This isn’t the sky falling, of course: XP Mode is a special feature targeted at businesses that have legacy applications that require Windows XP. Such operations will be required to confirm that the hardware on which they’re running includes CPUs with the virtualization technology. For your average desktop and laptop PC, chances are you’ll never actually need to run XP Mode.

And if you do, you can always try VMWare or VirtualBox or something…

Via CNet.

I’m down with Windows 7. I really am. It’s going to be a good, solid OS that will take us well into the next decade. Microsoft does this kind of thing every few years – they dump out a clinker (Windows ME) then amaze us all with something great (Windows XP). They’re not the richest company in the world because they’re dumb. They know what they’re doing.

The folks at DownloadSquad, however, note that XP mode isn’t just an admission of defeat by Microsoft. It is, instead, it is a way to allow folks to run POS systems on new hardware. Fair enough. But it is a cop out. It’s a cop out on the part of IT departments, just as it should be, in that it allows them to sit on tested – but old – software while updating their junky old hardware.

But why is the author so adamant that XP mode is a good thing? Of course it is. Anything that makes an IT guy’s life easier is a good thing. But this is a general purpose OS. Making the IT guys happy is a massive priority for Microsoft, sure, but I hope they also make us regular Joes happy as well.

Incidentally, Vista will stop being supported in 2012. Sucks to be someone who likes Vista.

Do you want to install Windows XP on your Sony VAIO P (don’t call it a netbook!)? Do you even have a Sony VAIO P yet? If you answered yes to both questions, read on.

There’s a thread over on the Pocketables forum detailing how to install Windows XP on the tiny (not a netbook!) notebook. Getting the OS up and running seems to be relatively straightforward until you get to the 3G and GPS drivers. Luckily, forum user tnkgrl has figured out how to strong-arm the machine into using the Vista drivers in XP.

As always, be sure to back up and proceed at your own risk.

How to install XP on Vaio P

Getting WWAN and GPS working in XP

[Pocketables Forum via SlashGear]

A few weeks ago, we read about how the British Royal Navy would be installing Windows XP on some of its submarines. Oh boy, did we all share some laughs! "Control-Alt-Drown," said one commenter; "Beware the blue cruise missile of death!" said another. We ROFL’d and LOL’d all the live-long day.

Well in a somewhat related story, it appears that computers aboard a handful of the British Royal Navy’s warships actually contracted a virus that cut off e-mail and internet access.

Thankfully the run-of-the-mill systems for accessing the internet aren’t tied into similar systems used for strategic commands and operations, according to The Register.

A spokesperson for Britain’s Ministry of Defence released the following statement:

"Since 6 Jan 09 the performance of the MOD IT systems in a number of areas was affected by a virus. Immediate action was taken to isolate the problem to stop the virus from spreading. This meant that some people were without regular IT access (i.e. email, internet). There have been no infections detected on any networks with sensitive information.

A solution to prevent re-infection has been tested and implemented. The majority of systems are working normally. This is an ongoing process which we are working urgently on so for those people who are still off line normal business will resume as quickly as possible."

The system in question is called NavyStar and is supplied to the British Royal Navy by Fujitsu.

Citing affordability and ease-of-maintenance thanks to off-the-shelf parts, he British Royal Navy is rolling out a customized version of Windows XP on its nuclear submarine fleet. The move will save UK taxpayers up to $32 million over ten years and has cut installation time down to about two and a half weeks per submarine.

Training time is expected to be much shorter, too, given the prevalence of Windows outside of the Navy. Hacking is a concern, although BAE Systems — the company that designed the setup — claims that things have been modified enough to prevent unauthorized access.

[via CNET]

This has to be hard for Microsoft. Generally when Microsoft launched a new OS, the old one is shuffled out of the door by manufacturers. Sure, most PC users will not upgrade older systems until at least one Service Pack, but new computers would always have been loaded with the latest and greatest OS.

That changed when craptastic Vista launched. Thankfully, the operating system has at least reached a point of usability but the fact that some PC makers still offer Windows XP – sometimes at a pricey premium too – shows that the Windows world isn’t too happy about Windows Vista. Windows XP runs so well on a variety of hardware where Vista doesn’t even like some brand new systems. Who knows if this is going to be the last delay of death for the OS. Early versions of Windows 7 are slated for launch in ‘09 so maybe Microsoft will keep XP around until 7 can take its place.

My favorite netbook of 2008 is now a few bucks cheaper. HP cut the price of the Mini 1000 to $359 over the weekend. It’s certainly not the cheapest netbook on the block, but let’s wait and see what HP does with their MIE version. It was, after all, $20 cheaper than the XP version when it was first announced. There’s also a bump to 1GB of RAM on the XP Mini 1000 on top of the price cut.

Product Page

The ever-sassy Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is pointing out that Apple is essentially lying like Satan lied to man about the cancer-causing potency of high-fructose corn syrup. In “Bean Counter,” for example, Apple suggests that Microsoft spends more on advertising than on “fixing Vista.” Adrian tells the honest truth:

For each $1 of sales Apple spends:

– 1.9 cents on Advertising
– 3.3 cents on R&D

For each $1 of sales Microsoft spends:

– 2.6 cents on Advertising
– 13.9 cents on R&D

This would be interesting except for the fact that Microsoft has to spread that 13.9 cents over 89,809 employees, most of whom, presumably, are building new software products to replace Vista. Apple’s 28,000 employees are also hard at work building hardware, something Microsoft rarely has to worry about, so we’d assume there is a 10 cent spend in that $1 on prototyping and manufacturing. Apple also produces approximately 20 real products – most of them retreads of old products – while Microsoft has plenty of teams producing stuff that may never see the light of day. OS X is already strong and steady – it doesn’t need a Vista moment to make it better – and the products are generally popular. And those Vista/Windows ads did suck.

Again, Kingsley-Hughes is essentially trying to get a rise out of us MacTards. Negative Mac stories are delicious link-bait and ZDNet could use them some link bait – no harm no foul. That said, we should always remember that no matter how jovially bumbling John Hodgman appears, Microsoft is still number one in terms of market share. Calling Apple out for trying to convince people to buy their products is un-American and frankly socialistic. Could Marx’s evil theories behind this scurrilous, vindictive vituperation? Perhaps, friends. Perhaps.

Read this line and you’ll understand how Joe Wilcox (and pretty much everyone else online) over at eWeek feels about Windows Vista:

Vista is headed to as quick a death as Microsoft can give it. Someday soon, some gun-toting Microsoft executive will lead Vista out back and “Pop!”

Screaming “Vista sucks!” is by no means a novel idea, but Wilcox uses, you know, evidence to support his claim, that Vista is dead to Microsoft. For example, Microsoft didn’t bleat endlessly about Vista licenses sold during last week’s earnings call. Is that because sales are down, or because sales weren’t as impressive at last quarter?

There’s also netbooks, the tiny half-laptops that, for whatever reason, people are snapping up. Needless to say, RAM- and graphics-hungry Vista doesn’t exactly run well on netbooks, which is why so manufacturers offer XP or Linux in lieu of Vista. If Microsoft can’t sell its fancy operating system to manufacturers of netbooks, where is growth going to come from, Mars?

This is why, by the way, Microsoft is so bullish on Windows 7—ignore that whole Vista thing, ’twas but a minor setback.

Let’s dive into the press release.

Boosts store associate confidence, credibility and versatility. With Circuit City’s vast product line, sales associates sometimes shrank from guest encounters because they were not always confident of the answer. EDGE gives them what they need to sell or discuss any product in the store as well as any product on circuitcity.com because the mobile tool integrates online content for a seamless multichannel experience.

So according to Microsoft, not only will these tablet PCs help the associates, but now, just maybe, customers can actually get waited on because the associates won’t be afraid of ‘em.

Allows for more satisfying guest experiences with every visit. Guests receive a more consistent experience when they interact with EDGE, which helps to improve the overall perception that the city is a unique and differentiated place to shop for consumer electronics.

Are customers going to use EDGE while the associate stands there, holding the tablet? 

Complements the new-hiring strategy in the city store format. The city has been able to expand its hiring pool and can now seek friendly associates with strong team-building and communication skills rather than searching exclusively for highly technical associates.

Chicks? Is Circuit City going to start hiring women sales associates? (O.K. stop yelling. Yes, we know women are technical too, but have you ever been in a Circuit City? It’s like an Alaskan LAN party on the sales floor.)

Influences future growth of the company. The city store format incorporates a number of new elements influenced by EDGE, including a more innovative store layout and easy-to-use technology to help guests make smarter buying decisions.

More technology, less sales people. Sounds like a good plan Circuit City.

We kid, we kid. Still, with all this new roaming platform, will anyone be able to find the checkouts easier?

A recent article in APC Magazine finds a marketing manager for HP detailing how business users are still able to order machines pre-loaded with Windows XP while making it appear that the OS sold was Windows Vista.

Jane Bradburn of HP Australia says,

“From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.”

So the business customer gets an XP machine but it appears on the books as a Vista license. Microsoft is aiming to make Windows XP completely unavailable by January of next year, but HP is apparently “already in discussions with Microsoft about how it could push this deadline back” because the feedback that HP’s been getting from businesses is that most of them don’t have time to do compatibility testing and the cost of re-imaging all their machines is too high during the slow economy.

Okay, here’s what happened. Microsoft took a group of 120 individuals who “were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista” and who rated their perception of Vista at less than a five on a scale of one to ten. These people were shown a demo of what they thought was a new Windows OS called “Mojave” and this demo was individually tailored to each person based on “the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews.”

While the average rating of Vista before the demo was 4.4, the post-demo rating was 8.5, even though Mojave was actually Windows Vista. So what can we learn from all this? Vista looks nice. Problem is, none of these people had to use Vista. They were just “given a demo by a trained retail salesperson.”

So you’ve got a bunch of people who have only heard bad things about Vista but have never used it (or even seen it, from what I gather), and then you show them some tricks from what they think is a new operating system and they like it. What a surprise.

Most people wouldn’t argue with the idea that Vista looks nice and perhaps even looks good on paper. What Microsoft should have done, though, is sent these 120 home with a copy of Vista and had them use it for three months. I don’t think the average score would be 8.5 after that, but if it was, it’d be a big win for Microsoft’s image. This Mojave Experiment, though, just seems kind of dumb.

I mean, how hard is it to trick 120 people who haven’t even seen Vista before? These people probably aren’t all that computer savvy to begin with. They’ve just heard from their friends and IT departments that Vista is a bad operating system. Microsoft had the right idea by attempting to teach them not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case, all they were shown was the cover of the book and a few good chapters.

Mojave Experiment Videos [MojaveExperiment.com]

Windows Vista offers significant advances in security and productivity and we recommend that enterprises that have not yet deployed it should absolutely evaluate its benefits. If you looked at Windows Vista previously and had concerns, the combination of Service Pack 1 and improvements made by our partners probably fixed many of the issues you were worried about and we encourage you to take a second look.

Translation: Spend more man-hours poring over our software. We’ll wait!

He then goes on to say:

If you have existing PCs running Windows XP, then you can use Windows XP for as long as you need. If you do stay on Windows XP, we recommend you install Service Pack 3 and Internet Explorer 7.

Translation: If you’re not going to drink this Kool-Aid then you might as well stay safe.

Not terribly compelling reasons to leave, Bill or even to stay. I know Microsoft’s whole financial plan involves “selling lots of copies of Windows” but there if Vista ain’t gonna sell, it ain’t gonna sell. Keep trying.

Tiny XP [Warning: Porn ads] is a stripped down yet simultaneously beefed up version of XP that includes almost all the drivers necessary to run on almost any hardware as well as a number of registry hacks that ensure that the install won’t bog things down.

Is it legal? No, but it’s basically a sysadmin’s godsend. It even includes a tiny copy of Linux for boot-time troubleshooting. “Tool” implementations like this have been around for years and their absolutely crucial for regular troubleshooting. It’s actually interesting: this version basically acts like a powerful Linux install, once the go-to tool for most sysadmins. How the worm has turned.

InfoWorld has a somewhat long-ish article about how to beat the drop-dead date for Windows XP sales, which Microsoft has set as June 30th of this year. That’s in less than a month! What to do?! Well, here are a couple of options.

First, June 30th is the last date that Windows XP can be sold. However, retailers and manufacturers can still sell copies of XP to the public and/or load copies of XP onto computers after that date, they just won’t be able to buy more copies of XP from Microsoft once stock runs out. So you’ll probably see retail stores and PC makers buying up copies of XP this month, lots and lots of copies.

Second, manufacturers have the option to provide downgrade rights to customers who buy new computers that would normally be pre-loaded with Vista. Dell is apparently offering downgrade rights until January 31st of next year and HP will be offering downgrade rights until July 30, 2009. So for many custom-built PCs, you’ll have the option of loading them up with XP instead of Vista.

A recent press release says the following.

“Customers and partners have made it clear to us that they want Windows on their netbooks and nettops,” said Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of the Original Equipment Manufacturer Division at Microsoft. “We are committed to providing Windows solutions for these devices, helping to ensure a high-quality experience for both our partners and customers.”

Microsoft does have a point, despite my overwhelming urge to want to draw parallels to that Office episode. What’s one of the first things that inquisitive, tech-savvy people do when they purchase a low-cost, sorta underpowered device like the Eee? Try to see who can get it to run Windows. Looks like Microsoft is going to make that a lot easier for everyone in the coming months.

Microsoft is working with more than 20 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) including Acer Inc., ASUSTek Computer Inc., BenQ Corp., Dell Inc., First International Computer Inc., Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd., HP, Inventec Corp., Lenovo, Medion AG, Micro-Star International Co., Positivo Informatica, Pegatron Corp., Quanta Computer Inc. and Wistron Corp. to deliver Windows-based offerings for consumers.

It’ll be interesting to see the price point of this netbook-focused operating system and how different it is from current offerings. The general feeling has been that it’ll be little more than a stripped down version of XP, which would be fine with me.

Since HP can’t seem to make the SP3 patch for XP work with its AMD procs, Microsoft has blocked these computers from getting the free update from Windows Update.

The bug affected AMD-based computers that were getting updates for Intel-based computers on accident, notable those made by HD. This would cause endless rebooting as the machines couldn’t utilize the downloaded software.

No word from MS on when updates for the AMD-based computers will be out, but we’re hoping shortly.

All the craziness going on with XP’s SP3 and AMD processors is complex, but Microsoft wants you to know it’s not their fault, it’s HP’s fault, among others.

It turns out that the OEMs, including HP, have been installing the wrong sysprep before XP, using an sysprep designed for Intel’s platform. So it’s not a Microsoft issue, or an AMD issue, it’s a configuration issue.

There’s no patch yet, though Microsoft is working on the problem. We’ll let you know when there’s a fix.

the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs…the systems can have no more than 1G byte of RAM and a single-core processor running at no more than 1GHz.

Really? Single core? No touchscreens? Limiting the damn screen size? What Microsoft has just done is make sure that the most advanced UMPCs and low-cost computers won’t be running Windows. They’re trying to set up the low-cost PC as a separate market, and so it is, but they can’t simple draw a box around the hardware and say “fit this.” It’s not their job. And I really don’t think the Eee PC is going to cannibalize Vista sales, guys, so don’t worry about it.

I have no doubt this will grease the wheels and get more low-cost PCs to market and to the people who need them in developing countries, but at the same time it’s very much Microsoft playing 800-lb gorilla.