The series goes on with three new observations…

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the default homepage for Internet Explorer is no longer the massively ad-infested monster that is MSN. Instead, we’re now presented with the lighter, friendlier, much cleaner Live homepage that’s sure to please the Google-lovers out there.

Also, I was quite happy to see that my basic Group Policy settings for my XP machines were properly retrieved and run on my newly domain’d Vista machine. Logging in with my domain user account and popping up Windows Explorer showed me all my usual mapped network drives, thanks to my logon scripts. It’s the simple things that make transitions like this all the more pleasant…

I still wish the logon screen would default to a domain account on the first reboot after joining a domain. If I just joined a domain, why would I still want to login to the local machine? In XP, this is merely clicking a button to display the login drop-down box and selecting your domain from the list. With Vista, we’ve made it an extra click - Login as another user, Login as another user, type in credentials. No more drop-down list goodness… Like I said, it’s the simple things. They can make the transition more pleasant, but they can also make it a much larger pain in the ass…