Windows Phone 8, or 'Apollo,' Debuts Next Month at San Francisco Conference

Microsoft will finally lay out the details on the next version of its smartphone OS, which could be a precursor to Windows 8.

June is turning into Developer's Month. Along with Microsoft's TechEd, there's Apple's WWDC, Google I/O, and a two-day Windows Phone developer conference in San Francisco that will be the coming out party for Windows Phone 8, otherwise known as "Apollo."

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Little has been disclosed on Apollo, but thanks to leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what Microsoft has in store. Last February, a leak gave some insight into what Microsoft was planning.

Most significant is that Windows Phone 8 will share components with Windows 8, allowing developers to reuse most of their code when porting an app from desktop to phone. It's believed the kernel, networking stacks, security, and multimedia support will all have heavy overlap between desktop, tablet and phone.

Apollo will also support Near Field Communication (NFC) radios for contactless payments, full Skydrive integration and full integration with Skype and support for multicore processors.

Microsoft has said, and reiterated in an April 5 blog post, that current Windows Phone applications and games will run on the next major version of Windows Phone. How much recoding you'll have to do to accomplish this will probably be discussed at the San Francisco show.

Another question that hopefully will be answered next month is what will change under the hood. Other Microsoft watchers with better connections than me have said they believe Microsoft will change the kernel from Windows CE to Windows 8 RT.

The potential is tremendous. If Microsoft does pull this off, you will have portability between desktop PCs, tablets and phones with relatively minor modification.

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Speed Up Windows XP With System Mechanic 10.8

System Mechanic 10.8 Put Through The Test

We've all seen those annoying television commercials that promise to speed up a slow computer, but do such solutions really work? The CRN Test Center put Iolo's System Mechanic 10.8 through its paces and was impressed with the results.

Our test subject was an old Pentium III-era PC running Windows XP so slowly that the machine was completely unusable. Just opening the Start menu easily took 20 seconds, opening an app required about a minute, and we could fix a steak-and-egg breakfast in the time it took to reboot this dinosaur.

But it was perfect for our purposes. We installed System Mechanic 10.8 and, after running a scan, the tool reported that the overall system status was poor and health and security were at alarming levels.

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Performance Problems
After many years of use (and neglect), Windows machines develop all sorts of issues that can sap performance and open the door to more problems. Listed first are the security flaws, which include absence of a firewall, dangerous start-up items and other security vulnerabilities.

System Mechanic also identified hundreds of registry problems, which happen normally over the course of time but nevertheless can slow down a system and make it prone to crashes. The tool also found more than 1 GB of junk. While this might not seem like much by today's standards, it represented more than 1 percent of this system's total hard drive capacity of 80 GB.

Results Of First Pass
System Mechanic was able to clean out all the clutter and remove the unwanted start-up items. Of the 611 registry errors found in the first scan, 591 were repaired, leaving 20 unfixed. Performance results after the first pass were moderate. After restarting, system responsiveness was slightly faster but still far too slow.

When we relaunched the tool, it reported that while our system's health was now firmly in the green, its security was still at warning levels and our system status had only been upgraded from poor to fair. So we ran another scan.

Third Time's The Charm
During a second pass at diagnosing the system, System Mechanic found 44 new registry errors in addition to the 20 problems left unrepaired from the first scan for a total of 64. It also found a new security vulnerability. But during the second repair pass, the tool fixed only 62 of the registry errors and did not repair the security problem.

A third pass found those issues, a third registry problem, and reported that available memory was running low. System Mechanic offered us the option of optimizing memory to fix the problem, which we did.

Getting Rid of CRUDD
We call them something else, but In Iolo's parlance, "commonly redundant or unnecessary decelerators and destabilizers" are known as CRUDD. Whatever they've called, System Mechanic gets rid of them with its CRUDD remover. On our system there were four: an AOL Toolbar, an Ask Toolbar, a Google Toolbar for IE and a Yahoo Toolbar.

The screen here identifies each along with a judgment as to its favorability and presents options to keep, kill or decide later. We killed them all.

Good Enough
During the last repair pass, System Mechanic reported it had done some repairs on the system drive, realigning more than 30,000 files and defragmenting another 6,518. This led on the next pass to even more misalignments and fragmentations, a problem so pervasive that it affected more than the total size of the 80-GB volume. System Mechanic was able to repair all the problems but was never able to achieve more than a "fair" system status. However, the test system was transformed from "a hammer and chisel would be faster" to one that performs well enough to be used as a jukebox, backup PC for Internet access or for doing school papers.

With more than half of all Windows computers still using Windows XP, there are millions of systems out there in need of similar repairs. For such systems, the CRN Test Center recommends System Mechanic, which provides 50 tools in all, including those for acceleration, repair, cleanup and security, for $40 list. System Mechanic 10.8, released in April, is compatible with the current Windows 8 beta. A free version of System Mechanic 10.8 includes.

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Aged Windows XP costs 5x more to manage than Windows 7

As XP's life wanes, Microsoft talks dollars to get businesses to ditch 11-year-old OS

Computerworld - Microsoft yesterday added ammunition to its increasingly aggressive battle to get users off the nearly-11-year-old Windows XP by citing a company-sponsored report that claims annual support costs for the older OS are more than five times that of Windows 7.

Microsoft has been banging the Windows XP upgrade drum for years, but stepped up the campaign in 2012, including starting a "two-year countdown" to the demise of security support. Last month, Microsoft was blunt, saying "If your organization has not started the migration to a modern PC, you are late."

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Windows XP exits all support, including monthly security patches, in April 2014.

In a blog post Thursday, Erwin Visser, a senior director for Windows, used data collected by IDC to make Microsoft's upgrade case.

"The bottom line...[is that] businesses that migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 will see significant return on investment," said Visser.

Microsoft sponsored the survey (download PDF) conducted by IDC, which in turn interviewed nine enterprises or large organizations to drill into the support costs of XP and Windows 7.

According to IDC, an amazing 42% of the Windows "commercial" installed base, or anything other than consumers' home machines, was Window XP, making Microsoft's job of moving everyone off the old OS by its April 2014 retirement nearly impossible.

In fact, IDC projected that if current trends continue, 11% of the enterprise and educational Windows installed base will still be running XP when Microsoft stops patch delivery in 23 months.

And those XP machines costs organizations considerably more to support than comparable PCs running Windows 7.

One reason for the increased costs for supporting Windows XP is that it's typically running on older hardware that, independent of the OS, is more expensive to simply keep running.

The magic milestone is after the three-year mark, when "costs begin to accelerate" because of additional IT and help desk time, and increased user downtime due to more security woes and time spent rebooting, said IDC.

IT labor costs jump 25% during year four of a PC's lifespan, and another 29% in year five, IDC noted, while user productivity costs climb 23% in year four and jump 40% during year five. Total year five costs are a whopping 73% higher than support costs of a two-year-old client.

However, the operating system also plays a major role in the cost differences, said IDC, with XP more expensive to support in every category the research company surveyed.

Organizations reported that they spent 82% less time managing patches on Windows 7 systems than they did on Windows XP, 90% less time mitigating malware, and 84% less help desk time.

Benefits were also striking for Windows 7 users' productivity compared to XP. Windows 7 users wasted 94% less time rebooting their computers and lost 90% less time due to malware attacks.

On the IT side, the savings of Windows 7 mount dramatically, IDC said.

"IT activities account for 11.3 hours of time spent per PC per year when using Windows XP," the research group said. "Shops that have moved to Windows 7...spend 2.3 hours per PC per year on maintaining those systems."

IDC did the math, and concluded that for every 230 PCs running Windows 7 rather than XP, an organization could shift one full-time IT person to other work. Or conceivably do without him or her entirely.

The Microsoft-commissioned report also painted a rosy return-on-investment (ROI) picture for companies who do ditch XP for Windows 7. By IDC's calculations, the acquisition of a new PC -- one where Windows 7 is retained as the OS rather than being downgraded to XP -- pays for itself in one year and generates almost $1,000 more in savings from reduced IT costs and worker downtime over a three-year span.

"The migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 yields a 137% return on investment over a three-year period," claimed IDC.

Windows XP have a shortening upgrade window -- no pun intended -- and not only because of the April 2014 end to all support. Microsoft is expected to launch Windows 8 this fall, a time when most new PCs will then also be pre-loaded with the OS by computer makers, or OEMs.

That will not immediately strike Windows 7 from the rolls, but it does start a couple of clocks ticking: OEMs can continue to sell Windows 7-powered PCs as long as two years after Windows 8's launch, but the older operating system will disappear from most retail outlets one year earlier, or in the fall of 2013.

Organizations that have Software Assurance (SA) agreements -- the Microsoft-sold software insurance policy that lets firms upgrade to every new version of a specific product released during the life of the deal -- can downgrade any Windows 8 PC to Windows 7. But SA is almost exclusively an enterprise program.

Smaller firms that buy Windows licenses at retail, likely in the form of a new PC, can also downgrade from Windows 8 to 7, but only if the new system is pre-installed with Windows 8 Pro, the higher-end edition. They will also need media -- a DVD or flash drive -- containing Windows 7 Professional to complete the downgrade. If smaller shops wait too long, they may find it difficult to locate a seller for the latter after late 2013.

Likewise, while Windows XP Professional can be upgraded to Windows 7 Professional, companies sans SA also require a copy of the newer OS. The same end-of-retail caveat for Windows 7 applies to them as well.

Microsoft has been dissing Windows XP for some time, but the ROI report was its first argument that stressed dollars and cents.

In June 2011, a Microsoft manager said it was "time to move on" from Windows XP; earlier that year an executive on the Internet Explorer team belittled XP as "lowest common denominator" when he explained why the OS wouldn't run the then-new IE9.

The company has not yet turned on Windows XP like it has on the 11-year-old Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). For more than two and a half years, Microsoft has urged users to give up IE6, going so far in March 2011 to launch a deathwatch website that tracks IE6's shrinking share.

It wouldn't be a surprise if Microsoft followed suit with Windows XP once the OS drops to a more manageable share mark: According to Web metrics company Net Applications, XP accounted for 46.1% of all operating systems used to go online in April.

If XP continues to shed share at its last-12-months' pace, it will still own a 17.6% share in April 2014, when it drops off support.

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