Windows Archive

Microsoft has revealed a general release date for its upcoming operating system Vista - 5 December, 2006. Speaking to IT professionals, parliamentarians and senior law-enforcement officers at the Parliament and Internet conference in London on Thursday, Microsoft revealed its release plans. "We will officially launch Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 on 5 December," said David Hipwell, a Windows client sales professional at Microsoft. On a very, very related note, the EC says that Vista will not be delayed due to regulatory issues. Also, the Shell: Revealed weblog has an item explaining why Aero Basic looks the way it looks. Update: ZDNet has removed the release date story, and since they are being rude by not offering an explanation, I have no idea what is going on.

Microsoft has released licenses for the Windows Vista operating system that dramatically differ from those for Windows XP in that they limit the number of times that retail editions can be transferred to another device and ban the two least-expensive versions from running in a virtual machine. The new licenses, which were highlighted by the Vista team on its official blog Tuesday, add new restrictions to how and where Windows can be used.

'The most secure Windows ever' may be very secure from hackers and malware - but what do you do when Longhorn Server let's you install the OS, set up Active Directory, and initialize the domain without once asking you to even create an administrator password? "What happened to Windows Server? Where did all of the stringent security checks and ultra-protection of Windows Server 2003 go? Windows Server 2000 was quite insecure, and Windows Server 2003 turned over a new leaf... But it seems Microsoft is more than willing to flip that page back - even Windows Server 2000 required an Administrator password at the very least."

Microsoft on Tuesday released a slew of patches for Windows and Office, but a glitch prevented the company from pushing the updates out automatically. The patches, which include critical fixes for both Office and Windows, can be manually downloaded from Microsoft's Web site, and the company said it hopes the more-automated tools will have the patch available later on Tuesday. Microsoft said that its technical teams "have been working around the clock" to solve the updating problems.

"It is rare that you would willingly let vandals and burglars into your home but a controlled environment like a honeypot computer lets you do the technological equivalent in relative safety. The idea of letting the PC get infected was to see exactly what nasty programs hit our machine and how easy it was to recover from infection."

In the increasingly Google-YouTube-Web 2.0 age we inhabit, it's become fashionable to dismiss Windows as a relic. Ask around the office. You'll hear the Gen Xers sneer about how Microsoft's operating system is, well, so yesterday. Even a fair number of IT greybeards are warming to the notion that the times, they are a changing.

The Inquirer has been looking at the latest release of Microsoft’s Vista operating system. This time, we tackle build 5744, otherwise known as Release Candidate 2. Tested today is the x64 version, which has a date stamp of 03/10/06. So what has changed over RC1 and earlier builds? Elsewhere, Microsoft has said they expect Vista's deployment rate to be twice that of Windows XP. Finally, even though RC2 will be the last public test build, Microsoft still has changes up its sleeve for Vista RTM.

This article deals with various Windows XP-related myths, grouped in four sections: requirements, reliability, optimisation, and security. I do miss Adam and Jamie, though. This is actually the first webpage I have ever seen that actually includes a changelog. A surprisingly simple yet handy idea.

SuperFetch, a new feature of Windows Vista, is designed to intelligently manage memory pages to keep the system responsive even after running background tasks that take a lot of memory. Watch this Channel9 video to see how Vista attempts to form subsets of memory to page together. The speaker also touches on other new kernel-level features such as ReadyBoost and flash-based hibernate.

"Today, Microsoft is excited to announce the availability of Windows Vista RC2 to Technical Beta Testers, TAP Testers, and MSDN/TechNet subscribers. This new build of Windows Vista offers users a higher level of performance and stability - improving what was established in Windows Vista RC1. We were able to also fix many of your bugs reported from RC1 and implement them for RC2. Thank you to our beta testers for the bugs and feedback you submitted for RC1."

Microsoft, of all companies, continues to lead the way with free and loose licensing terms around server virtualization software and multi-core processors. As of Oct 1, Windows Server Datacenter Edition operating system customers will have the right to run "an unlimted number of virtualized Windows Server instances". This policy applies to licenses covering new servers and previous licenses upgraded with new version rights. All told, it means that you pay to run Windows Server Datacenter Edition on a server with a set number of processors and can then divvy that box up with any combination of Windows Server Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition and/or Datacenter Edition without needing to count the number of virtual machines being created or pay for extra Windows Server licenses.

If Vista is not activated with a legitimate product registration key in time, the system will run in 'reduced functionality mode' until it is activated, said Thomas Lindeman, a senior product manager at Microsoft. In this mode, people will be able to use a Web browser for up to an hour, after which time the system will log them out, he said. On a related note, Microsoft later this month plans to roll out an Express Upgrade program that gives buyers of Windows XP-based PCs a coupon for a free or discounted upgrade to Windows Vista through March 15.

Microsoft this Friday will ship the final pre-release version of Windows Vista and, unexpectedly, will name the release as Release Candidate 2. Previously, Microsoft had publicly asserted that it would not ship an RC2 milestone release of Windows Vista. But don't let the name fool you: RC2 is really just a standard interim build of Vista and will not be given out to millions of users as was RC1.

The Vista Team Blog has an interesting article on Vista's installation routine, more specifically on how long it takes to install Vista. "PC World got the conversation going on installation times in Windows Vista. While they quote Jim Allchin that Windows Vista can take as little as 15 minutes to install, my installs have been more like 20 minutes (still rocking fast), so I thought I would talk with David D'Souza who manages our Deployment and Installation team to get some more information about the different deployment scenarios and their installation time."