(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...XP deathwatch: Your key questions answered
The following FAQ list appeared on Computerworld U.S.:
Even though it has had its own problems of late, Windows XP remains the most-used version of Windows. The newest data from Web metrics vendor Net Applications Inc., for example, pegs XP as driving 73% of the personal computers that went online last month, five times the nearest competitor, Microsoft Corp.’s own Windows Vista.
Which is why an impending deadline five weeks from today is important.
According to Microsoft, June 30 is the last day it will permit retailers and OEMs to sell the nearly-seven-year-old operating system.
You’ll have questions as that date approaches, including whether the deadline will drive up prices (gouging, anyone?); we plan to have the answers, starting with this FAQ and continuing through the end of next month.
How long until Microsoft shuts off the XP spigot? Five weeks from today is the last day Microsoft will officially allow retailers to sell the old operating system, and let major computer makers — called “OEMs,” for “original equipment manufacturers” — to sell PCs with XP pre-installed.
Monday, June 30, is the EOL, or End-Of-Life, a term Dell Inc., not Microsoft, has publicly used, for XP’s retail and OEM availability.
So what’s the June 18 date I’ve heard about? That’s the day that Dell has said is the last possible day for its customers to buy a machine running Windows XP. “To meet Microsoft’s June 30 last-day-to-ship OEM Windows XP deadline, June 18 is the last time to purchase a Dell laptop, desktop, or workstation with an OEM Windows XP license,” Dell says on its Web site.
Other big-name OEMs, such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo, have not announced cut-off dates, but must also abide by Microsoft’s rules that no XP-based system ships after June 30.
Are there any loopholes? Sure, and they’re big enough to steer the Titanic through. A “downgrade” clause in Microsoft’s guidelines for OEMs lets computer makers install Windows XP Professional — but not the more common and less expensive Windows XP Home — on new PCs at customer request when those machines are ordered with Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate.
Dell took advantage of the clause to announce last month that it would use the downgrade rights of Vista Business and Vista Ultimate to install XP Professional free of charge at the factory. Assuming customers want to, they can later use the included Vista installation media to upgrade from XP Professional. of the clause Other vendors are doing similar things. HP, for example, also offers a free at-the-factory XP Professional downgrade option on some systems sold with Vista Business.
Can I still buy Windows XP? Absolutely. In fact, we’ve started tracking retail availability and pricing at three popular online technology outlets — Amazon.com, Buy.com and Newegg.com — to gauge whether the operating system is in stock and what it’s selling for.
For the three-day stretch leading up to Monday, May 26, all three outlets have Windows XP Home OEM — the least-expensive version of the OS, but also the one that comes with the most restrictions — in stock and ready to ship for those who want to downgrade a Vista machine on their own, or who prefer to have a backup license in hand.
The prices for May 26, shipping included, were $95.15 at Amazon.com, $100.24 at Buy.com, and $89.99 at Newegg.com.
We’ll revisit those stores on a regular basis, and report our findings in future FAQs or stories in the run-up to the June 30 EOL.
Will I be able to buy Windows XP after June 30? Affirmative. There’s already a healthy market for the workhorse on eBay, the online auction site that sells both old and new stuff. That won’t disappear overnight.
Again, we’ve started tracking eBay’s listings for a couple of Windows XP metrics: How many items pop up when a search using the string “windows xp” is run on the site, and the current lowest “Buy It Now” price for Windows XP Home OEM.
We tried several different searches on eBay. During the three days prior to the 26th we found 1,804 results for “windows xp;” 1,080 results for “windows xp” narrowed down to listing strictly in the “Software” category; and 675 results for “windows xp” narrowed to not just the Software category but by “operating system” and “windows.” The auction site’s lowest prices, shipping included, for a legitimate copy of Windows XP Home OEM for the three days were $91.75 for May 23 and 24 (that is, Friday and Saturday), with a slight uptick to $92.00 on Sunday.
We’ll monitor eBay’s XP listings and prices to see if, for example, more sellers start flogging the OS as June 30 approaches, and whether prices move as the end draws near.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Symantec pins blame for XP SP3 registry corruption on Microsoft
The finger-pointing is getting ugly. Gregg Keizer reports:
Symantec Corp. Thursday said it was Microsoft’s code that crippled some PCs after upgrades to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) emptied Device Manager, deleted network connections, and packed the registry with thousands of bogus entries.
“We finally got to the bottom of this last night,” said Dave Cole, Symantec’s senior director for product management of its consumer software. “All of these problems are related to the same thing, a Microsoft file that created all the garbage entries [in the registry].”
He also said that some of the same symptoms had been acknowledged by Microsoft when users updated to Windows XP SP2 several years ago; Cole referenced a pair of Microsoft support documents to back up his claim.
Two weeks ago, after Microsoft launched Windows XP SP3 on Windows Update, users started reporting that their network cards and previously crafted connections had mysteriously vanished from Windows after updating with the service pack. The Device Manager had been emptied, they said, and Windows’ registry, a directory that stores settings and other critical information, had been packed with large numbers of bogus entries.
Most users who posted messages on Microsoft’s XP SP3 support forum said that the errant registry keys — which started with characters such as “$%&” and appeared corrupted at first glance — were located in sections devoted to settings for Symantec products. Not surprisingly, they quickly pinned blame on the security company.
Earlier this week, Symantec denied that its software was at fault, and instead pointed a finger at Microsoft.
Thursday, Cole said Symantec engineers had connected the current problem to a Microsoft file named “fixccs.exe.” According to information on the Web, fixccs.exe stands for “Fix CCS MaxSubkeyName mismatch,” and appears to be part of both XP SP3’s and SP2’s update packages.
Cole wasn’t sure exactly what function fixccs.exe served. “But it caused similar problems with the Device Manager after SP2. It looks like it’s reared its head again.”
Two Microsoft support documents — KB893249 and KB914450 — both describe a problem remarkably similar to what users have reported recently. “After you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on a Windows XP-based computer, the Device Manager window is blank or some devices no longer appear,” reads KB893249.
The fixccs.exe file attempts to make changes to the registry, said Cole, but in some cases also adds large numbers of unnecessary keys. When asked why so many users had reported seeing the errant entries in sections reserved for Symantec products, Cole called it “the luck of the draw. We have a fair number of keys in the registry, and we’re on a lot of systems. This is not exclusive to Symantec.”
Others have noted that too. A user identified as MRFREEZE61, who posted the first message on the Microsoft support forum thread two weeks ago, and later came up with a workaround, said as much today.
“The reported problems are not just limited to those using Symantec products,” wrote MRFREEZE61 in a comment added to the original Computerworld story. “Folks on the forum report this specific registry corruption with no Symantec products installed at all. Some find this corruption in device control set enumerators associated with UPNP (Universal Plug and Play) and other ‘legacy devices,’ others from users of Avast [Antivirus].”
Fixccs.exe has also been linked to problems some users had installing early builds of XP SP3 late last year. In a support forum thread that started Dec. 22, 2007, Shashank Bansal, a Microsoft engineer helping users troubleshoot XP SP3 installation bugs, said: “This is a serious problem for us and we would like to investigate it to further depths. We would need help from all users on this forum for the same.” Bansal then asked users who had had trouble updating from XP SP2 to SP3 to identify the process that had hung or had hogged CPU cycles. “Look out for cscipt.exe or fixccs.exe,” he asked.
On Thursday, Cole said Symantec was working on a standalone tool that would delete the extraneous registry entries. “We hope to have it ready pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re working with Microsoft in the normal channels.”
That word must not have trickled down to Microsoft’s technical support representatives. Users who have posted to Symantec’s support forum and others who have e-mailed Computerworld claim that they have been told by Microsoft support that the fault is all or partially Symantec’s.
A user going by “ZLevee” copied messages received from Microsoft support to a Thursday post on the Symantec support site. “Based on the current research, the issue can probably be caused by the conflicts between SP3 and Norton. Please let me know if you have any Norton product installed.,” ZLevee said the Microsoft support representative had claimed.
A Computerworld reader e-mailed an account of his experience last week with Microsoft’s support. “I had an online chat with a tech support person named ‘Obaid’ on 5/18,” said Thom Nielsen in the e-mail. “He told me that Symantec products do NOT work with XP SP3. He told me Symantec is aware of the problem(s) & is working on it.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of this,” said Cole when asked to comment. “I hope we can clear up any confusion.”
When asked earlier Thursday whether it had uncovered any more information about the disappearing Device Manager and the corrupted registry entries, Microsoft said it nothing new to add beyond the recommendation it made Tuesday: that users contact the company’s technical support desk if they have had problems upgrading to XP SP3.
Microsoft was not available for comment Thursday night.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...XP SP3 update corrupts Windows registry, users claim
An update from Computerworld U.S.:
Symantec Corp. today denied that its consumer security software, including Norton Internet Security and Norton 360, is to blame for wreaking havoc on some users’ PCs after they upgraded to Windows XP Service Pack 3.
Microsoft Corp. declined to answer questions about the problem, which has emptied Windows’ Device Manager and deleted network connections, preventing some users from connecting to the Internet or to wireless networks.
According to reports posted the day after Microsoft launched Windows XP SP3 on Windows Update, some users found that their network cards and previously-crafted connections had mysteriously vanished from Windows after updating to the service pack.
“The Network Connections screen now does not show any of the NIC cards. I have three adapters that used to show up,” said someone using “MRFREEZE61″ as an alias on Microsoft’s XP SP3 support forum on May 7. “In an attempt to troubleshoot, I tried to bring up the Device Manager, and to my surprise it is now empty.”
Numerous other users corroborated MRFREEZE61’s account on the same support thread.
MRFREEZE61 reported that he had found large numbers of corrupted entries in Windows Registry, a directory that stores settings and other critical information for Microsoft’s operating system. Those entries, said MRFREEEZE61, began with the characters “$%&”; once they were removed, the PC returned to normal.
Others chimed in to claim that the errant keys were located in sections of the registry devoted to settings for Symantec products, and they pinned blame on the security company’s consumer-grade software installed on their PCs. “I see parent keys that all seem to be Norton/Symantec product keys,” said someone identified as “gfrost.”
“This appears to be a Symantec-related problem according to the keys showing up,” said another user, “datarimlens.” “Is anyone from Symantec on this yet? Since SP3 has been distributed to at least one of my machines, am I to believe that this problem did not show up in testing? Really? For something as widely tested as SP3? Really? I mean seriously?”
“I upgraded three well-maintained laptop machines, one with NIS2008 [Norton Internet Security 2008] installed and running during the upgrade, one with NIS2008 installed but shut down during installation and one without NIS2008 installed,” said “bighowie,” yet another user posting to the forum. “As you guessed, the one without NIS2008 upgraded like a charm. No problems. The other two have the same mess as identified by all in this thread.”
Today, Symantec said its initial investigation had uncovered no cause and effect between its software and the corrupted registry keys, which in some cases numbered in the thousands.
“While we’re seeing that this issue can affect Norton users, we don’t believe we’re the root cause,” said Sondra Magness, a Symantec spokeswoman, in an e-mail. “In further searches on this issue, we found a number of users experiencing the problem but who do not have Norton software and/or are experiencing the issue on XP SP2.”
In a follow-up telephone conversation, Dave Cole, Symantec’s senior director for product management of its consumer offerings, acknowledged that users running Norton titles were experiencing problems, but he said the numbers are small. “The support lines are not ringing off the hook,” he said. Cole also said that Symantec had done “extensive testing” of its products with Windows XP SP3, but this issue hadn’t surfaced.
And he essentially blamed Microsoft for causing the problem. “This is related to XP SP3,” he said, “and XP SP3 has already had other issues specific to some OEMs and some processors.”
Cole was referring to the “endless reboot” snafu that users began reporting after applying the service pack upgrade. Last week, Hewlett-Packard Co., whose AMD-powered machines were cited by most users as the only ones affected, confirmed the rebooting glitch, and Microsoft announced it would add a filter to Windows Update to prevent AMD-based PCs from obtaining XP SP3 via the update service’s listings.
“People need to exercise caution before [updating to] XP SP3,” said Cole. “This may well go beyond Symantec.”
For its part, Microsoft has remained mum. Although a Microsoft engineer asked users on the support forum for additional information — and provided an e-mail address for them to forward details — the company did not address questions put to it Monday that asked it to confirm the problem, point out any posted Microsoft solutions and fix blame on either Symantec or its XP SP3 update.
Microsoft limited its response to boilerplate language that it has used before in statements about XP SP3. “Customers who experience a problem with Windows XP SP3 installation should contact Microsoft Customer Support Services, which can provide free assistance and troubleshooting for these issues,” a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail Monday afternoon.
Some users, in fact, reported that they had contacted Microsoft’s help desk, and via a remote session managed by the tech support representative, had had their Windows registry cleaned. Many others, however, vented at the apparent lack of interest by Microsoft in their troubles.
“I see no evidence that Microsoft is working on this issue, or even that they are mildly concerned about it,” wrote “Sandbridge” Friday.
MRFREEZE61 posted clean-up instructions for afflicted users on the Microsoft support forum, and several reported back that the work-around had done the trick. “Hey Mr. Freeze, just wanted to say that your solution saved my butt big time,” said someone identified as “RevDAGG” on Sunday.
Manually deleting the rogue registry keys, however, was impossible for some, who reported thousands, even tens of thousands, of corrupted entries; several called for an automated tool to help them do clean-up.
“Once we’ve figured out how many customers this affects, [an automated tool] is absolutely possible,” said Symantec’s Cole. “If there is something we can do to address the problem, we’ll do it.”
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...More than 200,000 sign InfoWorld petition
InfoWorld, our affiliate in the U.S., has collected more than 200,000 names on its petition asking Microsoft Corp. to continue supporting Windows XP
The publication posted this report.
Since InfoWorld launched its petition at SaveXP.com four months ago, more than 200,000 people have added their voices to the demand that Microsoft keep Windows XP for sale after June 20.
As of May 15, the count was 200,805 signatures, excluding duplicates and fake signups.
And if you look to your right side of this page, you can sign ComputerWorld Canada’s petition.
“We’re pleased and a little bit amazed that so many people from throughout the world have felt so passionately about the need to keep XP on the market,” said Executive Editor Galen Gruman. “We had heard grumblings throughout much of 2007 about dissatisfaction with Vista’s high hardware requirements, questionable interface changes, slow performance, and incompatibilities with third-party software, but no one seemed to want to say so in public. That’s changed since the petition’s launch on Jan. 14.”
The campaign has caused a media frenzy, with stories in most major newspapers and news Web sites, as well as in blogs and radio programs. Recently, for example, Business Week noted in a recent story on increasing enterprise adoption of the Macintosh that Windows Vista was perhaps one of the biggest stumbles in tech history. A separate report noted that large companies such as General Motors and Alaska Airlines are skipping Vista and instead waiting for the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7.
And a major tech analyst firm has warned that Microsoft’s many mishaps with Vista are putting the Windows franchise in jeopardy.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seemed to suggest that the company might give XP a reprieve — something it had done six months ago when it extended XP’s end-of-sales date from Dec. 31, 2007 to June 30, 2008, due to customer resistance to Vista, But his PR firm, Waggener Edstrom, quickly issued denials that any change was imminent, suggesting that the voices seeking to keep XP were a small minority.
Through its PR firm, Microsoft has declined to meet wit InfoWorld to receive the petition and discuss the concerns of its customers who have signed it. Microsoft has repeatedly stated that it is satisfied with its sales of 140 million copies of Vista, which analysts and press reports repeatedly note include copies of Vista preinstalled on consumer PCs (for which XP has not been an option since spring 2007 at most retailers) or copies shipped to enterprises who exercise their rights to “downgrade” their systems to XP. There is no data on the willing adoption of Vista.
Microsoft has extended XP’s life for sub-US$400 PCs and for PCs meant for poor countries — neither type of PC can run the more resource-intensive Vista. But Dell has gone a step further, announcing it would install XP on select new systems after June 30 using the “downgrade” license option from Microsoft in which a customer pays for Vista Business or Vista Ultimate but gets XP installed instead.
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(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 10) Loading ...Software developers ignore Vista
Most respondents to a Computerworld survey said they prefer environments such as .NET to the Windows Presentation Foundation of the Vista operating system.
Eric Lai of Computerworld wrote this article today
Windows developers are confirming the results of a survey released yesterday that found fewer than 1 in 12 programmers currently writing applications targeting Windows Vista .
“None of our customers are saying, ‘G******it, we need those WPF controls now!’” said Julian Bucknall, CTO for Windows programming tools maker Developer Express Inc. , referring to one of Vista’s most highly-touted features, its new graphical subsystem, Windows Presentation Foundation . Rather, “we find most are still sticking with ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications.”
True to Microsoft ’s form, ASP.Net and Windows Forms and most of Windows XP ’s other legacy technologies still work fine in Vista. (The converse is also true: many Vista features can be installed as add-ons to XP.)
But as in every upgrade cycle, Microsoft runs the risk that developers may bypass the latest technologies — in Vista’s case, WPF, the XPS printing format that Microsoft is touting as a rival to Adobe ’s Portable Document Format (PDF); Windows Sidebar ‘gadgets,’ and others — in favor of those further down the road, such as those expected in Vista’s successor, Windows ‘7′.
“Microsoft tends to dump ten new technologies on us, but only 2 or 3 really stick,” said Michael Krasowski, vice-president of PDSA Inc., a Microsoft-focused 20-developer firm in Tustin Calif., citing the Windows DNA Architecture as an example.
Microsoft Corp. undoubtedly wanted to avoid its current predicament. It has been publicly talking up features in Vista since 2003 — half a decade.
But such “overmarketing,” as Krasowski calls it, can rebound. Experienced developers have become jaded towards the third-party apps Microsoft trots out as exemplars of Redmond’s latest technology — “demoware,” he calls them — that sparkle with flashy animation and video.
“You can’t write an enterprise app like a demo. It’d be all soft and weak under the hood,” he said. “We’d never put all that stuff in because it couldn’t support 100 concurrent users.”
Some say it’s premature to declare Vista a flop with developers. For one thing, despite the 140 million copies Microsoft claims to have shipped, the market hasn’t reached a tipping point yet.
“I can???t see targeting something only to Vista when you have XP and Windows 2003 out there in huge numbers,” said Dave Noderer, a Microsoft MVP who runs the Florida .Net User Group as well as his own software development firm, Computer Ways Inc. in Deerfield Beach, Fla.
Others point out the symbiotic relationship between most Windows developers and the large enterprises that hire and pay them. Enterprises are proving even slower than the rest of the market at moving off XP, say analysts such as Forrester Research Inc.
“Large enterprise don’t transition overnight to the newest platforms,” said Shannon Braun , a Microsoft MVP and Minneapolis-area-based programming consultant. “To me the adoption pace [of Vista by developers] seems pretty normal.”
“Vista is too bleeding-edge — not for us, but for our clients,” Krasowski said. PDSA’s clients include large, blue-chip customers such as Kaiser Permanente and Boeing Inc. “They’re all leery of Vista.”
And why shouldn’t they be? According to data released this spring by migration software vendor AppDNA Ltd., about a fifth of enterprise applications running on XP break when moved straight to Vista, mostly due to pre-XP-era code still lingering in the app. That increases to nearly half for apps migrated from 32-bit XP straight to 64-bit Vista.
Another reason is that Microsoft, in an attempt to catch up to the Mac, emphasized consumer-y aesthetic features with Vista, with WPF, Aero and the DirectX 10 3-D graphics rendering engine all aimed at making Vista or its apps more pleasing to the eye.
More attractive apps are more user-friendly apps, says Microsoft, and that translates into increased user productivity. But that message remains a hard sell to enterprises, who demand their apps stay “lean and mean,” said Krasowski, not get “confused and cluttered.”
Others say learning how to take advantage of Vista’s new visual features remains daunting. Improving data presentation is “a good thing to do, but there is a lot of hacking through the undergrowth first,” Bucknall said. “I don’t think a lot of developers know how to get to that stage.”
Noderer is optimistic. While XP-era technologies such as Windows Forms “will be around for many years to come,” he said, Vista-era ones such as WPF “will slowly rise as the way to do Windows applications.”
But others think that the rise in popularity of server-delivered business apps — coupled with Microsoft’s recent moves to make its Internet Explorer 8 browser behave more like other Web browsers — could make Vista’s client-side graphics-enhancing features irrelevant.
“98% of the apps we write are for the Web,” Krasowski said. “They’re more flexible and easier to maintain. Many of our clients are migrating from apps written in VB6 or .Net.”
Heather Havenstein contributed to this story.
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(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...XP SP3 cripples some PCs with endless reboots
More from Gregg Keizer of ComputerWorld U.S.:
Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 sends some PCs into an endless series of reboots, according to posts to a Microsoft support forum.
Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft Corp. and a prominent Windows blogger, has worked with users to tentatively identify the problem as involving only machines using processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Messages from frustrated users began accumulating on the XP SP3 support newsgroup Wednesday, just a day after Microsoft released the update to the general public.
“I just installed Windows XP SP3 and after completing the processes and when the system reboots, the system cannot proceed to load the Windows,” said a user identified as “Olin” in a message that kicked off a long thread. “It just displays the flash screen of Windows then after it reboots again.”
Most users who left messages on the forum said that they were unable to boot into Windows Safe mode — a last-ditch way to sidestep the normal boot process for troubleshooting purposes — or revert to a previously saved System Restore point.
Some were understandably upset. “Way to go, Microsoft, releasing the pile of dung called SP3 that hoses your system so bad even Safe Mode isn’t working!” said a user identified as Mike Voss. “Props to your QA guys, they certainly have done their job.”
Johansson, who watched one of his PCs repeatedly reboot after installing XP SP3, traded accounts with several other users on the newsgroup and summarized the results on his blog.
According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. “The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers,” said Johansson. “Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality.”
Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn’t normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes “a big problem,” Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.
The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC’s BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is “most likely not your problem,” but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. “Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them,” he said.
Johansson also spelled out workarounds for both problems on his blog. The HP issue can be solved by disabling the intelppm.sys driver, while the second fix requires the user to plug in a USB flash drive before booting.
Microsoft was not immediately available for comment early Friday, but someone identified as a Microsoft employee on the support forum had asked users to e-mail him information about the PC’s system configuration and whether they were able to enter Safe mode, and to submit event viewer logs.
This isn’t the first endless reboot problem Microsoft’s faced in relation to a service pack recently. In February, the company pulled a Windows Vista SP1 prerequisite update from automatic delivery because it was crippling some machines.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...If you don’t like Internet Explorer 7 you’re gonna hate XP Service Pack 3
First, the problem was compatibility with retail point of sale systems.
Now that Microsoft has released released Service Pack 3 for the soon-to-be-phased out Windows XP operating system, users have found another problem.
Greg Keizer of Computerworld US filed this report
Microsoft has warned users updating to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they won’t be able to downgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to the older IE6 without uninstalling the service pack.
The warning first appeared in a post Monday to a company blog written by the Internet Explorer (IE) development team. Microsoft released Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update as an optional download Tuesday.
“If you choose to install XP SP3, Internet Explorer 7 will remain on your system after the install is complete,” said Jane Maliouta, an IE program manager , in the blog entry. “Your preferences will be retained. However, you will no longer be able to uninstall IE7. If you go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, the Remove option will be grayed out.”
The inability to downgrade to IE6 after installing XP SP3 was by design, said Maliouta, because the service pack includes newer versions of the old browser’s files. If Microsoft had allowed users to revert back to the pre-SP3 version of IE6 — the one saved on users’ PCs when they upgraded to IE7, and until now what was used to back out of the newer browser — Windows would have ended up in a “mixed file state,” Maliouta said.
“This state is not supported and is very bug prone. To ensure a reliable user experience, we prevent this broken state by disabling the ability to uninstall Internet Explorer 7,” she said.
Users who want to retain the ability to downgrade from IE7 to IE6 should uninstall the former before upgrading to XP SP3. Once Windows XP has been updated to SP3, users can then install IE7. That process allows for reverting to IE6 in the future.
“The restriction on uninstalling only applies to when you install a Windows Service Pack release on top of a standalone IE release,” Maliouta said.
If Windows XP SP3 has already been installed, the only way to return to IE6 is to first uninstalled the service pack. At that point, IE6 can be restored on a PC that’s been updated to IE7.
Microsoft released IE7 in October 2006; it was the first major update to Internet Explorer since August 2001, when IE6 went final.
The newer browser has not been able to usurp IE6, particularly in businesses, where it remains Microsoft’s most popular browser. According to a survey released in late March by Forrester Research , only 30% of corporate Internet Explorer users had switched to IE7 by the end of 2007. IE6 accounted for nearly all the remaining 70%.
Maliouta also outlined how Windows XP SP3 upgrades affect in-place copies of IE6 and IE7; in both cases, she said, the currently installed browser remains undisturbed by the update.
However, users who have installed IE8 Beta 1 — a preview of its newest browser that hit the streets two months ago — will not be offered Windows XP SP3, according to Maliouta, again because of possible instability problems.
“We strongly recommend uninstalling IE8 Beta 1 prior to upgrading to Windows XP SP3 to eliminate any deployment issues,” she said, “and install IE8 Beta 1 after XP SP3 is on your machine.”
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...SP3 rollout snarled by Windows XP change
Gregg Keizer of Computerworld U.S. filed this report:
Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that it delayed the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) because changes to the operating system can corrupt data in the company’s retail point-of-sale and store management software.
The company has also suspended automatic distribution of Vista SP1 as well as XP SP3. “Yes, we are temporarily holding any additional automatic distribution of Windows Vista SP1″ said a spokeswoman.
Tuesday, Microsoft postponed the expected release of XP SP3 because of what it called a “compatibility issue” between the OS and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), point-of-sale and store management software designed for small and midsize retailers. When it announced the service pack’s delay, however, Microsoft did not spell out the specifics of the bug.
In fact, a Microsoft representative had outlined the problem in a post to the RMS support forum five days earlier, on April 24. “The Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) Development team has identified problems when Windows Vista SP1 is installed,” said Tom Berger, who identified himself as a Microsoft online support engineer. “Windows Vista SP1 may cause data loss and corruption in Microsoft Dynamics RMS databases.”
According to Berger, Windows Vista SP1 changed the way Microsoft SQL Server handles some database records, specifically those that include information from multiple tables. “All users who have applied Windows Vista SP1 will be affected,” he added.
A Microsoft spokeswoman on Wednesday acknowledged that the same problems affected RMS users running XP SP3.
The company is also working on filters to block machines running RMS from being offered either Vista SP1 or XP SP3; it will resume automatic delivery of Vista SP1 and add XP SP3 to Windows Update once those filters are in place.
In the meantime, Windows Vista users can upgrade to SP1 by manually selecting it from Windows Update — it hasn’t been removed, only suspended from automatic download and installation — or downloading a standalone installer from the Microsoft site.
Although Windows XP users have no similar official alternative, some have uncovered a standalone installer for SP3 buried on Microsoft’s servers, and have been posting links on the TechNet support forum. Although the installer — available in several languages, including English, German and French — was vetted by numerous users who said it was identical to the finished version released earlier to TechNet and MSDN subscribers, Microsoft would not confirm that the links led to sanctioned files.
“In this particular case, it’s possible that some third-party websites are linking to the Windows XP SP3 software that we have published for MSDN and TechNet subscribers,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “Since we cannot confirm the source of every link that third-parties provide, our recommendation is that customers wait until we’ve published Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and the Download Center.”
Microsoft’s record with Windows service packs has not been impressive. Vista SP1, for example, was held from most users for six weeks because of balky device drivers, and the company initially blocked paying subscribers of its TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) from downloading either Vista SP1 or XP SP3.
Microsoft has not divulged a timetable for resuming Vista SP1 on Windows Update, or offering XP SP3 for the first time. It also has not set a schedule for delivering a fix for the RMS bug.
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