Windows 7 is about ready to hit the streets and Microsoft wants to make sure that the corporate rollout experience is smooth, or at least smoother than OS upgrades have been in the past. To that end, Microsoft has introduced a few features, tools and services, including one mean to help manage drivers, that should help enterprise-level users make a smooth transition from their current version to Windows 7.

Windows 7 Separates Drivers From Images

Drivers have been a major hang-up since the introduction of Vista two years ago. Since Microsoft isn’t taking any chances this time, the software giant took a long look at the way drivers were rolled out in Enterpriseville. What they found was that enterprise users were loading many more drivers than were needed in order to compensate for the large number of desktops they were servicing. Loading more drivers than what’s needed opens the door for potential conflicts and other problems, like slow installation times.

To correct this, Microsoft added “Dynamic Driver Provisioning” which allows drivers to be stored in a central location, separately from an image. The system allows IT professionals to select drivers by BIOS sets or by a device’s Plug and Play ID. Images can also be updated offline, and different images with different driver configurations can be stored in an image library. The image library concept isn’t new to Windows 7; this feature was also present in Windows Vista.

Speeding up installations was also a primary concern. IT professionals in large work environments have used third-party multicast tools to blast new images to networked computers for years. Now Microsoft offers Multicast Multiple Stream Transfer, a multicast service that can send data to multiple workstations simultaneously.

Speed is also in the mix for the Windows 7 product. Microsoft has struggled with the size of the operating system and the length of time the system required to load. The company offered a half-compromise with Vista that enabled the system to load the most used parts of the operating system first, giving the appearance (but not always the quality) of being ready to go. Microsoft now says that the Windows 7 system loads completely within 11 seconds of boot-up.

To accomplish that, the company has worked closely with Intel to optimize the performance of the OS with the capabilities of Intel’s newest chipsets. The result is lower power consumption (great for laptops and other portable computing devices), better virtualization and better overall performance.

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