Vista Successor

That era is upon us once again! I remember those endless days trying to get my hands on erstwhile Longhorn to see how the future OS from the MS stable was going to look. Well, as I said, That era is upon us once again! With the rumours of successor to Vista gaining strength, the time is not far off when the emulators and beta versions are going to flood the download scene. The rumours are that the successor to Microsoft Windows Vista, perhaps, code named as Windows 7, has already been handed out to trusted "key" partners. The release period, which was earlier set to be early 2010, has been recast as late or end 2009. That leaves almost two years of salivating , imagining and speculating what the new version is going to be like. If the rumours are to be believed, Microsoft is ready to release two versions known as M2 and M3 in April/may and second half of this year respectively. But going by the history of Microsoft, there would be just no point in settling for these date lines. We all would remember how the release dates for Microsoft Windows Vista kept slipping. Same is the case for the yet to be released SP1 for Vista. All I would say is, keep your fingers crossed.

Vista And File Transfers

The new and flashy OS from MS Stable, has some inherent problems, The most peculiar of them is the file transfer. It was first reported almost nine months ago and yet the problem continues.

Screen shots relayed this week by two Reg readers say it better than we ever could. "48167 Days and 23 hours remaining," one of them reads. "36843 Days and 0 hours remaining," states the other. Both are Vista's best-faith guesses as to how long it will take to copy data from one location to another.

The slow copying of Vista has been experienced by many a users. It is just not limited to transfering files, but also disc writing. The built in engine is is snailish, to say the least. One user who was trying to write a DVD using the Vista in built engine, had a myth shattering experience when the system told that it would take 131 years to write 168 MB of data. Does it not make you jump out of your seats? 131 years for 168 MB of data? The similar job finishes in seconds on the seasoned pros like Nero. Now please do not eveb imagine for a second that this was tried on a some slomo machaine. This was experienced ona state of the art laptop. Problem is, the big guys at MS just plainly do not acknowledge this.

Vista's Long Goodbye, as we've come to call this bug, is one of the more baffling things to come out of Redmond in recent memory. Copying files to a CD or across a network is not exactly one of the more exotic things a PC user can do, right? And yet, the problem continues.

It was expected that the problem would be rectified with coming of SP1. But even after the update is installed, many users are confounded to learn that the problem still persists.

To be fair, some participants on 478-post thread on Microsoft's TechNet site have reported success in eradicating the Vista malady. Some report SP1 does speed things up. Others have seen improvements after running through a series of steps that includes disabling Windows search service, tweaking Vista's user account control settings and setting network interface cards at half duplex or auto negotiate. Now, if MS expects all of its users to be nerds or geeks to carry out similar tweaks, then it has definitely lost touch with ground reality. Unimaginable, that a company would spend more than five years and millions of bucks and bring out a product worse than its predecessor. Way to go MS!

Sinning Patches

Microsoft Corp. promised to end the patch year with a bang by scheduling seven security updates for next Tuesday to fix flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer. Windows Vista, the one-year-old operating system that Microsoft pledged was its most secure ever, will be affected by five of the seven updates. Unless it yanks one or more from the list at the last minute, Microsoft will end the year having released 69 security bulletins in 2007, nine fewer than 2006's total but 14 more than in 2005. Now that is a substantial number folks.

The point here is that MS was going to release patches for users to apply. Well, they did, and i did. The result, unpleasing to say the least. Now i do not know what kind of rabbit did Microsoft plan to pull out of their hat, but it was not surely a bunny for me. It was a Monster. How? Let me explain.

Like a truthful, faithful guy i downloaded the patches and after application, the computer rebooted. Everything hunky dory. Not really. The Update Service said that update had failed. I checked the history and this is what i saw. An error code I had no clue about. Not only me, even Microsoft, on their help site, had no clue about this error code. Why would a behemoth of the size of MS would do a thing like that? If they are not sure of what kind of error codes their product is going to pop out, then why have such kind of coding? Well, the only solution i could see to this was to disable automatic updates till Mr Balmer comes out with a veritable reply. And please be quick to it guys, competition is sure closing in.

SP1 News

Microsoft will use the upcoming release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to disable the two most widely used exploits of the operating system's activation process, as well as do away with the system that reduces access to features and functionality for those users with counterfeit or non validated software.

The Vista SP1 update will make changes to the underlying code to prevent the two primary types of exploits that pirates currently use to generate counterfeit versions of Windows Vista: the OEM BIOS exploit and the Grace Timer exploit.

The moves come even as Microsoft officials say piracy is on the decline. "We're seeing indications from internal metrics, like WGA validation failures, that the Vista piracy rate is less than half that of [Windows] XP today," Alex Kochis, Microsoft's group product manager for Windows Genuine Advantage, told eWEEK.

The OEM BIOS exploit has two basic variants. The first involves directly editing system files and the BIOS of the motherboard to present information to indicate to the system that the copy of Windows had been installed by an OEM in a factory environment.

The other variant is software-based and tries to do the same thing by intercepting some of the calls to the BIOS and returning a result expected in a factory-based install, Kochis said.

For its part, the Grace Timer exploit resets the 30-day grace time limit between installation and activation. One of these, known as the 2099 hack, pushes that out to the year 2099.

Kochis acknowledged that any user who chooses not to install the SP1 update would not be affected by these changes.

eWEEK.com Special Report: Windows Vista: Microsoft's Longhorn Client

Vista SP1 will also bring changes to the customer experience with the Windows Genuine Advantage program, especially how it differentiates genuine from nongenuine systems in Windows Vista, as well as with Windows Server 2008 when it is released in the first quarter of next year.

Users whose systems are identified as counterfeit or have not been validated as genuine will be presented with clear and recurring notices about the status of their system and how to get a genuine copy.

This is a change in tactics from the current approach for Windows Vista, where counterfeit systems go into a state called reduced functionality mode, which essentially suspends, after 30 days, a number of features of the system until the user takes action to get genuine.

Microsoft saw Vista SP1 as an opportunity to make these changes in line with recent feedback from some of its larger enterprise and public sector customers, who felt the move to reduced functionality mode was an anti-piracy measure for the consumer and small-business space, Kochis said.

eWEEK.com Special Report: Piracy & Counterfeiting "Under this new system, no features will be disabled. Instead it will be a notification-based experience similar in some ways to what we have done with XP. A user of a system that has not been activated and gone through the 30-day grace period to activate will, when logging in on the 31st day, see a dialog box on a plain black background," he said. "That will give them two options: Activate Windows now, which will bring up all the options to do this, and activate Windows later, which takes them directly to their desktop, which will be exactly the same as it had been the last time they used it, except that there will be a plain black background and a message in the lower right hand corner over the system tray telling them that their copy of Windows is not genuine."

In addition, every hour a balloon reminder will appear from the system tray asking them to activate Windows, and the desktop background will be switched back to black if the color had been changed.

Windowsw Vista SP1

It seems all the negative press on Microsoft Vista is making MS to sit up and take notice. They ought to. The flag bearer product of a company can not be allowed to be a bug in itself. In my previous post, i recommended that users who are using microsoft vista, must stick with Vista rather than downgrade to Windows XP. Now there are plans afoot to make the experience ( Damn, i used eXPerience) of Vista much more fruitful. First up, the larger known issues. People have complained about various things, chief among them are

- computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode
- Long time taken to copy large files, especially from USB devices. This one really makes me laugh. They designed "Ready Boost" to boost performance through USB drives, but bugged it enough to make the file transfer slow.
- Lesser compatibility in case upgrading from Windows XP.
- Driver issues with nVidia; in fact with most video drivers.
- Activation tweaks

Not a very long list, but very basic things that can put a user off. So to address all these issues, Microsoft, in a muted and downplayed manner, is doing what it does best. Bring out a service pack. Two substantial collections of Windows Vista hotfixes have been leaked to the Internet. I say leaked, because they were initially offered to Windows Server 2008 beta testers. This led to lot of speculation amongst users that the pair are actually the foundation of the future Service Pack 1 (SP1) release for the operating system, although Microsoft has entirely downplayed the whole issue.

Labeled "Vista Performance and Reliability Pack" and "Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack," the two updates feature a long list of non-security-related bug fixes. The AeroXperience site even posted results of early testing of the packs' performance. According to a write-up here, systems updated with the Vista Performance and Reliability Pack copied large-sized folders in less than half the time as compared with unpatched machines. That is good news I suppose. But it is always better to wait with crossed fingers when it is related to Microsoft.