Lenovo's XP 'downgrade' program
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Lenovo has a page on the company Web site devoted to its XP "downgrade" program, complete with logo.
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Nearly 50 programs may be disrupted by XP's Service Pack.
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Microsoft Corp.  said it will  begin selling a stripped-down, low-cost version of its Windows  XP operating system in the emerging markets of Indonesia,  Malaysia and Thailand in order to spread the use of computing  and develop technology markets.
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With a specialized version of Windows XP Embedded, the software maker wants to get its fingers in the till.
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Some say Win XP SP2 enhancements cause conflicts, don't protect as claimed.
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Service Pack 2 is the long-awaited mega-bug fix for Windows XP, and pretty much the last bit of excitement until Longhorn. But what does it mean for you?
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Dell customers may now decline unwanted software or 'bloatware' applications loaded on new PCs.
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InfoWorld?s petition asking Microsoft not to discontinue Windows XP after June 30 has garnered more than 65,000 signatures since Jan. 14. And with those signatures have come thousands of reader comments that reveal why many IT organizations are up in arms about the June 30 deadline to retire XP.                                                    Three reasons dominate the resistance to Vista: performance, compatibility, and cost. All of them can be overcome with investments in hardware, software, training, and support. The question is whether the upgrade will help businesses increase sales, perform better, or serve customers more effectively -- especially when other IT initiatives with more ROI potential, from greening the datacenter to more effective partner integration, may fall back in the queue as a result. A recent Gartner study confirms that such direct business benefit is now driving IT budgets, not new technology for its own sake.[ SignInfoWorld?s Save XP petition to ask Microsoft to keep XP available after June 30. ]Lots of pain, little gainJohn Alber, CTO at Bryan Cave, a large, tech-savvy law firm in Los Angeles, was willing to go on the record when he expressed misgivings about moving to Vista over the same trio of issues. Many other IT professionals were not, due to fears about damaging their company?s relationship with Microsoft. Off the record, one technology vendor told InfoWorld that it has indefinitely postponed its conversion to Windows Vista after several months of testing because the demonstrable benefit was elusive. Similarly, the IT staff at a large California school district has no plans to convert to Vista; its technology director said that Vista takes twice the hardware resources.In some cases, the changes that Vista brings reduce productivity or increase costs just to maintain existing capabilities. That?s why John Hawkins, CEO of Adviser Media, ended up removing Vista from a new laptop and then from his company, which maintains several how-to sites aimed at baby boomers. ?Whatever I tried to do, the new computer fought me -- and usually, it won. By ?do,? I mean basic stuff: save a file, connect to my office network and the Internet, turn on, turn off, copy some files. It's my computer -- shouldn't I be allowed to do these things? Nope, not without lots of effort, wasted time, and sometimes, complete failure,? he wrote in his blog.Basic incompatibilities also drive him to go back to XP, Hawkins told InfoWorld: ?My ?favorite? is that Vista doesn't work with many Wi-Fi access points (the main reason our users demanded a return to XP) -- and Microsoft's fix is to tell users to replace them!? Scott Pam shared this frustration: ?There are lots of incompatibilities on drivers,? noted the independent IT consultant in Palm Desert, Calif.Even some of those who like Vista on their home computers have been unable to use it for work. ?I love Vista on my home machine. But it would be completely impossible to use at work. I still need to support applications running on Pocket PC 2002 and Windows CE 4.2 platforms, and for that I need the development environment I wrote them with -- Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++. This is not supported, and doesn't work, on Windows Vista. Even where the customer has upgraded some devices, a move to Visual Studio 2005 native device development entails a change of libraries, which can have complicated breaking changes. Oh, and they broke serial ActiveSync as well,? noted a U.K. developer who declined to be identified.And of course, those much-publicized performance issues loom large. ?It uses mega hard disk space and has a lot more running programs in the background than XP,? noted a support technician at a broadband provider, who asked for anonymity.User frustration equals IT frustration Support staff and IT consultants also feel the pain, mainly from the confusion that Microsoft?s new UI and security controls cause their users.IT consultant Scott Pam is frustrated with the burden that Vista has placed on him. ?Customers are panicking,? he says, since they can?t find their data or common controls in the new UI and assume the data has been lost or their Vista PC is broken. ?So I go back for free [to explain how to use Vista], costing hundreds of dollars of my time.? He asks why Microsoft could not have offered its new security approach and other features without breaking the familiar Windows XP UI. ?Apple added new capabilities in all the versions since Mac OS X 10.2 but kept the interface, drivers, and applications mostly compatible. Microsoft changed everything.?The broadband company?s support technician faces the same user frustration. ?A lot of us cringe when we get a call regarding Vista. It is hard to understand, hard to find what we need, and hard to explain it to customers,? she said.The new UAC (user access control) security approach bedevils both IT consultant Pam and his clients. Not only do users not know how to respond to endless ?are you sure? messages about possible security threats, Vista?s lockdown of users? own files areas keeps clients from being able to work. He cites a user who dutifully copied all his data to a USB drive before converting to Vista, only to discover that Vista would not let him copy the data back because the USB drive wasn?t accessed through administrator privileges. ?That?s ridiculous -- it?s his drive,? Pam said. The idea of having to log in as an administrator just doesn?t occur to users, he noted.Jason Sage, a developer and software engineer who didn?t want his company named, is also frustrated by overzealous security in Vista, which he believes works against the standard set by Microsoft .Net and Visual Studio. True, in Vista, Microsoft has documented what developers need to do to give applications permission to access their own configuration files. But Sage thinks the basic approach is wrong. ?What we have now is applications running as the user. This is too much responsibility for many users who have no idea what all the software on their machine is doing while running as them.?Other developers are frustrated by the change in security and other core OS services. Noted one developer working at a small company: ?My company has had several developers forced to use Vista while servicing our clients. The result has been an absolute nightmare. Applications don't work, drivers collide, the screen loses integrity at random times, we encounter file data loss or corruption, our network-based automated backups don't work, etc.?Roadblocks on rollback to XP  Given the many frustrations he?s encountered, Pam advises his clients not to install Vista or to replace Vista with XP on new computers. And he seethes that he?ll have to get each of the five different Vista versions, and either five PCs to run them on or a Mac or Unix box with enough virtual machine capability to run them all, just so he can duplicate customers? environments.?Several of my customers have gone back to the store where they purchased their new computer and have asked that they replace Vista with XP,? he says.But users may not always have that choice, several InfoWorld readers noted. ?There are not always XP drivers available for a clean install of XP,? commented one reader, whose newer Toshiba?s NVidia video card had only Vista drivers. Another reader had a similar issue with a new Acer laptop: ?The hardware and firmware in my laptop's chipsets simply do not support XP.?Agents of change Not everyone is holding back on the shift to Vista, of course. Several InfoWorld readers expressed satisfaction. For example, an independent developer in the U.K., who did not want to be seen as a ?fan boy? and thus declined to be identified, told InfoWorld he prefers Vista to XP and views the UI changes and incompatibilities as minor issues. ?Vista is what Microsoft wanted XP to look like; when they couldn?t achieve Vista?s look they settled for the horrible design it has. Yes, Vista uses more resources than XP, but it runs absolutely everything 20 percent faster for me than XP ever did. Yes, drivers are a problem at the moment for older hardware that is capable of running Vista, but then the same was true for XP,? he said. ?Program compatibility has caused one or two problems recently, but nowhere near as many with XP when I first got it.?Other readers suggested that those who wanted to stick with XP were doing so because they simply didn?t want to invest in new hardware. All OS conversions cost time and money and change is just part of the technology landscape.For IT, the cost of such change -- directly and indirectly -- is the key issue in deciding when, or even if, to shift from XP. Microsoft has told the Wall Street Journal that resistance to adoption is ?business as usual? in a new OS?s first year, but eventually there?ll be no need for a petition effort like InfoWorld?s to keep an older OS available.The question is what ?eventually? means and what Windows 7, now rumored to be arriving next year, may offer instead. Meanwhile, if massive response from InfoWorld readers is any indication, few businesses are putting an upgrade from XP to Vista at the top of their to-do lists.
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More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld?s ?Save XP? petition in the three weeks since it was launched ? many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change. On June 30, Microsoft plans to stop making new licenses to Windows XP available through most outlets, though business users and some consumers will be able to ?downgrade? to XP after that date under certain circumstances. InfoWorld expects to present the petition to Microsoft when it has collected 100,000 signatures.[ Follow all the coverage of and reader reaction to the ?Save XP? campaign. ]Although InfoWorld?s campaign has given a voice to users who prefer to keep the familiar XP, concerns over Vista had been bubbling since its release a year ago. That has been evident not only anecdotally in comments that InfoWorld editors have heard from IT staff and users alike, but also in the slow adoption of Vista in the marketplace.While millions of people have gotten Vista with a new PC, most did not have a choice of what OS was loaded on it, since retailers stopped selling new XP computers in spring 2007 and online sellers (with the recent exception of Dell) made XP available only to business customers.Where people have had a choice, Vista has not been it. Microsoft has reported that it sold 100 million Vista licenses in 2007, which means that roughly four out of 10 new machines shipped with Vista on them. By comparison, nearly 70 percent of PCs shipped with XP in its first year. According to NetApplications, about 11 percent of installed machines use Vista, compared to 75 percent running XP.IT consultant Dimension Data Americas has yet to have any of its midsize business customers convert to Vista, said Jeff Dimock, its vice president of Microsoft solutions ? though he noted that several are working on plans to do so. ?The mid-market has not been upgrading to Vista,? said Karen Hayward, executive vice president at IT outsourcing firm CenterBeam, which provisions OS and other apps to midsize businesses.Compatibility issues and lack of perceived value are the major reasons that businesses and users have avoided Vista. Research firm Gartner advises its clients not to switch to Vista until early 2009, after the first service pack has been released, third-party compatibility is improved, and more Vista-ready hardware is in the hardware purchase cycle, says Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft forced a popular alternative to Windows Update off the Internet today, sending the maker of AutoPatcher cease-and-desist e-mail. The free utility has been removed from its download site. Microsoft did not give a reason for the move, which came more than four years after AutoPatcher debuted. "Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history," said Antonis Kaladis, the 20-year-old Greek college student and author of the program. "As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down." AutoPatcher, which was in version 5.6, let users collect Windows hotfixes and security patches from Microsoft's update services, then package them so they could be applied to multiple machines, or reused multiple times on a single PC. It was especially popular among people who frequently reformatted drives or those who did informal tech support for friends and family or in a small business. Each month, the current set of Windows' -- and as of this month, Office's as well -- updates and hotfixes would be added to the packages. The program supported Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Server 2003. This month, Kaladis and his team of volunteers added support for Office XP 2003 and 2007. The Microsoft take-down e-mail was posted to the Neowin.net forum that AutoPatcher used for its user support. "Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above [www.autopatcher.com/downloads/], which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft," the e-mail read. "We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company's network," it continued after listing various versions of Windows and Office. The e-mail was signed by a Peter Anaman, a Microsoft Internet investigator. Users of AutoPatcher were, not surprisingly, hot. "I cannot believe that Microsoft did this," Andrew Lucas said in a response to Kaladis' posting of the news. "You are providing a service Microsoft refuses to do. It has now been over 3 years since Microsoft released SP2 for XP." "The end of AutoPatcher is the end of my use of any Windows product, period," swore a user identified only as KMan. Other users -- lots of others -- literally swore at Microsoft in the comments attached to Kaladis' post or on the Neowin forum. More than a few however, took a more c'est la guerre approach to AutoPatcher's demise. "I don't get why everyone is so annoyed, I'm shocked AutoPatcher was allowed to continue for so long in the first place. Is anyone really surprised by this?" asked a user calling himself kudos in a post to Neowin. Microsoft has dealt similar cease-and-desist orders to other patch-related Web sites or services in the past. In April, it leaned on Hotfix.net, whose operator, Ethan Allen, had posted more than 100 hotfixes he expected would be part of Vista SP1. Coincidentally, Vista SP1 was talked up by Microsoft today. Allen also complied by yanking the download. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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thejoelpatrol writes &quot;So did Slashdotters call this one? Windows XP SP2 seems not to be so secure after all. A Register reporter goes in depth to find out just how safe a fresh install is.
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TechWeb - If sluggish performance and numerous bugs in your shiny new PC running Windows Vista have got you down, you can downgrade -- at no additional cost -- to Windows XP. It's not hard. Here's how.
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Many XP users still not really fans of the Vista.
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OS Migration has moved to the bottom ranks after making its mark on IT Professional&#39;s top five priority last year. With a long-awaited security update to Windows XP now complete, Microsoft is preparing a holiday
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Description: A new Microsoft upgrade tries to make Windows XP more secure against attack. Service Pack 2 contains a program -- known as a firewall -- that keeps out some destructive computer worms.
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If you think you don't like the program you just downloaded or the new computer you just booted up, wait. A bug-fix patch, a driver update or a new third-party program might arrive to smooth out the problems. Or maybe some lurking glitch or mechanical fault will surface and give you a reason to...
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With automatic download of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) enormous SP2 security patch to the Windows XP operating system set to begin, the industry still waits to understand its ramifications. Home users that have their preferences set to receive operating-system updates as they are made available by Microsoft may be surprised to learn that some of the software they already run on their systems could be disabled by SP2 or may run very differently.