem caused by misconfiguration, or even a problem caused by an inattentive end user.

Ideally, you can implement some form of proactive administration and then rely heavily on automation to ensure that the most common issues are dealt with even before you need to be alerted to a problem. But, in order to establish this proactive administration schedule, you need to be aware of the administration capabilities in Vista for both local and remote computers. You also need to build the appropriate toolkit. To do so, you need to investigate several different aspects of computer administration. These include: ...