February 13, 2009

Vista or Windows 7? Just get rid of XP, Microsoft tells users

February 11th, 2009

Posted by Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s latest Windows deployment guidance for business users has morphed from the overly simplistic “Don’t wait for Windows 7.”

The company’s new corporate advice is more nuanced and more dependent on where users are currently in their deployment cycles. But the bottom-line message is whether you decide to go with Vista or wait for Windows 7 is less important than getting off Windows XP.

When I wrote last week about the pending arrival of the “perfect Windows storm,” some readers claimed I was complicating matters and that the choice of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 was clear-cut for business users.

This week, Microsoft officials themselves admitted that users are confused and looking for guidance as to which Windows client version they should be targeting in their near-term deployments. To try to clarify things, the company is updating its Windows guidance for business users.

In the inaugural post on February 11 on the newly cialis once a day minted “Windows for Your Business” blog, Gavriella Schuster, Senior Director for Windows Commercial Product Management, offered a more detailed check list for business customers who are planning their Windows roadmaps:

  • If you are running Windows 2000 in your environment: Migrate your Windows 2000 PCs to Windows Vista as soon as possible. Extended support for Windows 2000 ends Q2 2010, and as an enterprise customer, you may soon find your business’s critical applications are unsupported.
  • If you are in the process of planning or deploying Windows Vista: Continue your Windows Vista SP1 deployment. If you’re really in the early stages or just starting on Windows Vista, plan to test and deploy Windows Vista SP2 (on target to RTM Q2 2009). Moving onto Windows Vista now will allow for an easier transition to Windows 7 in the future due to the high degree of compatibility.
  • If you are on Windows XP now and are undecided about which OS to move to: Make sure you taken into consideration the risk of skipping Windows Vista, which I am discussing below. And know that deploying Windows Vista now will make the future transition to Windows 7 easier.
  • If you are on Windows XP now and are waiting for Windows 7: Make sure you take into consideration the risks of skipping Windows Vista, and plan on starting an early evaluation of Windows 7 for your company using the beta that’s available now. Testing and remediating applications on Windows Vista will ease your Windows 7 deployment due to the high degree of compatibility.

Given an estimated 71 percent of business PCs are still running XP, Microsoft’s advice to upgrade from XP isn’t overly surprising. The biggest competitor to Vista and/or Windows 7 isn’t Linux or Mac OS X; it’s XP.

Schuster said she has been talking to several business users every week for the last couple of months and is hearing the same questions over and over again. Is moving to Vista — with Windows 7 in the wings — futile at this point? Is Vista another “Windows Millennium” — an operating system Microsoft quickly backed and then abandoned, heading off in another direction with Windows XP? If customers already have started Vista deployments, should business customers abandon them and prep for Windows 7 instead?

“I’m not advocating Vista or 7. I’m just saying they should be getting off XP,” Schuster told me when we chatted earlier this week.

Microsoft is retiring XP SP2 support in April 2009; XP SP3 support isn’t going away until 2014. (Microsoft isn’t advising business customers to count on SP3 to extend the life of their existing operating systems. Why patch again an operating system originally introduced in 2001? Schuster quipped. I suggested containing costs might be one reason….) Plus, Schuster argued, a number of app vendors are phasing out support for their XP applications.

“Typical enterprise organizations tend to have between 500 and 5,000 different applications deployed across their environments,” Schuster said. “Users need to find out how long these apps will be supported on XP and when (ISVs) are planning to certify the new versions of these apps on Windows 7.”

In the interim, she said, business users should shell out for MDOP, Microsoft’s Desktop Optimization Pack — a collection of deployment and virtualization tools designed to make running legacy apps and migrating to new OS releases easier. (MDOP is available for purchase by Software Assurance volume licensees only.)

XP users: With IT budgets being slashed, what’s your latest upgrade game plan? Are you going to move to Vista any time soon? Wait for Win 7? Or is it XP SP3, here you come?

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February 12, 2009

XP deadline extended toward launch of Windows 7

Dennis O'Reilly By Dennis O'Reilly

Microsoft has acknowledged that it will allow system builders to pay for installed copies of XP through May 30, rather than shutting down the pipeline this month.

If you order from your preferred vendor by Jan. 31, you may be able to rely on XP for new systems almost right up until the long-awaited Windows 7 ships, an event that's expected cialis instructions to occur within a few months.

Vista is looking more and more like the Edsel of the computer industry. Presumably as a result of slow uptake by corporations and individual users, Microsoft last month confirmed that it will allow OEMs and smaller-scale "system builders" to pay as late as May 30, 2009, for copies of XP ordered by Jan. 31. (Vendors won't have to pay Microsoft until the systems sell. MS previously had been expecting payments for copies of XP by Jan. 31.)

The details of Microsoft's new, flexible inventory program were first reported on the ChannelWeb site.

Combine this news with reports that Windows 7 may ship as early as mid-2009, and it looks like Microsoft is ready to relegate Vista to the binary scrapheap. Maybe the company's recent $300 million marketing push for Vista wasn't so successful as Microsoft claims it was.

As Mary Jo Foley states in her All About Microsoft blog, vendors of low-budget PCs such as netbooks were already being allowed to sell new systems based on XP through June 30, 2010, or one year after Windows 7 ships — whichever came first. Microsoft's new policy now gives a reprieve to builders of mainstream computers, and to end users who want to buy systems running Windows XP, not Vista, indefinitely or until Windows 7 is a proven commodity.

Will the Windows 7 RTM make an early entrance?

The official release of Beta 1 of Windows 7 to the public is widely expected to occur next week. If all goes well with the remaining testing, indications are that the final, RTM (released to manufacturing) version will be available as early as August. Lending support to this theory is the fact that the end-user license agreement of Beta 1, like all recent prerelease versions of Windows 7, states that the software will expire Aug. 1, 2009.

This feature — as well as the use of the product's built-in slmgr -rearm command to extend the beta's trial period without an activation key — was recently explained by Marius Oiaga of Softpedia. Other sources predict that Windows 7 won't ship to OEMs until October 2009, becoming available to end users the following month.

Early reviews of the Windows 7 beta, such as those summarized by the Telegraph of London, variously describe the new operating system as being not much different from Vista or representing an unspectacular-but-solid improvement. If Windows 7 turns out to have better performance and reliability than Vista, as some reviewers believe, the OS may gain a measure of relieved acceptance from end users after only a few months on the market.

Paying a premium to downgrade from Vista to XP

The extended availability of XP on new PCs will gladden the hearts of many Windows users. For a few unfortunates, however, the XP option is coming at great cost.

Eric Krangel reports on the Silicon Alley Insider blog that Dell has gradually been inflating its surcharge for "downgrading" a PC from Vista to XP. The bite rose last June from U.S. $20 to $50, then spiked in October to $100, and now is a whopping $150.

The fact that Dell's customers appear to be willing to pay this amount or more to avoid Vista may be the greatest indictment of Microsoft's unloved OS.

The reality is that the Redmond software giant has been forced by popular opinion to provide customers with a Vista-free option — an extended life for XP — more than two years after Vista's rollout. Depending on your point of view, this concession can be interpreted negatively as an act of desperation or more positively as a burst of marketing acumen on the company's part.

As usual, the truth is likely somewhere in between.

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February 9, 2009

How well does Windows 7 handle 512MB?

February 6th, 2009

Posted by Ed Bott

I’ve been spending most of my time lately conducting in-depth research into how Windows 7 works, in preparation for my next book. In the process, I’m discovering stuff that simply doesn’t become apparent to a casual tester. Case in point: Back in 2007, I looked at Windows Vista Home Basic and determined that it could run well on an older machine with limited resources, including 512MB of RAM. I never tried it with Vista Ultimate, nor would I have bothered. And since I don’t have that 2002-vintage test machine set up, I haven’t repeated those tests with Windows 7.

Earlier this week, I fired up a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3 so I could test upgrade scenarios with Windows 7. I couldn’t do a straight XP-to-Win7 upgrade, so I added a new virtual hard drive and installed Windows 7 in a dual-boot configuration. After making a few notes on how the setup process worked, I put the VM aside and went on to other work.

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 uses less memory than you might think

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 uses less memory than you might think

A few hours later, I went back to that new Windows 7 installation to look at a few details, and that’s when it struck me: This virtual machine was configured with a mere 512MB of RAM, and yet I hadn’t noticed any slowdowns during setup or in operation. Even more startling, I realized that I had inadvertently installed the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 Ultimate in this VM. But the most eye-opening moment came when I looked at Task Manager’s performance tab. I’ve pasted a screen grab of the memory gauge here.

The x64 edition of Windows 7 Ultimate running on just over 200MB of RAM? That was a pleasant surprise. I was also surprised to see that this clean install was using less than 9 GB of disk space in this VM. With my curiosity piqued, I configured a new VM using the same settings and did a clean install of Vista Ultimate, giving me a good baseline for comparing XP to its successors. Here are the stats for all three operating systems, with memory usage measured after all update operations had completed and the system had been idle for at least one hour:

cialis dosage daily

XP Vista Win7
RAM (MB) 150 299 216
Disk (GB) 5.7 14.3 8.6

Or, in graphical terms, with the raw numbers normalized so that XP=100:

Windows 7 uses less RAM and disk space than Vista

Windows 7 uses less RAM and disk space than Vista

As you can see, on this low-resource configuration Windows 7 uses dramatically less RAM than Vista, and also has a smaller hard-disk footprint. A few configuration notes can help put these results in perspective:

  • For XP, the installation includes Service Pack 3, plus all available updates including Internet Explorer 7, Windows Media Player 11, and Windows Search 4. The only non-Windows application installed on this system is Firefox.
  • For Vista, the installation was of Ultimate Edition (x86) with Service Pack 1 and all available Critical and Recommended updates. No third-party software was installed.
  • For Windows 7 Beta, I used Ultimate x64 edition. As with the Vista installation, I accepted any Critical or Recommended updates and installed no third-party software.

The numbers and charts don’t really tell the full story, though. With identical configurations, Windows 7 was dramatically faster at starting up and shutting down than Vista, and some routine tasks that would grind the Vista machine to a halt completed without incident on the Windows 7 machine.

Just for comparison’s sake, I reconfigured each system to include 1024MB of RAM. With the extra RAM available, the delta between the Windows 7 and Vista VMs narrowed dramatically, although the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 still used less RAM than Vista. On the Vista system,. this upgrade made a noticeable difference, whereas the Windows 7 system performed about the same.

Clearly, the Windows 7 development team has taken a close look at performance and disk footprint when resources aren’t abundant. I suspect that when Vista was being designed, this was an afterthought, with the notion that cheap RAM and hard disks would make those machines obsolete. They didn’t account for netbooks or for the impact of solid state drives, which offer capacities that are much smaller than equivalent rotating media.

Why does Windows 7 use so much less disk space than Vista? A very small amount of the savings (much less than I expected) is in program code. The biggest savings is from the preallocated volume shadow storage space, which holds System Restore points and backs up files via the Previous Versions feature. On my Vista virtual machine, this feature was using more than 4.6 GB of disk space. Under Windows 7, the system reserved less than 400 MB.

This attention to performance when resources are less than expected on a modern desktop PC potentially has positive implications for netbooks and other cheap PCs. I might have to haul that old 2002-era Pentium 4 out of mothballs and see how it handles Windows 7.

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February 4, 2009

Controlling Windows 7

Microsoft received a lot of feedback from its users in regards to showing plenty of alerts and messages when using different versions of Windows. Because of that, Windows 7 has been designed in such a way that users are able to take buy cialis online usa control over the messages they want to see. That's right, when you use Windows 7, you're the only one in control. And it's all thanks to the Action Center. Keep reading to learn even more!

Even if you don't change a thing, you'll still see fewer notifications and icons on your screen, because the Action Center consolidates alerts from 10 Windows features, including the Security Center and Windows Defender.

Rather than popping up with a message in the lower right hand corner of your screen, if Windows 7 needs your attention, you'll see an Action Center icon and you can then find out more by clicking on it. If you don't have time to look at the alert immediately, the Action Center will keep the information for you to address later.

That's it. Just another great feature coming to you soon in the new Windows 7 operating system. Enjoy!

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Windows 7 Beta

Have you heard the big news yet?! This past Friday (January 9, 2009), Microsoft released the Windows 7 Beta and it is now available as a free download. The new Windows 7 promises to be a leaner and meaner version of Windows Vista, because it was designed with “simplicity, reliability and speed” in mind. Now, before you start downloading it, here's a little more of what you can expect from the new Windows 7!

Improved Taskbar and Full Screen Previews

The taskbar at the bottom best price cialis of your screen is what you use to switch between the applications you have open, right? Well, in Windows 7, you can set the order in which the icons appear and they'll stay that way, no matter what. They're much easier to see too! With just one click on the new large icons or bigger preview thumbnails, you're ready to go. You can even see a full screen preview before switching over to the window.

Jump Lists

With Windows 7, Microsoft focused on keeping the things you use the most right in front of you. One example is the new Jump List feature. It's a handy way to quickly reach the files you work with most often. To see the files you've used recently, just right click on the icon in your taskbar. For instance, right clicking on the MS Word icon will show your most recent Word documents. Plus, if there are other files you want to keep close by, you can just pin them to your Jump List.

Windows Live

In Windows 7, some of the features previously included in the operating system are now available for download through Windows Live Essentials (a set of free applications available for your computer, supported by Windows 7). You can download Windows Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer, Movie Maker and much more. With those great applications, you can improve your Windows experience and benefit from faster delivery of the new features and services.

If all of that sounds like a good deal to you, download the Windows 7 Beta for yourself right here. Enjoy!

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