Articles about Windows Vista

In a big blow to the case against Microsoft's allegedly confusing "Vista Capable" labeling program for PCs, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday denied Microsoft's petition to overturn a decision granting the case class action status.

It may be exactly what Microsoft doesn't want right now, even if it ends up winning the case in the end: the symbolism of a mass of consumers taking up arms against the company, in dispute over the very heart of its value proposition for Windows Vista. Yesterday the Ninth Circuit ended the company's hopes of being able to face the plaintiff on the company's terms.

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It is the type of vulnerability that Microsoft wanted to head off as long as possible, especially since Windows Vista's new kernel was designed to thwart this possibility.

Now, as the company acknowledged in a security bulletin yesterday, a malicious program running as a local or network service can leverage another local or network service running in the same system, to elevate its own privilege and potentially cause damage.

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Microsoft has made Vista Service Pack 1 available in all of the company's 36 supported languages, where there had previously only been five: English, Spanish, French, German and Japanese.

x86 and x64 versions are available for manual install through Windows Update or from the Microsoft Download Center as a standalone installer, and DVD images are available to TechNet Plus and MSDN subscribers as well as those with a volume license. The two standalone installers can be downloaded here: x86, x64.

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Analysts from Gartner said earlier this week that Windows is collapsing under its own weight. Talk in the blogosphere keeps pointing to a Windows 7 release date earlier than 2010. Is Vista already a lame duck?

ANALYSIS Certainly Microsoft wants to avoid another debacle on the scale of Windows Me, an operating system release that tilted more toward a mistake than an upgrade, and whose publicity turned into pushback from both customers and the press.

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In a world, to sound like Don LaFontaine for a moment, where nothing could possibly go wrong, when something small does go wrong, it's huge. Today, Microsoft is hoping a small patch will make a huge difference to Vista's image.

The problems Microsoft had in simply rolling out early versions of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to its initial testers served to vindicate its worst critics' complaints: It didn't seem the company could even correct Vista correctly. The rollout problems were even the topic of at least one of Apple's recent anti-Vista Mac ads. But many of those problems were apparently caused by a minor issue with automatic updates; and now, Microsoft says it's publishing a patch for pre-SP1 Vista that will enable customers with Automatic Updates to apply the SP1 series of patches without fear of entering an endless reboot cycle.

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The man who became the public face for Windows Vista -- and often bore the brunt of criticism directed at the OS -- through blog posts and community events has resigned from Microsoft.

Nick White is leaving the Redmond company to take a position at BuzzCorps, a blog-oriented viral marketing company founded by former AMD communications manager Chris Aarons. White has worked with Aarons in the past on marketing efforts for Windows Vista.

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Symantec sued Microsoft almost 2 years ago for violating licensing terms on its patented technology in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The suit has finally come to an apparently amicable settlement.

Financial terms were not disclosed by either party, both of whom requested to dismiss the case from the Seattle U.S. District Court "without an award of costs or fees to either party."

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According to at least one Dell official, despite recent debacles with SP1, the business client migration to Windows Vista continues undaunted. A new Dell Client Migration Solution, unveiled this week, includes services and tools designed to ease businesses' migration burden.

Although Windows Vista still isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea, Dell this week rolled out a new set of services and tools "optimized" for organizations moving to the OS that customers who've already made the shift either really like...or really don't.

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Several tech companies along with some analyst groups have been asked by the plaintiffs to testify as part of the class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over Vista.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop has dug up the list of 28 companies that have received subpoenas as part of the case. Former Windows chief Jim Allchin is the only individual listed in this list that has been asked to appear.

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In a growing effort to show the world it is embracing the open source community, Microsoft announced it will work with the Eclipse Foundation to offer the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit that can be used with the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.

The use of Eclipse technology will allow Java developers to make software applications that look native to the Windows Vista operating system. Eclipse is an open source community project that is the most popular Java development environment available to programmers.

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11:50 am March 19, 2008 - Despite Amazon's messages on Tuesday that it would be shipping commercial packages with Windows Vista SP1 starting today, those messages this morning were found to be replaced with new notices that the new boxes aren't in stock yet.

Currently, items for sale are marked with the curious message, "In stock on March 20, 2008."

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Microsoft appears to be attempting to increase Windows Vista sales by making the operating system more affordable both in the United States and abroad.

In the US, the changes will only apply to the Premium and Ultimate upgrade versions of the software. Premium will fall from $159 to $129, while the Ultimate version will now be $219, down from $299.

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As the looming court battle over the "Windows Vista capable" program draws nearer, a federal judge unsealed internal e-mails which show that Microsoft may have been aware of potential problems long before the suit was filed.

These e-mails are likely to provide the plaintiffs a good deal of evidence that the Redmond company was indeed aware that some of their certified products could not run the more advanced features of the new OS.

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Microsoft has presented a list of applications which are adversely affected by the problematic Vista Service Pack 1, some of which cease to function entirely.

The problem apps are categorized in three groups: those that are blocked from starting, those that lose functionality, and those that do not run at all following the installation of Service Pack 1.

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The reason it's called "beta testing" is to anticipate and isolate problems. But a big problem reported by some -- not all -- Vista SP1 testers is causing Microsoft to take a step back.

The regular update cycle for testers of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was suspended yesterday afternoon, following multiple reports of downloaders discovering their automatically updating computers stuck in an endless cycle of reboots. This would mark the second time in two months that pockets of testers reported such a problem.

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