I saw many articles against Wind

I saw many articles against Windows vista, and as long as I am one of these people who don't like vista, so I decided to put this page as a cumulative page for all articles against vista, and I goanna add another section later to show you how you can stay with Windows XP and get all of attractive eye candy which you liked in Windows Vista.

PC Tools attacks Vista's security

May 16 2008 14:39

The row between PC Tools and Microsoft over Windows Vista security escalated today with PC Tools attacking the effectiveness of Vista’s User Access Control (UAC) tool.

Earlier this week, Microsoft attacked results of a PC Tools' study which found Vista allowed 639 threats per thousand PCs compared with 86 for Windows 2000.

In a blog posting, director of Windows product management security at Microsoft, Austin Wilson, said Microsoft rejected the claims and vowed that Windows Vista was significantly less susceptible to malware than older operating systems.

However, in a statement released today, PC Tools said the company maintains its comments last week that Vista is not immune from online threats.

According to PC Tools, the latest raw data confirms that approximately 121,000 pieces of malware were detected on approximately 58,000 unique Vista machines in the ThreatFire community.

More than a year after Windows Vista's release, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this morning acknowledged some of the operating system's shortcomings -- calling it a "work in progress" during a speech to the company's Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle. He also acknowledged Windows XP's fans, but he stopped short of committing to further extend the older operating system's life.

Windows Vista: A work in progress. [Laughter, applause.] A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from. Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases. Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on? Because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting. We can't ever let that happen again. We had some things that we can't just set the dial back, but I think people wish we could. Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still, and that the performance and that the battery life and that the compatibility, we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve.

And yet, we did take some important big steps forward with Vista. So, I know I can get a lot of feedback from this crowd. The No. 1 point of feedback always for MVPs is on Windows. I know I can get a lot of feedback. I bet if I look I can get a little bit of good feedback. I'm sure I can get a lot of constructive feedback. And believe me, top of mind for me, for Ray [Ozzie], for the senior team here, is making sure that we continue to drive forward and take the good work that we did in Vista, take the chance for improvement and progress and drive forward.

Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray identifies Vista's biggest problem without clearly stating what it is. That's because the problem lies first with Microsoft, but he writes for technology professionals:

"Desktop operations professionals tell Forrester that they see the value in standardizing on Windows Vista, but many are having a hard time convincing their CIOs that the move isn't a risky bet, given the mixed reaction it's received in the press and the speculation surrounding what to expect after Windows Vista."

As I have written here so many times, Vista has a perception problem—a really big one. Vista isn't a bad operating system, contrary to the musings of bloggers and the news media. Vista is a mediocre operating system, when Microsoft needed to release something great. Vista is to Windows XP what the old Elvis was to the younger one.

Gray best sums up Vista's perception problem in this sentence: "Forrester has spoken with dozens of companies that are internally debating the possibility of skipping Windows Vista entirely and going straight to the next release, known as 'Windows 7.'" Considering that about six years separate XP and Vista, such willingness to wait even longer is sad commentary on Microsoft's current Windows version. Seven isn't expected for perhaps two more years.

A secondary inhibitor is the "wait-and-see" problem. If nobody's deploying Vista, then nobody else will. IT organizations do watch what their peers do in other businesses—and they want to learn from best practices or even mistakes.

Gray writes: "Because adoption has been cautious, it's been a challenge for companies to learn from early adopters." In that context, "it's not a huge surprise that just over half the enterprises we surveyed don't yet have Windows Vista deployment plans. Others are simply taking a wait-and-see approach."

Gray takes a bean counter's approach to Vista adoption: There is no other choice. He explains that in Europe and the United States, 97 percent of SMBs and 99 percent of enterprises run Windows on the desktop. "For large businesses, there's no viable alternative," he concludes.

Gray's IT organizational advice sums up to this—in my words, not his: Suck it up. Vista is inevitable.

Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems run most personal computers around the globe and are a cash cow for the world's largest software maker. But you'd never confuse a Windows user with the passionate fans of Mac OS X or even the free Linux operating system. Unless it's someone running Windows XP, a version Microsoft wants to retire.

Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

No matter how hard Microsoft works to persuade people to embrace Vista, some just can't be wowed. They complain about Vista's hefty hardware requirements, its less-than-peppy performance, occasional incompatibility with other programs and devices and frequent, irritating security pop-up windows.

For them, the impending disappearance of XP computers from retailers, and the phased withdrawal of technical support in coming years, is causing a minor panic.

Take, for instance, Galen Gruman. A longtime technology journalist, Gruman is more accustomed to writing about trends than starting them.

But after talking to Windows users for months, he realized his distaste for Vista and strong attachment to XP were widespread.

"It sort of hit us that, wait a minute, XP will be gone as of June 30. What are we going to do?" he said. "If no one does something, it's going to be gone."

So Gruman started a Save XP Web petition, gathering since January more than 100,000 signatures and thousands of comments, mostly from die-hard XP users who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.

On the petition site's comments section, some users proclaimed they will downgrade from Vista to XP — an option available in the past to businesses, but now open for the first time to consumers who buy Vista Ultimate or Business editions — if they need to buy a new computer after XP goes off the market.

The User Account Control in Windows Vista improves security by reducing application privileges from administrative to standard levels, but UAC has been widely criticized for the nagging alerts it generates. According to one Microsoft executive, the annoyance factor was actually part of the plan.

In a Thursday presentation at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft who was part of the team that developed UAC, admitted that Microsoft's strategy with UAC was to irritate users and ISVs in order to get them to change their behavior.

"The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross.

Microsoft not only wanted to get users to stop running as administrators, which exacerbates the effects of attacks, but also wanted to convince ISVs to stop building applications that require administrative privileges to install and run, Cross explained.

"We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it," Cross said.

Keith Meisner, senior systems engineer at AppTech, a Tacoma, Wash.-based solution provider, says UAC has helped Microsoft improve end users' overall security posture.

"Many of the situations we deal with have to do with users being uninformed about threats on the Internet," said Meisner. "Are there some annoyances with UAC? Yes, but advanced users know how to get around them."

Jim Allchin, the former co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms and Service division has been subpoenaed in the Vista Capable class action lawsuit. For those of you that haven’t been following the case, back in 2006 Microsoft came up with the idea that computers would be rated with two-tiers of performance when upgrading to Vista. Those that could only run the most basic features would be “Vista Capable” and those that could handle all the features would be “Premium Ready.”

The suit alleges that the “Vista Capable” campaign lead consumers to believe that a system was actually capable of running any version of Vista when it wasn’t. Vista Capable systems could only run Vista Home Basic and could not be expected to run all the features of the up-market versions of Vista even if they were upgraded.

It is also said that Microsoft lowered the required specs for Vista to help Intel sell its lower-end graphics chips; this helped Microsoft to install Vista on systems that were not really capable of running it.

Several Microsoft executives claim they were mislead by their company’s own advertising campaign. Some even wanted to call Vista Home Basic, “Windows 2006″ - leading some to believe that internally, Vista Home Basic wasn’t really Vista in the eyes of Microsoft.

General Motors (GM) may take a detour around Vista, the latest computer operating system from Microsoft (MSFT). The automaker has encountered so many speed bumps getting Vista to work on its machines that it may just wait for the next version of Windows, due in 2010 or 2011. "We're considering bypassing Vista and going straight to Windows 7," says GM's Chief Systems & Technology Officer Fred Killeen.

Vista taxes all but the most modern PCs with hefty processing and memory requirements. Many of GM's PCs can't even run the system. "By the time we'd replace them, Windows 7 might be ready anyway," Killeen says. Then there are compatibility problems with all the software that needs to run on Windows. GM's software vendors still haven't ensured all their programs will run on Vista trouble-free. So the company is sticking with Windows XP for now. Killeen figures GM could install Windows 7 in three or four years.

Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management, has a tough problem on his hands. Microsoft and its hardware/software partners have done a lot in the past 16 months to make Windows Vista a better operating system. With Service Pack (SP) 1, Microsoft has addressed some of the performance and reliability problems that has made Vista the butt of so much bad press when it launched.

But convincing the PC-buying public that Vista isn’t their worst nightmare has proven challenging — especially as the result of continued press reports, comments on blogs and in forums (almost always from anonymous users who may or may not have actually tried using Vista in the past month or two) and clever ads, especially by Apple, which disparage Vista and anyone dumb enough to install it. Ask the average consumer on the street about Windows and many will insist XP is less annoying, more stable and works just fine, thanks.

If you were Nash & Co., what would you do to try to turn the public tide?

Microsoft may be preparing to discontinue sales of Windows XP, but some OEMs have found a way to circumvent the software giant's June 30 deadline.

In yet another sign of the market's resistance to Windows Vista, Dell Computer, Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HPQ), and Sony on Wednesday all confirmed plans to exercise the downgrade rights Microsoft offers with OEM versions of Windows Vista Business and Vista Ultimate in order to continue offering XP-equipped PCs to their customers.

Downgrade rights, which Microsoft also offers to volume licensing customers, give users the ability to roll back to the previous version of the product they're using. Downgrade rights have existed since 2001 for Windows, but many Microsoft partners say they've been seeing a recent uptick in the number of customers exercising downgrade rights to roll Vista back to XP Professional.

Microsoft took another hit on the legal front Monday when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to let the software behemoth appeal a ruling by the judge in the so-called "Vista Capable" lawsuit that had granted the plaintiffs class action status.

In a brief, one-paragraph order, the appeals court denied Microsoft's request to appeal Judge Marsha Pechman's February 2008 ruling expanding the case into a class action.

The denial effectively lifts a stay that Judge Pechman granted to Microsoft in early April while the request for appeal was still pending. Judge Pechman's stay halted discovery in the case, a welcome respite for Microsoft, which had been roundly embarrassed when Pechman unsealed 158 pages of previously sealed evidence, mostly executives' e-mails, in late February.

Whether the denial of Microsoft's request to appeal and the lifting of the stay will put the case back on schedule isn't clear. The case was originally scheduled for October, however, the discovery process – halted by the stay – will now likely restart.

Microsoft could keep XP if customers want it: CEO

LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, Belgium (Reuters) - Microsoft could re-think plans to phase out its Windows XP operating system by June 30 if customers show they want to keep it but so far they have not, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said.

"XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer told a news conference on Thursday.

Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) has announced that it will stop licensing Windows XP to computer makers and end retail sales by June 30.

Ballmer said most retailers sold computers with Vista, the latest version of its Windows operating system, and most consumers were choosing to buy Vista.

Some consumers have complained they were unable to buy XP at retail stores, or as consumers. They say that in order to get XP they must buy their computers as small businesses.

In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?

Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time

April 21, 2008

If the “Vista sucks” movement has a public face, it’s the Sony Vaio. No one knows that better than my new friend Jeremy Toeman. In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?

Steve Ballmer has admitted that Vista is "a work in progress", and admitted the company has to learn lessons from its release.

Speaking at the Most Valuable Professional Global Summit in Seattle, Ballmer resisted calls for a slimmed down Windows 7: "Vista is bigger than XP and it's gonna stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still."

However, Ballmer went on to admit that it had taken too long to get Vista out the door

and admitted it had caused problems: "Vista is a very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from.

"Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases... because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting, we can never let that happen again. We had some things that we can't just set the dial back that I think people wish we could."

Ballmer also struck a conciliatory tone over Windows XP, which the company recently announced would still be available on low cost laptops such as the Eee PC: "We have a lot of customers using Vista, and we have a lot of customers that are choosing to stay with Windows XP, and as long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive, and we will listen, and we will hear that."

Microsoft admits Vista UAC prompts 'need work'

Scott Charney, head of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing division, admitted this week that Windows Vista's User Account Control (UAC) prompts are not intuitive and confuse users.

In a video interview with ZDNet.com.au at the AusCERT 2008 conference this week, Charney said Microsoft needs to make improvements around UAC.

"Clearly there is work that has to be done around the UAC prompts — in part because of user feedback that they get the prompts at times they don't necessarily expect them and it is not intuitive.

"If you give people too many prompts in too many situations, they view it as an impediment to getting their work done and they just start clicking ok on everything," said Charney.

"We give them dialogues and prompts that don't help them make the right decision as often as we would like. You can be surfing the Web and get a warning that this site is out of another site's control, or you may be passing data to another site. What is a user supposed to do with that information?

"You can click cancel and not do what you were trying to do, or you can accept the risk — we need to figure out better ways to mitigate that risk but let the user achieve their objective," he added.

Charney's comments echo those of Ivan Krstić, the former director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child project, who opened last year's AusCERT conference by claiming that desktop security was completely broken.

In an interview with ZDNet.com.au at last year's conference, Krstić said: "If you go to a Web site whose security certificate is for any reason not checking out, you get a dialogue box that you [require] strong Internet security [skills] to decipher," he said. "For anyone else, they get to do a random guess between yes, no and cancel. That's no way to protect anyone," he added.

Krstić said software vendors were "weaselling off responsibility for security to users" in order to "legally protect themselves".