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Today is the day I have been waiting for for a few months now as Microsoft has released windows XP SP3.

You can get it now from Windows Update by clicking to this Microsoft Download Link

The latest service pack is really mostly a bunch of bug fixes all rolled up into one package but I have found on all of the PCs that I have installed it on that it seems to have sped them up, not a lot perhaps but still the operating system is a little faster. The other great thing about the new Windows XP Service Pack 3 is that now we can do installs of Windows XP a lot faster. The last few installs that I have done have taken about three hours because even with an install of Windows XP with Service pack 2 there are still about 92 updates as well as that huge Internet Explorer 7 change.

so I can rejoice to this Service Pack upgrade for Windows XP today but this will probably be that last one as Microsoft will now start pushing hard to get rid of Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista.

By the way There is still some life left for support of Windows XP support will go on for a few years yet. Mainstream regular support will go until April 14, 2009, after that date Windows XP will begin its “Extended Support” period that will last for 5 years until April 8, 2014.

OK, what is with this link? I have had two messages in the last couple hours from people who apparently send me a link to

www.blockcheckercont.com

The site seems to be some kind of spam and I don’t trust the spyware that it may give us on our computers.

update: I have confirmed that neither of the people that have sent me this message actually sent it. It seems to be truly spam autogenerated from peoples machines

I just switched my main work computer to the Windows XP SP3 beta as it seems stable to me and have still run into the problem of the Address toolbar not working still.

One of the issues that Microsoft has is that part of the anti trust trials that they have gone thorough stated that this address bar restricts users to Internet Explorer, I use Firefox as my default eweb browser and clearly this is not true, anyway I digress let’s fix it instead!

Many people may not use the address toolbar in Windows XP but I certainly do. What this toolbar does is allow you to type in a command or a web address and it will launch your default web browser with that page. The Windows address bar sits in your taskbar so it is always there and easy to get to.

I was wondering if this functionality could be put back into Windows XP SP3 so I searched around and found a shell replacement by a company called Muvenum and is an address toolbar replacement.

There are a few notes about how this toolbar works:

• The dropdown button currently doesn’t show anything when clicked (empty).

• The combobox supports autocompletion using IE History like the normal address bar.

• The url opens in your default browser. (*seems like they could change it to do this and beat the “legal restrictions”, but as the one above says, it currently only pulls from the IE History.  I’ll look into pulling from FireFox if enough people ask for it.)

• If you type a single word it appends “http://” to the beginning.

• If you type multiple words with a space, it opens google search with the words as the search query.

This toolbar seems to do exactly what I had before and works perfectly. If you are doing your own beta testing on Service Pack 3 of Windows XP then it definitly does not hurt to try this toolbar addon to Windows

Well I downloaded the release candidate for Windows XP Service Pack 3 and installed it on both a VM and a secondary XP Pro machine and it seems to have passed the boot up test. I will be testing more today but so far the only differences between the SP3 RC and my old Windows XP SP2 is the computer performance, which is much faster then it was before and the loss of my address bar in the Windows Taskbar.

I  have been looking at the documentation that Microsoft has on the technet site and there is very little about what will bse included in the Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. It looks like we get a rollup of all the service packs, patches and security updates but there is no auto update to Internet Explorer 7. The Release Candidate for XP SP3 includes the updates to Internet Explorer 6 as well as anything for Internet Explorer 7.

Microsoft is very clear that there are almost no new enhancements in SP3. After the raft of changes a few years ago with Service Pack 2 this is a bit of a disappointment but I am sure that Microsoft would much rather have us all move to Vista then to continue with Windows XP

I had not heard of Casalemedia before today but now I have a reason to write about it. I have been a long time believer that if someone could target me with ads on the internet that were of interest to me I would be much more intereted in the ads themselves. Of course I am not alone in this thinking as advertisers feel the same way.

A few days ago I was at a site that sells contact lenses looking to buy contacts online. Although I didn’t buy any contacts that day I found it strange that that very same company (which will remian nameless for now) had ads all over an about.com site about home theaters.

Strange I said in talking to a coworker. I moused over the ad and checked in my status bar and the ad was served by Casalemedia. I did a quick search for Casalemedia tracking habits and it seems that they place a tracking cookie on your machine and serve you ads based on the sites that you go to.

This of course is not new, what is new is that they seemed to have been looking at the algorithym and getting it closer to being right. Let’s say that I go to 200 pages a day, what should they serve ads for? What am I just merely searching though and what is really of interst to me?

I do not like the idea of spyware and I know that I should hate tracking cookies but now I am much more intrigues. How will casalemedia keep up a good database if I delete the cookie? Do they know me by IP, I have a work IP from this laptop as well as a home IP. This may look like very invasive technology but I am sure it will be refined over the next few years to the point where the sites that I go to will look significantly different than the sites that you go to. Will someone eventually just give you a toolbar ala Alexa that will just suggest you sites all the time that you would like to visit based on your surfing habits.

By the way Casalemedia is not the only provider of tracking cookies. Take a search around and you will see that there are many companies that do the exact same thing if you would like another resource to find out about how to stop the tracking there are resources at Spyware Warrior.

I just ran across a story on MSNBC that apparently Microsoft is allowing sales of Windows XP to continue into the missle of next year.

Microsoft to extend Windows XP sales - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

To some people this may be a sign that Windows Vista has failed as an operating system and I guess to that question time can only tell. The real reason though that Windows XP sales are being extended is because of corporate buy in. Most large customers, who are of course the bread and butter of Windows sales, need to have Windows Vista move into the “evergreen” or PC replacement strategy and this takes time. One way that some companies will do an operating upgrade is to accelearate the deployment of new PCs and in this case becasue of the huge requirements of Windows Vista this will be difficult.

One of the real problems besides the high resource needs of Windows Vista is the lack of any real operating system needs that are being bundled into the Vista operating system. One of the big drivers for businesses to go from Windows NT and Windows 2000 Pro was the greater security in Windows XP SP2. Now that these security holes and deficiencies have been caught there is not really much of a need to upgrade.

I am sure that as the year goes on next year and as a much need service pack for Windows Vista is released that we will in fact see a real uptake in Windows Vista deployments. Coming in 2009 we should also see some kind of work done on the often stopped prouction on Windows Longhorn as it was originally envisioned and these additions will probably make a Windows Vista SP2 a very solid product that will become as popular as Windows XP has become.

I know that his is kind of old news but I was just doing a quick check to see when there will be a new service pack for Windows XP. Well it is a while yet, Microsoft says that there will be an SP3 or Windows XP in the first half of 2008.

Windows Service Pack Road Map

Why would I care about a new service pack 3 for Windows XP? Well it used to be that there was just a rollup of bug fixes in the service packs. Now though we have really gotten used to operating system enhancements to Windows whenever there is a service pack and it would really be nice to see some of the cool new Windows Vista infrastructure changes that some of us non-vista users would like to have in the old OS

Well after using Windows Vista for a few days I dumped it and moved my PC back to Windows XP. As we all know now it is useless to run Windows Vista unless you have 2 Gigs of ram and I only have 1 Gig of ram on my newer main machine.

As part of my Windows reload I started using some new startegies that I have not used in the past that I will have to document and post but in the end I have demoted my trusty old Athlon XP 2000+ in favor of our cheaper Acer Aspire T160 with a 64bit 3500+ processor with 1 Gig of ram and all of the apps are slowly coming online, Ok I lie, all of my apps were on the machine quickly it is the kids games that we are reloading as needed.

And no I am not running 64bit Windows XP, just the old pedetrian 32bit with service pack 2.

So Vista may be dead to me now but I am still jealous and once I am up to 4 gigs of ram I will be moving back to it.

- Windows XP fanboy

Well after being caught up in the Windows Vista hype last weekend I finally installed Windows Vista on Thursday. I was very excited except for me Vista is not ready for prime time. I have two computers at home, one computer - my main computer is a XP 2000+ with 512 megs ram and a 64 meg video card, our secondary computer is a new Acer XP3500+ 64 biy with internal video and 512 megs of ram. This secondary computer was the one that I decided to put Windows Vista on.

The install went smoothly enough and took about an hour I guess, I am not running the Aero interface as I expected as the internal video is not good enough and because of this and my small amount of ram my Vista index is only a 2.0 out of 6. But at least I now have Vista running in my house. One more problem that I have is that my 1 gig USB thumb drive is apparently not supported for use as a ready boost device according to Vista, makes ma a little sad as I thought that this would help my performance quite a bit.

I am really excited to have Vista running but why then did I say that it is not ready for primetime for me? Well the OS is great and different which does not bother me but my computers just are not up to snuff to be running this. I* expect that 2 gigs of ram is needed to really run Vista well and I am sure that will be a standard for new computers in 6 months time anyway. I may upgrade both machines in the next few weeks so that I can take advantage of Vista and all of the new features that even I do not know much about yet.

No matter where you are sitting on the whole “should I upgrade” debate we all have to know as IT guys that there is no choice but to move soon to the new Microsoft OS lest we become the future trolls in newsgroups talking about how we pimped out Windows 95 or XP or some other acncient OS that no one is using anymore.

Well today is the day. Finally we will have a new operating system from Redmond to play with. I have still not installed Vista but am really excited to be doing that sometime this week on one of the home machines.

The hype of Vista really caught me on the weekend. i noticed that just about every flyer from an electronics store was spouting the excitment that is Windows Vista (as well as Office 2007) and although I did not stand in line for my first copy last night I am this morning reliving the first lineup that I did and that was for Windows 95.

when I did lineup for windows 95 back over 10 years ago I was there at 11:30 and as soon as the doors of the store opened I bought my copy of Windows 95 and spent the next 2 hours installing the newest Windows on a 486 sx33 Epson computer with 8 megs of ram. Far cry from now when I will be using a AMD 3500+ with a gig of ram to install Windows Vista.

I guess after this next couple of weeks of OS excitement we will start talking about hte Windows Vista Service Pack 1 release. Probably a few months away though still.