> there really isn't all that much new from what I've read so far.
We've made some very deep internal changes, and more importantly streamlined a whole bunch of things. But despite that, with a product as truly huge as GSS is in spread, what is a knockout for some people is ho-hum to another.
One of the seemingly tiny changes we made, for instance, is in Ghost32 - we notify the volume manager of new volumes after doing an image restore in Windows PE, and there is a switch that can mount every partition in the image we cloned onto a specific drive letter. If you use Windows PE and do any kind of customisation of the image, this avoids a reboot and allows you to write a single script that combines the clone.
Mick Kohut on these forums gave us the insight that lead to this feature, and I think it's going to be useful to a bunch of people and save them a bunch of time. But if you don't use WinPE, it's worthless.
There's a new feature called "Generic Tasks" for the console that sounds somewhat lame when you read it on the page as a feature, but the UI work involved has massively improved the usability of the task specification process as a whole. No screenshot or description can do it justice until you try it out. But again, if you mainly just use the Ghost cloning client for manufacturing processes without using the console, it's nothing special.
I do encourage you to evaluate it yourself when it's out - there will be an updated trialware available - and no doubt some of the forum users who were in the beta and have decided to update will share their opinions (since those count for much more than anything else).
> Does the GSS 2.0 allow modification of NTFS images with Ghostwalker?
With Ghost Explorer you can edit NTFS images, yes. Ghostwalker is the sid-changing utility, and that not only works with Vista, we've added a 32-bit version that runs in Windows PE as well for the folks who do their cloning with Windows PE.
> Are these tools compatible with Vista?
That's a complex question, and I don't have the answer to it exactly (mainly because my head is totally full of the code I've had to work on for GSS2, and there's not much room for anything else). Hopefully someone else can fill that in.
> Is there an update available to my current tools without having to upgrade to 1.1? Would the update be compatible with Vista
We are totally, totally focused on making sure GSS2 is completely Vista-compatible right now; that's taking every moment of everyone's day here at Ghost HQ, testing and re-testing against the final Vista build. I have done a backport of a bunch of fixes for some components to 1.1 (especially, for the OU issue with adding machines to Active Directory Domains) but that's just something I'm doing, not a planned specific update.
In the main, I don't think the Vista changes would easily fit back into the GSS1.1 code - some will, but most of them for things such as e.g. UAC really won't, the design changes go too deep.