Bill Lindner

Last week we reported how the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a moratorium on users migrating to Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007 citing no compelling reasons to upgrade at this time. ... Federal Computer Week is reporting that more Federal Agencies are delaying the migration to Windows Vista. The Interior Department, including the Army and the Transportation Department are developing implementation policies and say they need to complete their testing of Vista before switching over from older working systems already in place. A draft ... (view more)

Intel, who has not benefited from expected boosts in sales after the Microsoft Windows Vista launch, has decided not to upgrade its PCs to Vista until the first service pack has been released. Once the service pack is released, Intel says they will ... still hold off on a full Vista roll-out. (Source: PC Advisor UK ) "I know of no organization that is going to adopt it before Service pack 1 is out -- that's in the second half of this year -- and that includes us. Starting in the second half of this year we'll do a modest deployment, and continue into next year. That's the large company approach ... (view more)

Users thinking about upgrading to Windows Vista may end up spending more than they thought. Besides having to pay for faster hardware, users should expect to pay for Vista upgrades to a lot of their favorite software. (Source: computerworld.com ) ... Instead of releasing free patches to update existing versions, some major vendors such as Adobe Systems Inc., Symantec Corp. and Intuit Inc. are adding Vista compatibility only to new releases or future products that are still being developed. Most of these new versions will add more features along with Vista compatibility. Vendors argue that if ... (view more)

Recently, Information week obtained a memo citing concerns over cost and compatibility issues by the federal U.S. Department Of Transportation (DOT) in January 2007, prohibiting thousands of federal workers from upgrading to Windows Vista, Internet ... Explorer 7 (IE7) and Office 2007. The DOT's Chief Information Officer (CIO) placed an "indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades since "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade." "Microsoft Vista, Office 2007, and ... (view more)

The United States Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has issued an advisory regarding remote tech support tools made by SupportSoft. The affected software uses ActiveX controls contain multiple buffer overflow vulnerabilities which could allow a ... remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system. The SupportSoft ActiveX controls are essentially small applications that can be run from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The affected software is often used by Internet service providers, PC makers and other companies to provide support functions such as remote ... (view more)

Consumers purchasing some high end computers online Dell are having to make those purchases with Windows XP, due to issues with some peripherals that are incompatibile with Windows Vista. There is no indication that the problem is widespread, but ... some customers wanting to build their own computers from Dell may be forced to choose hardware that isn't ready to run on Microsoft Windows Vista. A Dell spokesperson confirmed last Friday that two of its high-end gaming machines won't run the latest version of Microsoft's latest operating system (OS) at all. "There are still some compatibility ... (view more)

Last week Microsoft released their newest version of the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool. WGA is designed to make sure the Microsoft software on your computer is properly licensed (legitimate, not counterfeit) and supported by Microsoft or one ... of their trusted partners. Certainly, Microsoft would like to believe that their WGA software is reliable and doesn't make mistakes. When they released the original WGA software, however, it mistakenly identified potentially pirated software on several legitimate users machines. In a case of deja vu, the the newest version of WGA is also causing a ... (view more)

In an attempt to help businesses adapt to Windows Vista, Microsoft has released free tools that will help companies migrate to the new operating system, including software that will allow older versions of Windows to run alongside Vista in a virtual ... environment. Microsoft is hoping the tools will make moving to Vista less painless for business customers, particularly those who depend on older versions of Windows. During a meeting with financial analysts, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called analysts sales estimates for Vista "overly aggressive" and tried to downplay expectations for OS sales. ... (view more)

Oops! It looks like Microsoft has once again scrambled to update a recently discovered vulnerability in their Malware Protection Engine, used by the Windows Defender security programs. A security bulletin (MS07-010) has been issued by Microsoft (MS) ... for users of it's highly touted Windows Defender security program that affects 8 MS products. The security bulletin, rated "critical" details how a remote code execution vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine because of the way it parses Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Product and version numbers affected: Windows Live ... (view more)

Windows Vista has been released to the public for only a few weeks, and as expected, a number of credible sources are reporting that there are numerous issues with the new operating system. Vista and iPod The San Jose Mercury News as well as ... numerous other sources state that Apple is recommending to users that they wait to upgrade to Vista. The reason: the digital music software has some compatibility issues. Among the known issues, songs purchased from the iTunes music store may not play, contacts and calendar entries won't sync to customers' iPods, and customers could corrupt their iPod ... (view more)