February 2nd, 2009

Posted by Mary Jo Foley

Whenever Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, there’s always some period of uncertainty when customers face the choice of moving to the current release or waiting for the new product. This year,  however, that transition period is especially uneasy.

Windows 7 is — by all accounts (except from the Microsoft honchos) — due out later this year and is looking faster, smaller and more stable than any Windows release out there. Windows Vista is here, but not a user favorite (to put it mildly). And eight-year-old Windows XP is still the dominant version of Windows out there.

So what’s a Windows user to do? Follow Microsoft’s corporate guidance and upgrade to Vista now in preparation for 7? Hang on a bit longer with XP? Try mixing and matching the three in your IT shop?

Microsoft’s Windows brass have been reticent to provide a detailed answer to the question “What should my desktop strategy be?” But Mike Fiorina, a Microsoft account cialis online no prescription tech specialist based in New England, grabbed the Windows-upgrade-confusion bull by the horns in a blog post this past weekend.

Fiorina explained that a perfect storm is brewing: XP SP2 mainstream support is set to end in July, 2010 April 2009 (and all support for it by July 2010).  XP SP3 extended support isn’t retiring until April 2014, which, Fiorina said, “gives XP environments some breathing room, but not necessarily as much as you might think.”

Even though Vista SP1 has been out for a year (and Vista SP2 is expected some time in the next few months), Vista still is suffering from both real and imagined limitations, Fiorina admitted. From his January 30 post:

“The one recurring theme in discussions with corporate customers is that (Vista) application compatibility is a problem. Applications may not run in Vista, or maybe they can, but it’s not supported by the vendor. Remediation will be costly and time consuming. We get it. Many of the acquisitions and investments we’ve made in the past few years are targeting that problem specifically (Application Virtualization – SoftGrid, Enterprise Desktop Virtualization – Kidaro, etc.)”

Fiorina noted that the generally positive beta reviews of Windows 7 has meant “we’re hearing from a lot of folks ‘Why should I upgrade to Vista when Windows 7 is right around the corner?’” His answer:

“If we look at it from the perspective of an enterprise with fairly unaggressive adoption cycles, then you’ll see that you may be putting yourself in an untenable situation a few years down the road.”

Untenable? Fiorina continued his line of reasoning with the caveat, “for the sake of argument, make these assumptions”:

• “Company A doesn’t deploy new operating systems or major applications until Service Pack 1 (or a similar bug-fix milestone) has been provided by the vendor
• Company A probably won’t even begin testing their application footprint against the new OS until said SP1 is available
• Windows 7 ships in the fourth quarter of 2009
• Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 would likely not be final until the first half of 2011, if not later (going by our historical timelines for SP1 releases)
• So, Company A would begin testing migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 SP1 in 2011 sometime. How long would it take to perform adequate testing of your application suite to certify\remediate it for Windows 7? For most, this is at least a 6 to 12 month process…so, now we’re in mid-2012.  At that point, you’re ready to start building an image (hopefully using the MDT to make your lives easier).  Maybe the image is ready to go in early 2013. Then you have a little over a year to get it out company-wide until Windows XP hits end-of-life. Is that enough time?  Perhaps…but is it worth backing yourself into a corner?”

Sure, you could argue that Fiorina is a sales guy and is looking for any way possible to chalk up a few more Vista sales while Windows 7 is gaining steam. But, to me, his post highlights what’s likely to be one of the biggest IT questions in 2009: On which version of Windows should I standardize as my corporate desktop?

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?

By Dennis O'Reilly The way word-wrapping alters line breaks in some browser windows thwarted a few of our readers' attempts to disable AutoRun. If you manually typed a line break where the code requires a space, and you couldn't get the file to work, a simple change will do the trick.

Windows Secrets contributing editor Woody Leonhard authored a Jan. 22 Top Story on the Conficker/Downadup worm and included a link to a Nov. 8, 2007, article.

I'm going to take Scotty's word that this tip actually worked — but kids, don't try the butane-on-the-bearing trick without adult supervision! (I can't help wondering what Scotty tried on the sick drive before he turned to lighter fluid.)

By Dennis O'Reilly Reverting a Vista PC to XP requires an installation CD for each OS and can be done only on OEM editions of Vista Business and Ultimate. Users of Vista Home Basic and Home Premium — and anyone who used a retail version of Vista to upgrade an XP machine — must buy a copy of XP to make the switch.

Last week's Top Story on Microsoft's decision to extend yet again the deadline for buying a PC with Windows XP installed caused many readers to wonder whether they could dump their copy of Vista in favor of its predecessor. Reader Jim Harvey put it this way:

• "We have Vista Home Edition installed on a newly refurbished Gateway computer purchased for my wife for Christmas. However, trying to cope with all the operational changes in Vista has proven to be too frustrating for her.

  "We would like to downgrade the new computer back to the old XP license we have on our replaced computer, but we don't know how to do so. Is there a legitimate way to install our old licensed version of XP , still on the replaced computer, onto our new Gateway and get rid of Vista?"
  

Unfortunately, the only way you can revert a machine running Vista Home Basic or Home Premium is to buy a copy of XP and install it over the Vista configuration. However, anyone who bought a PC with an OEM edition of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate can downgrade to XP Pro.

Fred Langa's Jan. 8, 2009, column (paid content) described several ways to recover hard-disk space. Reader Kevin Kleinhomer wrote in to remind us of a couple of other tools that might help track down the missing bytes.

• "In his most recent article, Fred talks about a reader with missing space, but I think he missed a very important tip for the reader: Chkdsk. It could be a corrupted file system that is the root cause of the missing disk space. I have seen this many, many times.

  "A less likely possibility would be a rootkit. Booting off one of the many recently reported-on [rootkit-revealing] tools would hopefully turn this up."
  

Running Windows' built-in disk-checking utility couldn't be easier: click Start, Run (in XP) or just Start (in Vista), type cmd, and press Enter. At the command prompt, type the following:

The rap on Linux — at least among Windows users — has long been that the alternative OS is too difficult to install and use. Scott Spanbauer's Jan. 8, 2009, Best Software column (paid content) described the free Wubi installer utility for the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Reader Howard Harner points out that you can also get a free copy of Ubuntu on disc, if you're patient.

• "I'm glad to see your discussion of Ubuntu, since I have been using it as an alternative to uSoft [Microsoft Windows] for years. For older computers, cruising the Web, and copying CDs, it's great.

  "You didn't mention that one can get a free disk from Ubuntu that contains two versions of the OS — a full-install copy and a version that will run on top of Windows — by going to their Web site and filling out the short application form. It usually takes less than two weeks to receive it."
  

In fact, many Windows users choose to run Ubuntu off the CD rather than to create a hard-drive partition for the OS. Of course, you can burn your own Ubuntu CD. You'll find the download and instructions for creating your disc on the Ubuntu Community Documentation page.

By Dennis O'Reilly

As usual, the truth is likely somewhere in between.