Testing Windows 7 on work laptops

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loss4words

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 31, 2007
Messages
107
Hi guys,

I have a rookie question. My company is starting to test Windows 7 and hopes to start deploying it this summer, and I wanted to test on of our laptops. Laptops are not joined to domain but we like to restrict what people are allowed to do on them using local group policy. Other than testing if the software that my company uses works, what else should I focus on when testing the OS? Sorry for the newbie question.
 
VPN clients, security software, specialized drivers. Overall performance of the typical workstation in your business. Is Windows 7 hurting your performance or helping.
 
Are the laptops currently not joined to the domain, or simply never joined?

Either way, I would check that the Group Policies work, your anti-virus suite is compatible and supported, and any scripts (such as Kixtart) you may have. Also, depending on whether the OS is 32 or 64 bit; you'll want to check for driver compatibilities. This is just to name a few.
 
Thanks a lot for your suggestions, guys!

The laptops are never joined to domain, but there are plenty of restrictions with local group policy. Because I'm really new at my job and don't know exactly how they have the laptops configured currently with XP on them, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go through each policy on XP and try to duplicate it on Win7. That sounds like a lot of work, so I'm looking forward to it :)

Just installed Windows7 on one of our older PCs, and I'm already seeing the difference in performace. It's noticebly faster and much more responsive then XP on the same computer. I'll try to keep you guys posted as I explore and try to do more stuff on it. Please keep your suggestions coming. I really appreciate all the help.
 
You can use windows easy transfer to migrate settings, files and user accounts, I think it also supports local group policies.
 
Thanks, Stoly. I will definitely try this. Would Windows Easy Transfer work from partition to partition, if for example I wanted I wanted to dual boot XP and Windows 7 on the same HD?
 
loss4words said:
Thanks, Stoly. I will definitely try this. Would Windows Easy Transfer work from partition to partition, if for example I wanted I wanted to dual boot XP and Windows 7 on the same HD?
Click to expand...

sure, it only trasfers files and windows settings and some 3rd party software settings, but not the programs them selves, much less partitions. You can tranfer them from XP to XP, vista or win7.

BTW you'll need to download easy transfer for XP (google it, or look for it in MS site) as the one included in xp is not compatible with vista/7.

There's also the MS User state migration tool, it has more features aimed for business deployment but its much more complicated.
 
The one thing I found I had an issue with was Cisco VPN software. They didn't have a x64 version for Vista and pretty much indicated they weren't going to have one. I wonder if they'll actually put one out for Win7 x64.

I had to create an XP VM to be able to use Cisco VPN to some of my clients that used Cisco.
 
So I transfered settings using Windows Easy Transfer using a flash drive but something weird is happening. The local group policy that were transfered only apply to a local admin account, but not a standard local account. So when I log on as administrator I'm locked down, but when I log on as a standard user I could pretty much do anything. I tried playing arround with security permissions on the group policy folder (C:/Windows/System32/Group Policy) but nothing seems to be working. Do you guys have any ideas what could be happening?

On a more positive note, even the older laptops on which XP is almost unusable, run Windows 7 exceptionally well. That really made me happy.
 
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