12,000 private testers received Vista SP1. Although there is much stir in the blogosphere and on the news sites about it, I must admit it isn’t really that exciting since there are no revolutionary new features. More interesting is an interview at Channel9 with Mike Nash, corporate vice president in charge of Windows client operating systems product management. His interviewer, who is also a Microsoft employee, was cheeky enough to ask if Vista is a failure.

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I just read in the German print magazine IT Administrator (08/2007, p. 12-13) that Vista heats-up hard disks more than XP does. Hard disks in idle mode have a five to seven degree Celsius higher temperature and hard disks in operation are seven to nine degrees warmer than under XP. The hard disk’s temperature can get ten degrees higher than the vendors’ specifications allow. This could cause hard disk failures eight times more frequent than with XP.

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Last month, I wrote an article where I doubted that Vista loses users. Today, I read on Cnet that Vista retail sales were down 59.7% compared with Windows XP six month after its launch. In my post, I only discussed the corporate deployment of Vista. However, such a strong decrease in retail sales indicates that Vista isn’t doing well at the moment.

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It is the number one topic for the last two days in the tech blogosphere. Microsoft changed some files on Windows XP and Vista machines via Windows Update without asking for permission. Nate Clinton, product manager Windows Update, meanwhile tried to clarify this incident in the Microsoft Update Product Team Blog. In my view, his explanation is not plausible.

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These days, I often read that Vista skeptics are gaining the upper hand. For example this PC World article cites a Patchlink survey according to which 87 percent of businesses would stay with their existing operating system. And Chris Pirillo even believes that “Windows Vista loses users” to the arch-enemy Mac OS.

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Many new IT news sites and blogs reacted to this article on KezNews which claims that it is possible to get a valid Vista product key using a brute-force-attack. Although it is quite obvious, that it is almost mathematically impossible to get a valid key this way much sooner than the next big bang, many seem to be excited about cracking Microsoft’s WGA (I call it Windows Genuine Activation mess).

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Some days ago, I reported that we were having problems activating KMS on a Windows Server 2003. It turned out that we accidently exceeded the number of possible KMS installations. You can only activate 6 KMS hosts with one KMS key, each with up to 9 reactivations. I was quite surprised to hear that we have already 6 KMS hosts installed. Actually, I thought my test system is the first one. So how did we get 6 KMS installations?

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Today, I read two [1] [2] interesting and alarming articles from Ed Bott where he describes several cases of Vista users having serious problems with Windows validation.

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Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch interviewed David Lazar, director of Microsoft’s Genuine Windows initiative, about “Vista’s validation approach“. Did you know that Vista has to phone home every 180 days to reassure that you really, really paid your debts to Microsoft? This is what I call paranoia.

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Yesterday, I described how to start an application at an elevated level, i.e. with Administrator privileges under Vista. Unfortunately, this won’t prevent UAC (User Account Control) prompts from getting on your nerves. Every time a user or an Administrator runs an application requiring Administrator rights, UAC will prompt you for confirmation to proceed. Microsoft calls this “Secure Desktop Prompting“. These UAC prompts only distract you from your current task and bring no extra security. Therefore, I recommend disabling this feature.

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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know my favorite worst Vista feature: UAC. Now, I found my second worst feature, and I feel the urge to tell the world about it.

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SearchWinIT has a good article summarizing arguments for and against Vista migration. What I like is that Bernie Klinder, the author, doesn’t mention Aero and similar things, as an advantage. He focuses mostly on technical arguments; most of them are relevant for system administrators.

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I just stumbled upon Microsoft’s technical guidance for Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0. Oh my! Taking the length of the documents into account, this seems to be more complicated than deploying Vista.

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Today, I wanted to update Vista RC1 to RC2. When I booted up, Vista informed me that I have to activate it before I can logon. Unfortunately, I used a private IP. So Vista Activation wasn’t able to phone home. No problem you say? Just enter a public IP and go ahead. But how can you do that without logging on?

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Aseem Badshah calls on testers to share their experiences about the reliability of Windows Vista RC1. On the “Windows Vista Scenario Voting” site you can rate how satisfied you were in various scenarios. Unfortunately, one doesn’t see the results of other voters. The question is: Is it justified to call Vista RC1 a release candidate?

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