Putting a price on Windows Vista

I’m hearing a small amount of chatter that Microsoft is planning to dramatically reduce the price of Windows Vista next year to $99. I’ve done my best to track this story down, and as far as I can tell it’s not, shall we say, reality-based. One Web site (which I will not name or link to, because they have zero credibility in my opinion) wrote a speculative piece arguing that the price of Windows Vista should by $99, because anything else would be too much. Over the weekend, a relatively new blog focusing on Windows Vista wrote a similar story, which appears to be just a rewrite of the original, minus any proper sourcing. ~~(I’m not linking to this source, either, until they establish some credibility.)~~ Update: Looks like I got this backward. Vista Knowledge posted a blind story over the weekend, citing “word coming from Redmond.” Other sites seem to have picked up the unsourced story, often without attributing it properly. The editor of Vista Knowledge has posted in the comments, and we’ve exchanged some e-mail. Based on that exchange I’m willing to credit the story (but I’m still skeptical).

The original story shows up on Google News and a few other people pick it up. They link to one another, and a few of them embellish the story with details that appear to come out of thin air. Pretty soon you have a half-dozen sites all repeating a rumor that’s based on nothing. Seinfeld would be proud.

And really, is this news? Currently, an OEM copy of Windows XP Home Edition costs around $90. An upgrade version costs $99. If the rumor-mongers are true, the news here is that Microsoft doesn’t plan to increase prices for the most popular version of its operating system.

This rumor also ignores the biggest question of all: How many versions of Windows Vista will Microsoft sell? Currently, you and I can choose from at least four: Home Edition, Professional, Media Center (OEM only), and Tablet PC (with tablet hardware only). A few months back, eWeek reported on a speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at an analysts’ meeting. According to this story, Microsoft plans to introduce a number of new versions for Windows and Office next year, including an enterprise version of Windows Vista. Will all those versions cost $99? I don’t think so.

If anyone has heard this “Vista for $99” rumor from a credible source, with a plausible story behind it, please leave a comment.

Can you transfer your Windows license to a new PC?

A commenter on another thread asks:

can i upgrade my mobo to a totally different socket type and still use my oem xp license or will some bloke in india tell me “please buy another copy sir”

The short answer is, “It depends.” If you purchased your OEM copy from a reseller and built your own PC, or if you bought a PC from a white box builder who is a member of Microsoft’s OEM System Builder program, then yes, you can upgrade your motherboard and reinstall your copy of Windows. You may have to activate the new installation over the phone, but you should be able to use your existing CD key.

However, if you purchased your copy of Windows preinstalled on a PC from a so-called “royalty OEM” – i.e., one of the largest 20 PC makers – then it is system-locked, and your CD and license key will only reinstall on the same computer (or one with an identical motherboard and BIOS).

More details here and here.

Yet another reason why I recommend smaller system makers and DIY projects over the big names.

This is why we need independent sources

The normally reliable eWeek did a dreadful job with a story last week that highlighted a report from Webroot Software. The story has the alarming title Webroot: Spyware Rampant in the Enterprise. And sure enough, in the second sentence reporter Paul F. Roberts writes:

Webroot Software Inc.’s State of Spyware Report for the second quarter of 2005, claims that 80 percent of enterprise computers are infected with some kind of adware or spyware.

Meanwhile, in the story’s 15th graf, we read:

A new enterprise version of Spy Sweeper, which is being released Monday, will be able to detect and remove sophisticated spyware that changes the configuration of Windows systems and interacts with the operating system at a low level, said Brian Kellner, vice president of enterprise products at Webroot.

eWeek didn’t interview a single independent source for this story. It was essentially a press release for Webroot.

I’ve asked Webroot’s PR department to send me a copy of the report and will comment more after I see it. You can get one from their Web site, but you have to provide a lot of personal information, including company name and the number of computers in your organization. Why not make this important study freely available for download? Hmmm. It’s almost as though they’re building a mailing list they can use for sales calls.

Update: Webroot hasn’t gotten back to me yet, but Paul Roberts of eWeek was kind enough to send me a copy of the report. I flipped to the Enterprise SpyAudit section to break down that frightening 80% number. And sure enough, on page 36 is this gem: “…cookies tend to make up the largest number of infections per enterprise machine.” Cookies! As I’ve written before, cookies are not spyware. In my opinion, Webroot is totally wrong to claim, that a computer containing one or more tracking cookies is “infected with spyware.” Ironically, Webroot even acknowledges this fact in a sentence buried at the end of the section (page 40): “Webroot will continue to monitor cookies until a definitive decision on whether cookies constitute spyware is determined.”

Meanwhile, there actually are some frightening statistics in that report, including the observation that 7 percent of the 60,000 enterprise PCs in their sample were infected with malicious spyware, which they define as “system monitors and Trojans.” If that data point is accurate (a point I’m not willing to take at face value, given the report’s willingness to exaggerate in other areas), it’s cause for great alarm. Even one such program is too high for comfort on any corporate network.

Down to New Orleans

I just read this editorial from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, reprinted in Editor and Publisher.

It makes me furious. The spectacularly incompetent director of FEMA, Michael Brown, should be fired. So should whoever hired him. And whoever hired whoever hired him. And so on up the line.

Update: I’m reading a lot of comments (one on this site, and on other sites as well) from people who think that the state and local authorities deserve the lion’s share of the blame. Sorry, I don’t buy that at all. The Department of Homeland Security should have owned this crisis from Day 1, and they know it. In fact, they outsourced the management of the crisis to a private firm last year. Here’s the press release:

IEM Team to Develop Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana
June 3, 2004

IEM, Inc., the Baton Rouge-based emergency management and homeland security consultant, will lead the development of a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and the City of New Orleans under a more than half a million dollar contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

In making the announcement today on behalf of teaming partners Dewberry, URS Corporation and James Lee Witt Associates*, IEM Director of Homeland Security Wayne Thomas explained that the development of a base catastrophic hurricane disaster plan has urgency due to the recent start of the annual hurricane season which runs through November. National weather experts are predicting an above normal Atlantic hurricane season with six to eight hurricanes, of which three could be categorized as major.

The IEM team will complete a functional exercise on a catastrophic hurricane strike in Southeast Louisiana and use results to develop a response and recovery plan. A catastrophic event is one that can overwhelm State, local and private capabilities so quickly that communities could be devastated without Federal assistance and multi-agency planning and preparedness. [Emphasis added]

Thomas said that the greater New Orleans area is one of the nation’s most vulnerable locations for hurricane landfall.

The Governor of Louisiana requested Federal help on Thursday, August 26. The official proclamation of emergency by the state was issued on Friday. The President responded to her request by declaring a state of emergency on Saturday:

The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.

The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe…

Ordinary citizens in two-wheel drive vehicles were able to get into town to help people. All the major networks had people on the site from Day 1. So why wasn’t FEMA there?

Because the people running the agency are completely unqualified, and the agency has been gutted.

Redesign

As you can see, I’ve redesigned the site. Astute observers will also notice that I’ve switched to WordPress from Movable Type. More on that later. Right now I’m just making sure that all old posts redirect properly and that the RSS feed is pointing to the right place.

Give to the Red Cross and I’ll send you a book

There will be plenty of time to talk about computers later. Right now this country is in a crisis that is getting worse daily. If I worked for a company that were being managed as poorly as the relief effort in New Orleans, I’d quit in disgust. Sadly, we can’t quit, and we can only hope that someone competent appears on the scene. Soon.

Meanwhile, I’m donating the check that Google just sent me to the American Red Cross, along with an amount equal to the check I’ll get in a few weeks for this month’s ad revenue. That’s a total of $350. If you’ve been waiting to make a donation, I hope you’ll give as well.

If you want a reason to give more, I have an offer for the first 30 people who would like one of my books. Make a donation to the Red Cross or any legitimate charity that is working in New Orleans. Give as much as you can afford. Then send me an e-mail (ed-blog AT bott DOT com) with the details, including your address, and I’ll send you one of my books, signed. Tell me which one you want. I’ve got lots of copies of the standard edition of Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP and Ed Bott’s Your New PC. I’ll pick up the postage and handling. All you have to do is donate to the relief efforts.

More Bloglines issues

According to an announcement on the Bloglines News page, one of their crawler machines crashed yesterday, causing an outage that lasted until very late in the day. They say everything should be fixed by now.

But what’s really curious is that two announcements have been scrubbed from the News page. One was the August 9 notice that read, in full:

Bloglines Update

Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue — we’ve simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn’t put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.

That notice appeared after I criticized Bloglines in a series of posts and exchanged some e-mail messages and comment threads with a Bloglines spokesperson. It was there yesterday, when I pointed out that Russell Beattie had noticed problems at Bloglines as well.

In yesterday’s post, I asked Bloglines to post an update on the status of the server move. And today the August 9 announcement is gone. Down the memory hole.

I have an e-mail in to another contact at Ask Jeeves, the new parent company of Bloglines, requesting an explanation. I’ll pass along their response.

Update: The Ask Jeeves flack who got back to me says “the announcement was removed accidentily and we are still in the process of the move.”

What? This so-called server relocation has now taken a full month, with no end in site. This is bullshit. Here’s my follow-up e-mail to the Bloglines spokesperson:

Thanks for the update. I’ve asked this question several times and can’t understand why no one has answered it yet. Maybe you can help.

When is the server move scheduled to be completed? I have honestly never heard of a move of this sort that takes more than a week, much less drag on for a month.

Your very large and very loyal customer base has a right to ask that question, don’t you think?

I look forward to your reply.

But I certainly won’t be holding my breath. My most recent post has been up on my site for more than five hours, but my 359 subscribers who use Bloglines still haven’t seen it. That’s pitiful. Mark Fletcher, maybe you need to make a few phone calls and find out what your people are actually doing. They seem to have taken the summer off.

I’m not the only one who is noticing problems at Bloglines

Russ Beattie, who gets more traffic in an hour than I get in a week, says he’s about ready to give up on Bloglines:

Lots of Bloglines folk have pinged me about the fact that my site isn’t updating. Not much I can do. I’ve emailed them several times to fix their “jsession” bug (where they include Java Server Sessions as part of the URL) or to just delete every feed of mine except for the index.rss main feed. But that doesn’t seem to happen. I’ve done redirects on old feed URLs so it should work. I think Bloglines is starting to get crufty – there’s lots and lots of things that aren’t working, and the site is starting to bog down like crazy. I was really hoping that the move to Ask Jeeves would accelerate updates and improvements, not stall them.

As part of a promised commitment to be more transparent in providing information to their large customer base, Bloglines posted exactly one lame update back on August 9. “Everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete,” that update said.

Apparently the Bloglines staff is making the change to their hosting service using sneakernet. That would explain why they keep ignoring my e-mail messages.

Freeze Dry for Windows Vista

Looks like Windows Vista will have a cool new feature with a cool name. The word comes from ZDNet Australia:

Windows Vista will include a new technology known as Freeze Dry designed to maintain application states and unsaved documents even when patches are automatically applied and PCs are rebooted.

Speaking at the Australian Tech Ed conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland this week, senior product manager Amy Stephan offered a preview of the Freeze Dry technology.

Many IT managers plan to automatically install patches and updates on machines during periods when they are inactive, such as overnight or on weekends. However, as some patches require machines to reboot, users who leave documents open and unsaved run the risk of losing that data if the machine is automatically updated.

Freeze Dry eliminates that problem by automatically saving application state and documents and then restoring them once the system restarts, Stephan said.

This is one of the biggest complaints people have about Automatic Updates as implemented in Windows XP. If you forget to save a file and leave it open overnight when your machine gets an update, you might find that file gone in the morning. It’ll be interesting to see how well this works.

Tip of the day: Get to know your power button

It used to be so simple: A power button was an on/off switch, period. But on modern personal computers, things are more complicated.

Most PCs built in the 21st Century use a combination of motherboards and power switches designed to cooperate with the operating system. Typically, pressing the power button puts the PC into one of several standby modes (or wakes it up from this “sleep” state). If Windows is running, pressing the power button might activate the Windows Shut Down function.

What happens if your computer is misbehaving and you want to shut off the power and restart? This one stumps many people, who press the power button repeatedly and conclude that it’s broken when it doesn’t seem to work. The secret? Press the power button and hold it down for three to five seconds. This shortcut overrides the normal action of the power button and turns the power off. (If this doesn’t work, you may have a loose wire in the connection from the power switch to the motherboard and power supply.)

In tomorrow’s tip, I’ll explain how to configure the operation of the power button (and a few other, related settings) in Windows.