Windows XP

The Expert’s Guide to Implementing Microsoft Windows Vista

Scriptlogic is releasing an e-book to help you migrate to Windows Vista, it’s called The Expert’s Guide to Implementing Microsoft Windows Vista and it is free when you Register to download the 30-day trial of Desktop Authority now, and receive chapters 1-4 for free. Or, you may be able to register here to get it free, but haven’t tried it yet.

• Provides information about new features and the background on the editions available
• Highlights new and improved security features and impact on the IT professional
• Outlines a plan on how to prepare for the migration to Vista
• Teaches IT administrations how to minimize costs and user disruption when deploying Vista.

“Many IT administrators have already started to develop a Vista migration strategy and we wanted to arm them with the resources necessary to ensure a smooth and effective transition,” said Nick Cavalancia, vice president of Marketing, ScriptLogic Corporation. “Leveraging feedback and notes from an extensive customer base and Mr. Masson’s technical expertise, we were able to publish a guide that will help industry professionals take full advantage of the features included in Vista, one of the most anticipated OS launches from Microsoft in years.” Source: ScriptLogic Corporation Releases Free e-Book on Windows Vista Migration

The also have a whitepaper available, The Proactive Migration to Windows Vista,” detailing the best strategies for Microsoft Vista migration. Get it here.

Todays Windows News

What Will Windows 7 Look Like? Microsoft hasn’t said what features will be in Windows 7, but analysts have some ideas of their own.

Friday Rant – Things I hate about Windows Vista First, some background. When I?ve been sitting in front of a Vista machine during the six months since its release I?ve usually been in one of two modes. The first mode is where I?m exploring Vista and getting to know the features of the operating system, where things are and how they work. The second mode is where I?m actually doing my day-to-day work or play.

Microsoft: less vulnerabilities in Vista AND XP than Mac OX Tiger Microsoft?s chief operating officer Kevin Turner implicitly claimed yesterday that Vista and XP are safer than Apple?s Mac OS Tiger. As expressed during a conference call with analysts, Turner noted that ?there have been just 12 serious vulnerabilities reported with Vista over the first 180 days versus 25 for Windows XP over the same period. This number is also lower than for Apple and other operating systems. We have also seen 21 percent fewer support calls for Vista versus XP over the same period,? he said.

SolutionBase: Application compatibility testing for Windows Vista Deployment One of the most critical tasks in preparing a deployment of Windows Vista is to test the compatibility of your applications. Many applications that run perfectly under Windows XP simply do not run on Windows Vista. Since you don’t want to spend time and money to deploy Vista if none of your users are able to run their applications afterward, it is absolutely imperative to test each application ahead of time.

Gartner: Windows XP A Shaky Bridge To Windows 7 Gartner warns that businesses that decide to stick with Windows XP — Vista’s predecessor — until Windows 7 is available may be pushing their luck. “If the release date slips, enterprises will find it difficult to fully eliminate Windows XP before ISV and Microsoft support [for Windows XP] ends,” Gartner analysts write in the note.

Vista and XP Performance, Reliability and Compatibility Packs

Microsoft has released 2 Windows Vista fix packs and one for Windows XP. The one for XP is actually downloadable now, get it here, the two Vista fix packs have been uploaded to mediafire file serving site and can be downloaded here for the X86 version and the X64 versions here. It is being speculated that these two fix packs will be the majority of what comprises the Windows Vista sp1 and that it will not contain much more, but most all of the service pack information concerning Windows Vista is speculation right now.

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
• Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
• Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ?estimated time remaining? when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
• Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance of Vista?s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
• Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
• Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Source: Major Windows Vista updates, Vista Performance, Reliability and Compatibility Pack

Looks like a lot of improvements for Windows Vista users, lets hope that it is actually the case. No reports from anyone using them currently that I am aware of. Mary Jo Foley got a look at the email sent to the testers and it had some service pack 1 information in it.

Q: What is in Windows Vista SP1?

A: ?Windows Vista SP1 is an update to Windows Vista that, along with improvements delivered to users via Windows Update, addresses feedback from our customers. In addition to previously released updates, SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards.?

Q: What is not in Windows Vista SP1?

A: SP1 is not intended to be a vehicle for releasing new features; however some existing components do gain enhanced functionality in SP1. ?

Q: What are some examples of ?improved security and quality??

A: SP1 delivers improvements that target what we?ve found to be the most common causes of crashes and hangs, giving users a more reliable experience. SP1 also improves upon performance in key scenarios, such as copying files and shutdown time.

Beyond improvements to the basics, SP1 addresses other areas where we have received feedback. For example, SP1 improves the success of peer-to-peer connections, such as Windows MeetingSpace or Remote Assistance, when both PCs are behind symmetric firewalls. It also gives vendors of security software a more secure way to communicate with Windows Security Center. Source: New Vista fix packs provide updates promised for SP1

Some of the folks over on the AeroXperience.org website have benchmarked the time it takes to copy files before and after the fixes and the improvements are indeed promising.

During the tests, we quickly found copying small files (1MB-10MB) proved too difficult to time and therefore were cut from the benchmark. The other tests, however, blew us away (sorry, we’re pessimists when it comes to NVIDIA drivers and Microsoft hotfixes)…

After some very lengthy re-learning of percentages, we calculated the transfers completed over twice as fast! One oddity, however, was the fact the speed indicator in the file transfer dialog remained at a fairly constant rate (48MB/s), giving us the impression the speed calculation code is borked. Despite this, however, these numbers are very encouraging given the hotfix’s short life; we can’t wait to see what the final build delivers! Source: KB938979 to Fix File Transfer Woes. No, really.

So, it definitely appears that it will be a help to most people.

Windows XP and Vista News and Tips

Some stuff I didn’t get a chance to comment on this week.

Mark Minasi is one of those guys tech people look up too, published many books on technology and always seems to be on top of and in the middle of everything Windows related. He has a monthly newsletter and this one has some great Windows Vista info in it. This month he talks about Windows Vista Complete PC backup system, using it to backup to an unsupported network drive, Windows Vista does not recognize Windows XP’s roaming profiles, and Software License Manager.

CompletePC Trap: Never Lower Your Drive Size
I love Vista’s new CompletePC backup system. In case you’ve not looked into it, CompletePC Backup has a few neat features:

It backs up entire drive letters to a VHD (virtual hard disk) format. The process takes quite a while the first time you do it, but the incremental backups are quite quick, in my experience.
The beauty of the VHD format is that it allows you to create multiple snapshots of a disk, all stored in one file. Even better, the file format is smart enough to just hang onto the incremental information, so that even if you’ve done a complete save of, say, your C: drive ten times over the past few days, the VHD file won’t be ten times the size of your data. Instead, the backup will probably be only a few percent larger than the current size of the data on your hard disk.

Here’s the really neat part: restoring a CompletePC backup. When storing your system information to the VHD file, CompletePC removes the hardware-specific parts of the backup. Result: you can restore your CompletePC backup to another system as a bare-metal restore, regardless of the make and model of the system that you’re doing the restore on. So, for example, suppose you have an Acme laptop running Vista on a given motherboard chipset, ATI video chipset, and an IDE (“PATA”) hard disk. You make a CompletePC backup of that system. Then the Acme laptop dies and you buy a Zephyr laptop that features a different motherboard chipset, an Nvidia video chip, and a SATA hard disk. You boot the Zephyr laptop with the Vista Install DVD and use CompletePC Restore to restore your Acme laptop’s data and operating system to the much-different Zephyr… and it works. (This assumes that Vista has or can find drivers for the stuff in the Zephyr, of course.) Source: Mark Minasi’s Windows Networking Tech Page Issue #63 July 2007

Six months on, Vista users still griping Some working around flaws or sticking with Windows XP. Jessica Mintz talks to Chris Pirillo about Windows Vista and him upgrading back to Windows XP.

Microsoft re-assures partners on Vista compatibility Microsoft has used its annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) to stress that it’s working to solve stubborn compatibility problems between Windows Vista and partner products.

Vista’s advanced speech recognition technology The fake Steve Jobs talks about Vista’s speech recognition, includes video of someone using it to write a perl script.

Downgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP

This sure sounds funny to say it, but Microsoft is trying to make it easier to downgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP, as some applications still don’t work correctly or won’t run under Windows Vista. But, don’t worry, they have had the downgrade path for awhile now, you could and still can downgrade your Windows XP to Windows 2000.

Microsoft is simplifying the processes via which its PC-maker partners will be able to provide ?downgrade? rights from Windows Vista to Windows XP for their customers.

Microsoft will implement the first of the policy changes for its Gold Certified (top-tier) OEM partners within the next couple of weeks. The company will streamline downgrade-rights policies and procedures for the broader channel somewhat later, said John Ball, general manager of Microsoft?s U.S. Systems Group.

Under current licensing terms, Microsoft allows customers buying PCs preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate and Vista Business to roll back to Windows XP until they are ready to make the move to Vista. For OEMs, the process via which these rights can be activated has been quite cumbersome, Ball acknowledged. Source: Microsoft to simplify downgrades from Vista to XP

So, if you buy your PC from Dell, HP, etc, you will be able to roll them back to Windows XP and still have the option to bring them back to Windows Vista when you are ready for it. You can downgrade Windows Vista Business and Ultimate to Windows XP Professional, Tablet PC Edition and Windows XP Professional 64 bit Edition, you can downgrade Windows XP Pro, Tablet Edition and Pro 64 bit to Windows 2000 Professional. A few other facts from the article comparing Windows Vista to Windows XP.

• Ninety-nine percent of all Windows PCs sold at retail are being sold with Vista preloaded
• Seventy-eight percent of PCs preloaded with Vista are shipping with ?premium? SKUs (like Vista Ultimate and Vista Home Premium)
• Microsoft is experiencing 21 percent fewer support calls with Vista than it did with Windows XP
• Fewer security issues that need patching with Vista than XP (five Vista issues in the first 90 days vs. 18 with XP in the first 90 days)
• Device compatibility is high and getting higher daily

Windows Mobile and Windows XP News

For all of you people out there with Windows Mobile smart phones, you could soon be making free phone calls from your Windows Mobile and Windows Mobile 6 smart phones using Fring, a VOIP service that’s a lot like Skype.

Fring allows users to make free VoIP phone calls and conduct multiple live chat sessions through Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, and many other SIP service providers, according to the company.

Fringland says its mobile VoIP client enables “WiFi enabled but SIM-less” Windows Mobile PDAs to function as open VoIP phones, using either WiFi hot spots or 3G cellular data services for access to the Internet. It supports making low cost VoIP calls to PSTN/POTS landline phones using SkypeOut or similar services. “Presence” functions indicate a contact’s availability in real-time, allowing the user to select the best calling method based on factors such as the recipient’s availability, reception quality, and call cost, according to the company. Source: Free VoIP For Your Windows Mobile Smart phone

Download Fring here. In a related story, it appears Microsoft has been working on an application that will allow voice searches of your Windows Mobile device using Bluetooth and your mic. Check it out here.

From Techrepublic, you can download a Font properties extension that will give you loads more information on the fonts that are installed in your Windows XP system, both versions, home and professional.

After you download and install this extension, the number of tabs on each font’s properties dialog box will jump from two to 11, with each tab providing all kinds of information about the font. The information contained on these 11 tabs includes very detailed descriptions of each font, links to the font vendors and font designers, legal information, such as ownership, copyright, trademark, license, and embedding permissions, as well as technical information about the font. Source: Download an extension to learn more about Windows XP fonts

Check out the extension here from Microsoft, where you can download it from here or an older version for everyone still limping along on Windows 98 or 95.

Tired of the auto play box that pops up every time you insert your USB drive(s) into your computer? You can set Windows Explorer to be the default auto play action and it will open up every time you insert a USB drive, instead of that annoying box.

1. Insert your flash drive into the USB port.
2. When you see the AutoPlay dialog box, click Cancel.
3. Open My Computer, right-click your flash drive icon, and select Properties.
4. In the Properties dialog box, select the AutoPlay tab.
5. Perform the following steps for each item in the Content Type drop-down list:
   - Select an item in the Content Type drop-down list.
   - Choose Select An Action To Perform in the Actions panel.
   - Select the Open Folder To View Files In Windows Explorer action.
   - Click the Apply button.
6. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box

. Source: Permanently set Windows XP’s Windows Explorer as your flash drive’s default AutoPlay action

How To Get Ready to Upgrade from XP to Vista

Microsoft has posted a nice little summary to get you ready to upgrade your Windows XP machines to Windows Vista. It talks about backing up all of your files, as you should be doing anyway, of course you have to be at Service Pack 2 level, you need to verify the upgrade status of your computer, make sure your programs will still work and that you have enough hard drive space on your NTFS file system.

Verify the upgrade status of the Windows XP-based computer
To determine whether you can upgrade the edition of Windows XP on the computer to Windows Vista, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradepaths.mspx (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradepaths.mspx)
Additionally, you can use the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to help determine which edition of Windows Vista you can install. For more information about the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradeadvisor.mspx (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradeadvisor.mspx)
If you cannot upgrade the version of Windows XP to Windows Vista, perform a custom installation. (This kind of installation is also known as a clean installation.) When you perform a custom installation, you cannot migrate the Windows XP settings to Windows Vista. For more information about how to perform a custom installation of Windows Vista, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
933178 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933178/) How to install Windows Vista Source: How to prepare to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista

Some of the other KB articles you may have to visit:

308422 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308422/) How to use the Backup utility that is included in Windows XP to back up files and folders

322389 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322389/) How to obtain the latest Windows XP service pack

933178 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933178/) How to install Windows Vista

931359 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931359/) How to determine whether there are program-compatibility issues before you install Windows Vista

306542 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306542/) How to use the Desktop Cleanup Wizard in Windows XP

314097 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314097/) How to use Convert.exe to convert a partition to the NTFS file system

Windows XP Visual Styles

Ghacks.net has posted some links to 5 nice visual styles for Windows Vista from the deviantart website, the article is here, 5 beautiful visual styles for Windows XP. Of course you can’t change the visual style out of the box, some “hacking” is required.

The feature to add your own visual styles to Windows XP is locked by default and you need to replace the original uxtheme.dll with a patched unlocked one to be able to add visual styles to the operating system. Download the patched uxtheme.dll from Softpedia and do the following. Rename the original file which can be found in the system32 folder of your Windows XP installation to uxtheme.dll.old and move the downloaded version into system32. You will have to restart your computer afterwards before the changes are recognized. Source: 5 beautiful visual styles for Windows XP

Windows XP and Windows Vista News

Windows Vista and Windows XP in the news.

Vista: Benchmarking or Benchmarketing? Microsoft is in an excellent position to create an industry standard benchmark on a consumer level, because Vista will be the dominant operating system for new PCs by the middle of this year. A built-in benchmarking solution would not only allow users to assess and compare the performance of components and systems, but be a powerful marketing instrument for the whole industry as well. Microsoft developed a comprehensive but simple to understand rating scheme, called the Windows Experience Index.

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista Free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create searchable PDF files by selecting the “Print” command from virtually any application. With one click you can convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents or your emails and favourite web sites to PDF files.

Researcher to Demonstrate Vista Attacks A security researcher will show hackers new ways to defeat Vista’s BitLocker drive encryption. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Windows Vista Tip: Installing And Running Adobe Reader When you want to put a document online, or distribute it via e-mail, and you need it to look exactly the way it looks on paper, then PDF is the way to go — and the standard application used to view PDF files is, of course, Adobe Reader.

So Where is Microsoft Vista SP1? The April 25 release of a feature-complete Windows Server “Longhorn” beta is a monumental milestone for Microsoft, perhaps more important than the launch of Windows Vista. As the nucleus of Microsoft’s enterprise product strategy, Longhorn will likely pull deployments of other products, including Vista. However, uncertainty about the release of the first Vista service pack looms like a dark cloud over future upgrades.

How the ANI bug got baked into Vista: Microsoft explains In a postmortem of last month’s Windows animated (.ANI) cursor vulnerability, one of Microsoft Corp.’s security development gurus today spelled out how the bug sneaked into Vista.

Manual switch solves XP’s auto-play options Q. I have several flash drives and a couple memory card readers and want to change the automatic-play options that Windows XP offers when I plug them into a USB port. XP will automatically open Windows Explorer — unless there are any JPG picture or AVI movie files on the drive.

NVIDIA Releases nTune 5.05.38 For Windows XP and Vista NVIDIA has released a new version of nTune, its GPU and platform overclocking utility, to NVIDIA.com. The version is 5.05.38 and supports Windows XP (32/64-bit) and Windows Vista (32/64-bit).

Microsoft: Windows XP Sales Will Fade In 2008 as Vista Takes Hold Officials at the software maker said they expect that Windows Vista will account for 85% of OS sales in fiscal 2008 compared to 15% for Windows XP.

Tech, Google, XP, and Microsoft in China

Here are a bunch of tech stories for today.

Dell brings back XP on home systems Amid significant customer demand, the computer maker said on Thursday that it has returned to offering the older Windows version as an option on some of its consumer PCs.

How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons More than a year ago, I wrote about the increasing risks of data loss because more and more data fits in smaller and smaller packages. Today I use a 4-GB USB memory stick for backup while I am traveling. I like the convenience, but if I lose the tiny thing I risk all my data.

Vista, IE7 help Microsoft boost search market share In a rare bit of good news for Microsoft on the search front, web metrics firm comScore reported that for the month of March, Microsoft’s search engines saw their first market share increase in nearly a year. Microsoft’s search market share jumped 0.4 percentage points from February to March, giving it 10.9 percent of the total market.

April ’07 Back Compat Update April showers have yielded us a Back Compat update The latest backwards compatibility update is now available over Xbox Live (or will be very soon.) This free update brings the complete list of original Xbox games that you can play on your Xbox 360 to over 300.

Back to basics So we’re renaming Froogle as Google Product Search. We’re taking the opportunity to refocus the user experience on providing the most comprehensive, relevant results in a clean, simple, easy-to-use UI. Who cares.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Latest Ubuntu released, I may as well download this one and try it.

Google Video powering some pirate sites Google, already being sued for copyright infringement on its YouTube service, may have another copyright tempest brewing on its older Google Video site. The site hosts numerous full-length movies which are now being exploited by “guerilla” video sites; in essence, Google is one part of the engine that powers video piracy.

MySpace News Launches Thursday On Thursday morning MySpace will launch its much rumored news property at news.myspace.com. Expect the site to go live and a press release to be issued around 7 am EST.

Microsoft aims to reach next billion PC users Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is using a speech in Beijing to unveil a new low-cost bundle of Office and Windows, one of several new initiatives aimed at getting PCs into the hands of more people in emerging markets. Especially considering they have only sold 244 copies of Vista in China.

Widgetsphere: New Playground For Marketers If you’re in the online marketing game and are not yet hip to widgets, listen up. Two emerging Web 2.0 technology firms focused in this space have a message for you. Those companies are Widgetbox and ClearSpring, both of which presented in a session on Tuesday afternoon at Web 2.0 Expo that was billed as “Using Widget Syndication for Online Marketing and Measurement”.