Windows 7 pics…

Microsoft Fixes Vista SP1 Reboot Bug

(Check my blog for more interesting news)

Microsoft Monday said it has fixed a Vista SP1 reboot bug that had caused some users to suspend migrations and that the revised software will again be offered via automatic distribution.

The Vista Servicing Stack Update (SSU) was a prerequisite for installing Vista SP1 via Windows Update that was made available by Microsoft in February. The software, designed to ease installation, instead had the opposite effect by throwing some users into an endless reboot cycle.

At the time, Microsoft called negative reaction to the issue “a feeding frenzy.”

Microsoft says the problem is fixed and it will again offer the SSU prerequisite code starting April 8th. Users who have already successfully installed SSU do not need to reinstall it. In addition, users who have a copy of SP1 acquired by any means other than Windows Update do not need to install SSU.

Microsoft is fixing the problem by issuing a fix that installs prior to the installation of the SSU, a prerequisite for the prerequisite.

The new piece of code will ensure a “smooth install of the SSU by working to prevent the system from rebooting during the SP1 SSU installation,” according to the Microsoft Product Update Team Blog. The blog also says Microsoft made additional changes to the SSU installer code that will ensure the pre-SSU is installed before it attempts to load SSU.

The company said the original problem occurred during some “unknown and rare” instances when the SSU thought it needed to reboot when it did not. The resulting reboot try then touched off a never ending cycle of attempts and failures.

Microsoft says users with Windows Update activated do not have to take any action before April 8 to receive both the pre-SSU and the SSU code.

Microsoft Releases Visual C++

In separate moves, Microsoft has released its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack but discontinued extended support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE.

The feature pack had been available in a beta release since January, said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog this week.
“The Feature Pack provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) and an implementation of TR1 (Technical Report 1). Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications with the ‘look & feel’ of Microsoft’s most popular products — Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and Internet Explorer,” Somasegar said.

TR1 is a document that featured a Visual C++ implementation with extensions to the C++ ISO standard. Microsoft’s implementation of TR1 contains such features as regular expression parsing and sophisticated random number generators.

Also included in the feature pack are a component for the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar, Visual Studio docking, auto hide windows, and Windows Vista theme support.

The feature pack is downloadable by any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer, Somasegar said.

Also this week, Microsoft ended extended, paid support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE, which is more than 10 years old.

“If you haven’t converted all your apps to .Net, shame on you, but don’t freak out. Microsoft will continue to support the VB 6.0 runtime for all existing application in all the next versions of the Windows OS, including Windows Server 2008 and Vista,” said Microsoft’s Jeff Nuckolls, a technology specialist, in a blog entry from last week. Nuckolls still advised that users devise a migration plan.

An online petition in 2005 sought to save Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Basic for Applications. Still available, that petition has gathered 13,341 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon. A Visual Basic user who had participated in the petition drive downplayed his need for support of Visual Basic 6.0 Wednesday afternoon.

“‘Support’ is not something I need or have needed outside the peer support of other VB developers,” said Visual Basic user Don Bradner. “Now if it gets to where I can’t write a VB6 app or my VB6 apps won’t run, that’s a lot different; it is also likely to be a long way into the future.”

Microsoft Patches Critical Bugs in Windows

Microsoft has posted eight security updates — more than half marked “critical” — that patch 10 bugs in Windows, Office and Internet Explorer.

Of the 10 vulnerabilities plugged, Microsoft labeled seven as critical, the highest rating in its four-step threat-scoring system. Of the remainder, two were pegged as “important” and one as merely “moderate.”

Analysts agreed that the most serious vulnerabilities disclosed today were the two plugged by MS08-021, a critical update for every currently supported version of Windows, including the just-released Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the even newer Windows Server 2008. “That’s right across the board,” said Tyler Reguly, a security research engineer at nCircle Network Security.

“All versions of Windows are affected,” echoed Amol Sarwate, manager of Qualys’s vulnerability research lab. “You don’t need to have any special software on your PC to be vulnerable.”

The MS08-021 update, said Microsoft in the advisory accompanying the release, fixes two flaws in Windows’ GDI, or graphics device interface, one of the core components of the operating system. Attackers can use malformed WMF (Windows Metafile) or EMF (Enhanced Metafile) image files to trigger the bugs and “take complete control of an affected system,” said Microsoft.

“Users who simply view an image online or in e-mail could be compromised,” said Sarwate.

Both Sarwate and Reguly noted that there are similarities between the two new GDI vulnerabilities and ones revealed in late 2005, which were extensively used by attackers for months afterward. In fact, Microsoft patched that earlier GDI vulnerability — which was also exploited by malicious WMF and EMF files — “out-of-cycle,” or outside of its normal second-Tuesday-of-the-month update schedule.

Windows 7 Release Set For 2009

Microsoft has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.

It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched to consumers until January 2007. Given Microsoft’s recent track record – Vista arrived more than five years after XP – most outsiders had pegged some time in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7’s arrival.

But News.com reported on Friday that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates answered a question at a business meeting in Miami about Windows Vista by saying “sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version”.

And during its announcement on Thursday that it would extend the availability of Windows XP Home for low-cost laptops. Microsoft said it would retire the operating system only after June 30, 2010, or one year after the release of Windows 7, whichever comes later.

That implies that Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 – the only codename known at the moment – although whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and OEMs to start installing it, is unknown.

A Microsoft spokeswoman told Computerworld US the company “is in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA”. She said the company was providing early builds of the new operating system to gain user feedback, but otherwise was not providing further information.

Gates also said that he was “super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways” but didn’t elaborate.

What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista’s 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical sub-system.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32bit and 64bit editions.

Screenshots of early betas of Windows 7  build 6519 of Windows 7 released in December

Give your comments please

Give your comments please

Give your comments please

Give your comments please

Give your comments please

For more pics click here : Windows 7

Microsoft needs to start generating excitement about its software months or years in advance in order to prepare its millions of reselling partners.

But if it talks up Windows 7 too much, it runs the risk that large companies – Microsoft’s most profitable customer segment – will hold on to their Windows XP machines and skip Vista entirely in favour of Windows 7.

That appears to be happening. A recent enterprise survey by Forrester Research showed that only 6.3 percent of enterprises were running Vista at the end of December, with most of the upgrades coming at the expense of aging machines running Windows 2000, not XP.

The vast majority of the 100 million copies of Vista that Microsoft has sold so far have gone to individuals and small businesses purchasing new PCs.

The least-loved version of Windows has long been Windows Millennium Edition (ME), a buggy minor upgrade that was superseded by XP within a year of its release. Despite its far greater – some would say, too great – technical ambition, Vista may end up lumped together with ME as one of the blips on Windows’ long-term roadmap.

Microsoft Offers Way to Share Data With Social Networks

Microsoft is opening up its Windows Live platform to allow users to share their contact lists with five social-networking sites, some of which until now have been accessing such data through the back door.

The move is intended to give users control of their data, and remove the need for the kind of work-around used to share such data today, “which unduly puts customers at risk for phishing attacks, identity fraud, and spam,” wrote John Richards, director of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, on the official developers’ blog for the platform.

Facebook and Bebo members can now invite friends on their Windows Live contacts list to join their online social network at those sites, without having to hand over their Windows Live password. Members of the Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged communities will be able to do so “in the coming months,” Microsoft said.

As part of this effort, Microsoft is introducing a new website, www.invite2messenger.net, where people can invite their contacts from any of these five social networks to join them on Windows Live Messenger.

Yahoo already operates a similar service with LinkedIn: a page on the LinkedIn site takes members wishing to import their Yahoo Mail contacts list to a Yahoo log-in page in order to authorize the data exchange.

Some social-networking sites already offer to help their members import their contacts list from Web-based e-mail services and send invitations to people on that list — but to do this, the sites typically ask their members to hand over the username and password for their Web-mail account to gain access to the contact data.

That’s the case, for example, with LinkedIn’s functions for importing contacts lists from Google’s Gmail and AOL’s Web-mail service, which require that members trust LinkedIn with their username and password for the other services. LinkedIn does not yet have a link with Windows Live.

Internet users are becoming increasingly suspicious of such requests for credentials, given the prevalence of phishing attacks and other attempts at identity theft.

To enable the exchange of contacts data, Microsoft has created a new API (application programming interface) that allows social-networking sites to request access to the Windows Live contacts list of their members by sending the members to a Microsoft-controlled log-in page, where the members can enter their Windows Live credentials without having to divulge them to a third party. Microsoft then notes that the user has granted permission to the social-networking site to access the contact data.

Opening up the interfaces is a way of acknowledging that ownership of contacts lists rests with the sites’ users, not with their operators, according to Richards at Microsoft.

“We firmly believe that we are simply stewards of customers’ data and that customers should be able to choose how they control and share their data,” he wrote.

As recently as January, Facebook was not so sure that ownership of contacts lists rested with the users that had supplied it: it disabled, and later reinstated, the Facebook account of a tech blogger who used a service provided by AOL subsidiary Plaxo to download contact data from the Facebook site.

Windows XP SP3 Due Next Month

Microsoft will release Windows XP Service Pack 3 during the second half of April, according to a report from a Web site that has correctly predicted recent Windows ship dates.

TechARP.com, a Malaysian Web site that nailed Vista SP1’s release-to-manufacturing (RTM) date last month as well as its release to Windows Update last week, said that Microsoft will wrap up work on XP’s third and final service pack next month. The site pegged RTM for Windows XP SP3 as “second half of April 2008″ for seven languages, with a follow-on RTM of the remaining supported languages “approximately 21 days” later.

By TechARP’s account, Microsoft will first finish work on the Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish versions of the service pack.

Microsoft declined comment, other than to repeat an earlier statement about the service pack’s timing. “We are targeting 1H [first half] 2008 for the release of XP SP3 RTM, though our timing will always be based on customer feedback as a first priority,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

The last time Microsoft made a public move with Windows XP SP3 was a little over a month ago, when it posted a second release candidate to Windows Update.

About two weeks ago, however, XP SP3 caused a minor stir when what was purportedly the newest build leaked to the Internet and hit BitTorrent search sites such as The Pirate Bay. Although Microsoft initially refused comment, last week it acknowledged that the build — designated 5503 — was real and had been released to a portion of the invitation-only beta test group.

It also warned users away from any download. “This build was not intended for public release and anyone who has that build and is not part of the private beta is working with bits that Microsoft can’t verify,” a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail last week. “It’s possible the bits may have been modified with malware or other bad code that Microsoft hasn’t tested.”

Multiple versions of XP SP3 build 5503, including English- and Russian-language editions, are available via BitTorrent.

Once SP3 ships, the next major milestones for Windows XP are June 30, when the popular operating system is slated to fall off the reseller and retail availability list, and Jan. 31 2009, when it will be taken out of all distribution channels, including system builders.

Angry Vista Users Vent Over SP1 Driver Issues

Last Tuesday, Microsoft released Vista SP1 to Windows Update, giving most users their first shot at obtaining the service pack. Previously, only earlier testers, volume licensing customers, and IT professionals and developers who subscribed to TechNet or Microsoft Developer Network had access to SP1.

But as it added Vista SP1 to Windows Update, Microsoft also spelled out numerous caveats, telling users that there are as many as eight different reasons why they might not find the update in the Windows Update listing on their PC. Among those reasons: any of 31 language packs, earlier installed versions of SP1, various prerequisite updates, and a number of device drivers.

The service pack is being withheld from machines containing one or more of the listed drivers because, as Microsoft put it in a support document, “these device drivers are problematic on Windows Vista-based computers when you update to Windows Vista SP1.”
That made an industry analyst wonder about Microsoft’s driver testing process. “When Microsoft said there were problems with drivers, I assumed it was some odd scanner or camera or an ancient printer or something,” said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based research firm. “But then I saw the list. It makes me wonder what’s going on with device driver testing.

“Microsoft keeps saying that there’s this vast ecosystem of device drivers, but it appears there’s a much smaller number of reliable, well-tested drivers. Because if these drivers [on Microsoft's list] were tested, that calls into question the testing process.”

In fact, many of the complaints posted in comments to Microsoft’s Vista blog were related to drivers. For example, one user tried to plumb the depths of his PC to determine why Windows Update suppressed the service pack, but gave up.

“I’m not being offered Vista SP1 on my new Dell XPS M1530 laptop. As far as I can tell, I have two pieces of hardware in the problem list, but the driver versions I have seem to be OK,” said “markheath,” on the Microsoft blog. “So my question is, is there any way of finding out exactly what is stopping me from being shown SP1 via Windows Update? I’m tired of looking at driver versions.”

Others were upset at being forced to root through their PCs to find out why they couldn’t update. “I have just spent 1-2 hrs figuring out that I have one of the problem drivers hence why windows update isn’t offering me SP1,” said someone pegged as “scoobie” on the same blog. “Neither is it offering me an updated new driver. In my book that is not a good customer experience and a bit of a waste of my time.”

But there were still others who, after identifying a blocking driver, wondered where to point fingers. “I have SigmaTel audio drivers that are in conflict with SP1. Therefore, SP1 is not available to me via Windows Update,” said “Fatalah” on the Vista blog. “SigmaTel was purchased by another company, and driver updates are solely in the hands of OEMs now (Gateway, Dell, HP etc.) I do not expect Gateway to update this driver any time soon. When will SP1 be fixed to work with my old SigmaTel drivers?”

Another user, simply dubbed “Russieb,” seconded the motion. “No one seems to be addressing the ‘problem’ drivers, specifically SigmaTel. As Fatalah mentioned any SigmaTel ‘driver updates are solely in the hands of OEM’s now.’  Sony don’t [sic] want to know, neither do [sic] Microsoft! This is stopping a large number of users from installing SP1. Can anyone help?”

Cherry felt their pain. “I assumed in February that the drivers would be for an obscure bunch of peripherals, not drivers with this kind of usage.”

To Microsoft’s credit, the company has offered free support to any user with Vista SP1 issues. In several messages posted to the same comment thread as user complaints, Brandon LeBlanc, who identified himself as a Microsoft employee, directed people to the free support Web site.

“You have a variety of options you can choose for support — all of which will NOT cost you any support fee,” said LeBlanc. “I repeat: support for SP1 will NOT cost you anything — as long as you choose the correct option for support.”

Microsoft to Release Vista SP1 This Week

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is set to become available to a wider audience, according to Amazon.com and reports from a website that correctly called SP1’s ship date last month.

Amazon.com lists Vista SP1 retail copies as available on Wednesday March 19, while TechARP.com, the Malaysian website that nailed the update’s release to manufacturing (RTM) date several days early, said users would be able to download SP1 starting Tuesday March 18.

Vista SP1 shipped to duplication and OEMs on February 4, but since then it has only been available to previous beta testers, volume licensing customers and subscribers to IT subscription services. In fact, subscribers to TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) only got access to SP1 after raising a ruckus, with some threatening to cancel their subscriptions and others saying they would postpone Vista deployment.

Most Vista users, however, have been unable to obtain the service pack. That was a conscious decision on the part of Microsoft, which said that the delay was caused by a small number of hardware device drivers that won’t properly reinstall during the SP1 upgrade. Microsoft said it needed extra time to identify the drivers and set up blocking mechanisms that will prevent users whose PCs have those drivers from receiving SP1.

Microsoft has never identified the balky drivers or the responsible hardware manufacturers.

Retail buyers of the new version of Vista face no such driver problem, Microsoft has said. According to Amazon.com, customers after packaged retail copies of SP1 can get them beginning on Wednesday March 19.

Meanwhile, the Malaysian website that called Vista SP1’s RTM has reported that current Vista users will be able to download and install SP1 starting on Tuesday March 18. TechARP.com named Tuesday as the first possible start date for what it dubbed ‘End-User Manual Update’.

Since early February, Microsoft has said that Vista users would receive SP1 in “mid-March” by either selecting the optional update in Windows Update or downloading a standalone installer from Microsoft’s Download Center website. Only in April would it start pushing SP1 to all Vista users who have Windows Update’s Automatic Updates set to automatically retrieve and install important fixes. (TechARP has named April 18 as that date.)

When asked to confirm the March 18 delivery date for SP1, a Microsoft spokeswoman only repeated the company’s earlier statements. “In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update and the Download Center on microsoft.com,” she said. “Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. Any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not upgrade successfully will not be offered SP1.”

It’s unclear so far how a February snafu with affect SP1’s roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would “make the update available again shortly after we address the issue”.

That update was designated 937287 and described in a support document, with the same number. Microsoft has not re-released it to Windows Update as an automatic download/install.

Asked to explain how users will be able to download and install SP1 this month without the prerequisite, Microsoft’s spokespeople said that the endless reboot problem and the subsequent withdrawal of 937287 would not impact SP1’s schedule.

“The temporary removal of the prerequisite from automatic updates will not affect the SP1 release schedule – we are on schedule to release Windows Visa SP1 to Windows Update and the Download Center in mid-March and to users using Automatic Update in mid-April,” different spokeswomen said earlier this month.