PC World Philippines

Posts Tagged ‘ XP ’

Windows 7 Migrations: Don’t Get Distracted by XP, Windows 8

By Fei on August 11, 2011

By Shane O’Neill
August 11, 2011

FRAMINGHAM – Enterprises planning a Windows OS migration are at a bit of a crossroads. There’s a lot to consider.

First, there is increasing pressure to get all workers running Windows 7 as support for Windows XP winds down. At the same time, the demand from workers to use Windows 8 on tablets will only ramp up in anticipation of its release a year from now.

Hypothetically, the corporate landscape in a year and half will consist of Windows XP and Windows 7 running on PCs, and newly available tablets running Windows 8 competing with iPads and Android-based tablets.

“From an IT perspective, users will start clamoring for Windows 8 tablets because they are cooler than the stock corporate Lenovo Thinkpad laptops,” says Aaron Suzuki, CEO of Prowess, an IT consulting and managed services company that provides enterprises with OS deployment and virtualization technologies. “But that’s just more devices for IT to manage and migrate to and there will be application compatibility problems.”

Windows 7 has been available since October 2009, but it is only recently seeing real enterprise adoption. Last week, Web metrics firm Net Applications reported that Windows XP market share fell below 50 percent, to 49.8 percent. Although Windows XP still runs on the majority of Windows machines, it is no longer the majority leader among all operating systems, a title the OS has held for years.

Slideshow: The Best 2011 Windows 7 Laptops for Work and Play
Slideshow: Seven Windows 7 Features You Probably Don’t Know About
Slideshow: Seven Tools to Ease Your Windows 7 Rollout

Over the past year, Windows XP market share has dropped by 12 percent to 49.8 percent while Windows 7 has increased by 13.4 percent to 27.9 percent.

As for the Windows 8 threat to the enterprise, many industry analysts agree that Windows 8 is a tablet OS designed for consumers and to compete with Apple’s iPad. This is a smart and necessary strategy for Microsoft, but is not likely to hurt Microsoft’s enterprise business, according to analysts.

“Windows 8 is all about the tablet. I think it is dead on arrival for business customers,” said IDC research VP Al Gillen in a recent Computerworld story.

It’s likely that enterprises will skip Windows 8 in the same way they skipped Windows Vista (hopefully not for the same reasons), and focus on Windows 7. But many enterprises are having a hard time focusing.

Says Prowess CEO Suzuki: “We’re finding one of two things: businesses aren’t approaching Windows 7 migration in the most efficient way, or they are postponing it all together because they aren’t confident they have the right strategy to get it done.”

With that in mind, Prowess offers five strategic tips for staying focused on Windows 7 migrations despite Windows XP and Windows 8 distractions.

Evaluate your upgrade timeline: Realize that every business is different and there is no set timetable for migration. Look at your OS systems and determine if you can and need to upgrade. With Windows XP licenses expiring and Windows 8 just around the corner, do you have the necessary OS resources to support a growing and evolving workforce? If not, it may be time to put a migration plan in place.

Plan: You need to plan ahead at least a month or two, and in larger organizations possibly several months, to get the deployment plan defined, refined, and locked down. You’ll need to assess hardware and application compatibility and readiness.

Build a master image: Determine what makes sense for your organization and build a master image. Keep only the necessary information available on the master image, such as the OS and any desired applications.

Use virtual machines as reference computers: Using a virtual machine will reduce costs and save thousands with no physical equipment to buy, store, or track. It also reduces the amount of hardware present in your master image, keeping the image as clean as possible for deployment to diverse hardware.

Deploy: Assuming you have addressed applications and hardware, you still need to consider migration of user data and Windows deployment methodology. There are tools (such as Prowess’s SmartDeploy Enterprise software) that incorporate all of these best practices and can perform automated deployments with user data migration.

Microsoft revs dump-XP campaign, says ‘time to move on’

By Fei on July 13, 2011

By Gregg Keizer
July 13, 2011

FRAMINGHAM – Microsoft on Monday made its most aggressive move yet to convince customers to drop Windows XP and adopt Windows 7, telling them that there were only 1,000 days of support life left in the older operating system.

Stephen Rose, the IT community manager for the Windows commercial team, noted the 1,000 days remaining for Windows XP support in a post to a Microsoft blog .

“Windows XP had an amazing run and millions of PC users are grateful for it. But it’s time to move on,” Rose said, adding that the operating system exits security support in “less than 1,000 days.”

The 10-year-old XP actually has a little longer to live than that: Microsoft has promised to patch XP through April 8, 2014, 1,002 days from Monday.

“Bottom line, PCs running Windows XP will be vulnerable to security threats” after that date, said Rose. “Furthermore, many third-party software providers are not planning to extend support for their applications running on Windows XP, which translates to even more complexity, security risks, and ultimately, added management costs for your IT department.”

According to usage statistics and research firm surveys, Microsoft has its work cut out in moving users off XP.

Web metrics firm Net Applications now has Windows 7 ‘s usage share at 27%, for example, but XP still powers 51% of the world’s personal computers. If the trends of each over the last three months continue, Windows 7 won’t pass XP in the race for share until the second quarter of 2012.

Businesses are even more reliant on Windows XP, said Forrester Research when it recently estimated the aged OS’s share at 60% of enterprise PCs .

Monday wasn’t the first time Microsoft portrayed XP as yesterday’s OS. Earlier this year, executives on the Internet Explorer (IE) team called XP the “lowest common denominator” as they explained why the OS wouldn’t run IE9 or any future browsers .

And the company has taken firm steps to kill off other products it considers obsolete. Since mid-2009, Microsoft has urged users to give up IE6, the browser that shipped shortly before XP. Four months ago it upped the ante by launching a deathwatch website that highlights IE6′s dwindling usage share.

The push to abandon XP coincided with the opening of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), the company’s annual reseller meet. CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off WPC by celebrating another Windows 7 milestone: selling 400 million licenses for the OS.

Tami Reller, head of product marketing for the Windows group, cited that number to compare Windows 7′s uptake with XP’s in the same span of time.

“That is three times the pace of Windows XP,” Reller said.

Unmentioned Monday — for some time, actually — was Windows Vista, the hapless 2007 version that has been called Microsoft’s first OS failure since 2000′s Windows Millennium. Customers agree: Vista peaked at just under 19% in October 2009, but has lost about half its share since.

Instead, Reller talked up not just Windows 7 as the replacement for XP, but also its successor, Windows 8, which most expect to ship next year.

While Reller encouraged corporate customers to continue deploying Windows 7, she promised that Windows 8 would run on the same hardware.

“For our business customers, your customers,” she said, speaking to the partners at WPC, “this is an important element because the ability of Windows 8 to run on Windows 7 devices ensures that the hardware investments that these customers are making today will be able to take advantage of Windows 8 in the future.”

While neither Reller nor Ballmer mentioned Windows 7′s lifecycle, the company will push consumers now running Windows 7 to upgrade to Windows 8, too. According to Microsoft’s longstanding practice, it will support Windows 7 Home Premium, the most popular edition for consumers, for five years, half the time slated for enterprise support.

Windows 7 Home Premium will be retired from security support in January 2015.

Vista or XP Problems? Let Microsoft Fix It

By Fei on April 23, 2010

By Jared Newman
April 23, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft’s Fix It software, which tries to automatically figure out what’s wrong with your computer, is now available for Windows XP and Vista.

The software is in beta, and can run diagnostics for 300 common problems with Windows. When you run Fix It, you’ll see a list of things to examine, such as display quality, performance, and incoming connections. Clicking the “run” button next to each item launches an automatic troubleshooter. Each one only takes a minute or two.

PC users may have also run into the online version of Fix It, which has been kicking around in Microsoft’s support pages since late 2008. But if you’re having computer problems, you might not be able to get online, in which case Fix It could come in handy. Besides, selecting from a list of general categories is easier than hunting for a specific problem online.

Fix It is aimed at Windows XP and Vista users, because Windows 7 already has diagnostics built-in (you can access them via Control Panel > System Security > Find and Fix Problems). However, the software works on Microsoft’s latest operating system as well, and I find the interface is a little easier to manage in the downloadable version.

And, frankly, I wasn’t aware that the automatic diagnostics existed. They’re not easy to find in Windows 7, and I haven’t had any major problems with my PC that would prompt me to look for solutions. But I did manage to tune up a couple things — mostly programs running at start up that were affecting performance — with help from the Fix It software.

I’m interested to hear if anyone has successfully used Fix It to tackle major PC problems.

Malware Aims to Evade Windows 7 Safeguards

By Fei on February 1, 2010

By Erik Larkin
February 1, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO – Experts agree that Windows 7 has enhanced security to ward off attacks on vulnerabilities in old software. But what if a money-minded online scammer can persuade you to download malware onto your PC?

“Windows 7 is more secure, and upgrading to it is a big improvement,” says Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor with software-maker Sophos. “But it’s not going to stop malware in its tracks.”

Exploits Take a Hit

Digital crooks generally use two tactics to install malware on a PC. Exploits often take the form of a snippet of attack code hidden on a Web page–often a hacked-but-otherwise-benign site. When you browse the page, the exploit hunts for software flaws in Windows or in third-party programs such as Adobe Flash or QuickTime. If it finds one, the exploit may surreptitiously install malware without any hint of the attack.

In contrast, social engineering attacks try to trick you into downloading and installing bot malware that poses as a useful program or video. Some attacks combine tactics, as when a scammer sends an e-mail message encouraging you to open an attached PDF file, only to trigger an exploit buried in the file that then hunts for a flaw in Adobe Reader.

Security upgrades in Windows 7 could help prevent many attacks that target software flaws. ActiveX attacks, once the bane of Internet Explorer users, may “pretty much disappear” due to IE 8′s Protected Mode, says H.D. Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the Metasploit testing tool.

The arcane-sounding Address Space Layer Randomization makes it harder for crooks to find a vulnerability for a running program in your computer’s memory. The related Data Execution Prevention feature attempts to prohibit an attack from taking advantage of any flaw that it may discover.

“These two, in particular, could have a very large impact,” says Wisniewski. Still, though ASLR and DEP were expanded to protect more programs in Windows 7 than in Vista, they don’t cover all applications.

Vista Safer Than XP?

For a sense of what that impact might be, we can look at how Vista fared against malware. Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report covers the first half of 2009, prior to Windows 7′s release. It’s based on data from the Malicious Software Removal Tool, which Microsoft distributes via Automatic Updates to fight common malware infections. According to that data, the infection rate for an up-to-date Vista computer was 62 percent lower than that for an up-to-date XP system.

It’s possible, of course, that Vista users are technologically savvier on average, and so less likely to fall victim to malware. The sample sizes for XP and Vista, which Microsoft didn’t include in the report, might skew the statistics, as well.

But Sophos’s Wisniewski thinks that ASLR and DEP are factors, too. And since those features are expanded in Windows 7, there’s reason to hope they’ll continue to be effective.

“I don’t see this going away anytime soon,” says Moore. He notes that there are plenty of ways crooks can and likely will continue to ply their evil trade against the new OS. But “it does raise the bar,” Moore says.

Hacking People, Not Programs

Exploit-based attacks may be harder to pull off against Windows 7, but social engineering attacks may be as dangerous as ever. And the theoretically less-annoying User Account Control does little to disable poisoned downloads.

In October, Sophos ran a test to see how Windows 7 and UAC would handle malware. First, the testers grabbed the first ten samples of malicious software that came into their lab. They then ran those samples on a fresh Windows 7 machine with UAC at its default settings, and with no antivirus installed.

Two samples couldn’t run on Windows 7 at all. But at its default setting, UAC blocked only one sample, leaving seven pieces of malware that loaded right up.

Sophos’s test highlights two points. First, Wisniewski and others say, UAC isn’t designed to block malware as much as it is to encourage programmers to write software that doesn’t require special privileges–so you shouldn’t count on it for protection.

Second, if a bad guy tricks you into downloading a Trojan horse, ASLR and DEP don’t matter. IE 8′s SmartScreen filter and similar features in other browsers might block known nasties, but the malware universe is bigger than that.

Social engineering ruses include using a hijacked social network account to send malware lures to friends of the owner, sending a link to a supposed video taken of a friend, and hiding a poisoned URL in a shortened link of the type commonly used on Twitter. (For more on such dangers, see “How to Stop 11 Hidden Security Threats.”)

Toss in other tried-and-true scams such as videos that instruct you to install a codec file (but instead lead you to a malware download), and phony documents attached to e-mail messages that appear to come from coworkers, and it becomes clear why Windows 7 users can’t let their guard down.