Articles about Windows

If you're a business customer of Dell, you might have to purchase Vista with your PC, but that doesn't mean you have to use it. Today, Dell is trying a new way to satisfy both business users' wants and Microsoft's licensing requirements.

A recent revision to Dell's policy for business PC customers lets them take full and open advantage of an apparent loophole in Microsoft's operating system licensing, though they'll pay full price for it: Assuming Microsoft goes forth with its plan to discontinue sale of all versions of Windows XP after June 30, Dell will still enable its business customers who purchase Windows Vista Business or Vista Professional to exercise certain "downgrade rights" and have Windows XP Professional installed instead.

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It's apparently safe to try this now: Microsoft stated this afternoon it's going forward with plans to deploy Windows Vista Service Pack 1 via Automatic Updates.

But today's go-ahead won't mean that users will wake up one morning and suddenly find themselves upgraded (or not), or even that SP1 will find itself deployed all in the same morning.

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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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In a post to Microsoft's TechNet Forum minutes ago, a Microsoft official announced that Service Pack 3 of Windows XP has released to its manufacturing channels, in order to reach OEM and enterprise customers by the late-April deadline.

Microsoft's XP SP3 release manager Chris Keroack wrote that Web availability of the final service pack for Windows XP will begin on April 29, through the Microsoft Download Center. Confirming many users' suspicions, the company will wait until "early summer," Keroack stated, before enabling SP3 to be downloaded through Automatic Updates, perhaps in light of the company's recent debacle with Windows Vista SP1.

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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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Confirming the rumors that devices such as Asus' Eee PC are prolonging the life of XP, Microsoft today announced that the previously-established June 30, 2008 cutoff date for OEM and retail Windows XP sales was final, except for the new class of what the company has termed ULCPCs: Ultra Low-Cost PCs.

The nebulously-named class of computers including UMPCs, MIDs, Origami devices, subnotebooks and even desktops that offer lower power have received the official Ultra Low Cost PC (ULCPC) moniker from Microsoft.

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Signs coming from Microsoft indicate that Windows XP Service Pack 3 is finally ready for public release. But is the company just playing an April fools joke?

The long-awaited update for the aging operating system (now over 6 and a half years old) was expected to arrive last month, but instead Microsoft released a "Refresh" of Release Candidate 2, asking testers to try out a new Windows Update mechanism for delivering the SP3 bits.

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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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With Windows Vista Service Pack 1 out the door, Microsoft was largely expected to release Windows XP SP3 last week or this week. It didn't, instead making public a Refresh build of SP3 Release Candidate 2.

Microsoft says it "made this release candidate available in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3." But many users are wondering what's taking the company so long, as SP3 is largely a roll-up of existing updates and includes no major new features.

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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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