Are the windows longhorn sounds official
- #Are the windows longhorn sounds official drivers#
- #Are the windows longhorn sounds official driver#
- #Are the windows longhorn sounds official full#
- #Are the windows longhorn sounds official software#
We certainly won't miss DOS much - R.I.P.
#Are the windows longhorn sounds official driver#
This should make things easier for driver teams as well as the system builders - at least, that's the plan.
#Are the windows longhorn sounds official drivers#
Network support among other features will be available, and the same drivers as regular Windows can be used. (It also has a forced reboot that occurs every 24 hours.) WinPE can easily fit on USB flash devices, coming in at under 64MB for the minimum configuration, although 128MB flash devices may be more appropriate for customized toolsets.
#Are the windows longhorn sounds official full#
Like regular Windows, it can be customized to fit the need it can even be turned back into the full Windows environment if desired, although that's counter productive. What's needed is a new tool to accomplish this task.Įnter Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment), basically a stripped down version of Windows with reduced API support. DOS will hit the end of the road on 12/31/05 as far as Microsoft is concerned, and there will be no way to use a DOS executable to start the Windows setup process. A lot of new hardware - particularly SATA and USB devices - will not be properly supported by DOS. Consider the many businesses and OEMs that currently use DOS to load up a tool like Ghost, along with network drivers for specific platforms. We'll still have a command prompt within Windows, but the DOS environment is basically dead. The OEM partners at the session looked very interested in the new features, although it's certainly not going to have as big of an impact for home users.Īn interesting point that was made during this presentation (and covered elsewhere) is that DOS is going away.
#Are the windows longhorn sounds official software#
Then on the assembly floor once the hardware is built, the image and configuration file are used to setup the OS and software for a custom PC. (All of this can alternatively be done at the client level if desired, but that's basically the current way of doing things, so it's nothing new.) If everything goes as planned, an online ordering process could also be integrated with the new imaging tools to create an on-the-fly unattend.xml file for a specific machine. Images can be created, and modifying them can be done by opening the image and adding or deleting files, or simply by dragging and dropping packages onto an existing image. Most of this is accomplished using a new tool called Setup Manager. Still, instead of dozens or even hundreds of disk images, the process can be reduced to perhaps two images per machine platform. you can get by with a single image! There will still be separate images for x86-32 and x86-64, however, and it wasn't entirely clear (to us) at what point a separate image might be required for different systems. So, rather than having a separate image for Home, Pro, and Media Center, with further images for each system platform, not to mention the various languages. The Windows Images (WIM) can contain multiple configurations, and a single file called "unattend.xml" will contain all of the settings for a specific installation. The imaging system appeared to be very robust, as only the OS' developer could make it. For example, languages are now an entirely separate component a single "world wide binary" is used for executables and it simply plugs into whatever language pack(s) the user has installed. The underlying OS has also been componentized in order to facilitate deployment. While ghost utilities have been used in the past, Longhorn will include its own imaging system. Several of the bullets deal with the management of system images. Longhorn comes with quite a few changes to help their OEM and business partners. are all matters that have to be dealt with on a typical assembly line. If none of those items sound particularly important, then you probably haven't dealt with the deployment of a large number of PCs. Some of the basic problems with deployment of Windows are summarized in the following slide. Home users don't often think about these issues, but for a company like Dell, installing and configuring the OS on millions of PCs is a critical matter.
One of the sessions we attended covered the OEM/business side of Longhorn preparations. Longhorn Manufacturing and Installation Features