The E-List News - A Windows Support E-Letter

Welcome to The E-List News. As you may have read in my transition issue, I am changing the format (and name) of The E-List. The content will have the same flavor as before — just the packaging and the delivery method are changing. Its title is now The E-List News. But, as you can see below, it isn’t just another web page reproducing news feeds of the same articles you’ve read everywhere else on the web. As you’ve probably learned by now, I just have to do things a little bit differently, and I’ll continue that tradition with The E-List News.

There are three ways for you to access The E-List News. All are free. Two involve subscriptions, and one does not:

What about the old issues of The E-List? They’re still here as an archive. You can read individual issues, or use the Site Search page to find particular content that interests you. Veteran readers will recall that I had planned a digest of all the old issues, reorganized according to types of content and, in fact, I spent much of January getting about one-third done with that. It was too big a task for the available time, so I’ve simply put the original 26 issues back in place, in their original form.

AumHa VSOPs

(6/4/02)

In the of the first month or so, a few AumHa Forum participants demonstrated their excellence by the number and quality of the answers they provided to others. I have recognized this quality of voluntary service with the first periodic AumHa VSOP Awards.

You all probably know that VSOP means “the good stuff.” It’s a sign of class, maturation, and superior quality. At least, it is in cognac, where it is the abbreviation for Very Special Old Pale.

On our forums, VSOP also means “the good stuff.” Around here, the abbreviation stands for Valued Support Online Professionals. I make these awards in recognition of those who, freely giving their time, demonstrate technical expertise, spirit of community, and willingness to help others by providing a high level of reliable, accurate answers to technical questions and making other significant contribution to this site. It short, it is a measurement of technical skill and generosity of contribution.

The first AumHa VSOP Award recipient — and also the only one who has not been previously honored by the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award — is Koldbear. The other four recipients have long-established service records: I speak of Tom Porterfield, Alex Nichol, Harry O, and Andreas Kaestner. In addition to their many other individual contributions to the Windows, all have been a source of numerous recommendations, assistance, feedback, and other types of support for this site for years, as well as in the forums for the last two months.

SNIPPETS OF SITE NEWS

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUMS

(6/4/02)

It must seem like I just can’t make up my mind! In the April 1 issue, I wrote:

...a couple of correspondents have asked me if I would consider starting support forums or newsgroups here on the Windows Support Center. My thought is that there is no reason for this, since Microsoft already provides such excellent, well-visited newsgroups that give phenomenal, responsive answers. Nonetheless, since people have been trying to use the Guest Book for this purpose (until I put up a note about it and cut out some of those posts), I toss the issue out to regular readers. Feel free to tell me your thoughts on this.

Three days later, I had a whole new set of AumHa Support Forums in place. Man, what a fickle cuss I must be!

I wasn’t really being fickle, though. The real story is that I was asked to help develop and deploy a set of forums based on the popular commercial product vBulletin. Those particular forums are another story, which I’ll tell when they’re up and running... but my main point at the moment is that I wanted to get some experience in deploying this type of PHP-based forum software before I tackled that project. Almost the same day, the new Version 2 of the open source forum software phpBB was released, and I decided to be one of the first to stand in line for a copy. I installed it that night. I figured, in the worst case, I’d at least get to play around with it... in the best case, maybe it would be useful to people who visit the site.

I’ve occasionally been known for understatement. This was one of those times. In a modest way, the forums have been a great success already. People come ask questions. People come answer questions. People drop by to visit. In the first two months, about 1,100 posts have been made. We’ve also had fun.

I get a lot of email from site visitors asking support questions. Time does not permit me to answer most of these. Besides, I think a public forum is a much better place both to guarantee a wider range of insightful answers, and to share the information with more people. I encourage, therefore, that you bring your questions to these forums instead of emailing me. Just click FORUMS in the navigation bar at the top of this page. We’ll keep a pot of coffee going for you!

WHITHER GOEST WINDOWS 95?

(6/4/02)

On the microsoft.public.win95.general.discussion newsgroup this week, a poster asked for opinions “about the future of Windows 95.” Having answered him, I thought I would share my opinions with all of you.

Windows 95 is a discontinued product, which, however, remains in use by a large number of people. How many? I dunno. But only about 2% of the hits on my web site are from Win95 computers, and the site somewhat caters to Win95 users [and, by the way, will continue to do so!].

Microsoft has discontinued all active support for Win95, but will continue passive support (Knowledge Base, downloads, etc.). Besides this, the product’s future is in the hands of its current continuing user base.

Internet Explorer 6 does not install on Win95, and surely no future version of IE will do so. The current version of the MS Knowledge Base was written for IE 5.5 or later, though it usually works with IE 5.0. We can anticipate a time when the MS Knowledge Base will not be accessible by any browser that will install and run on Win95.

Win95 does not have an upgrade-install path to Windows XP, although it can be used as a “qualifying product” to do a clean install of Win XP. (It is believed that this was a bug that MS decided to leave in once it was discovered.) We can anticipate that there will be no future MS operating system that has an upgrade path directly from Win95.

It is unlikely that any new significant new application development will occur for Windows 95. Major software developers will likely only issue Win95-compatible new software if the version they developed for Win-some-Washington-mountain just happens to work fine on Win95. However, those new commercial programs that just happen to work on Win95 are likely to be few and far between. New programs tend to rely on new features that consumers want and Win95 can't support.

So the future of Win95 is pretty much in the hands of those people currently using it who don’t anticipate making significant software upgrades or additions in the future.

Another way of saying this is that there is no future for Win95, except as a legacy OS on a narrowing margin of (usually) very old hardware. However, I prefer the way I said it in the preceding paragraph.

While stepping up to Win98 right now (something to which the original poster alluded) might be a great move for Win95 users whose hardware supports it — and to give them a little more time on the software-and-upgrades treadmill — remember that Win98 will start dropping off the support radar at the end of this month! The future of Windows — a future that is substantially here already, and will be solidly in place a year and a half from now — is in the NT-based versions, of which Win XP is the most recent, but hardly the last.

ANTIQUATED KB ARTICLE AWARD

(6/4/02)

I love the Microsoft Knowledge Base, use it constantly, and have enormous respect and appreciation for those who keep it stocked with an unbelievable amount of useful information. But this one was so funny that I had to share it:

Secured Web Pages Not Loaded with Netscape Navigator 1.x
Last Updated March 25, 2002
“If Netscape Navigator version 1.x is used to access secured Web pages, the background may be loaded, but individual graphic items linked to the page are not loaded. The browser seems to continue to work, but never finishes the loading of the page....”

Uh, by the way, the web-based MS Knowledge Base can only be accessed with browsers equivalent to Internet Explorer version 5 or later. I don’t know what those Netscape 1.x users are to do about it! (Of course, how many people still using Netscape 1.x would go to Microsoft asking for answers?)

The good news is, if this article is still being actively maintained, I don’t think that those who are concerned about Windows 95 articles starting to evaporate from the KB have much to worry about in the foreseeable future.

THE STRANGE WINDOWS XP DOWNLOAD BUG

(6/5/02)

A while back, many site visitors wrote me that they were having trouble downloading and installing Lars Hederer’s great freeware utility ERUNT, listed on this site’s My Favorite Freeware page. ERUNT is ERU-NT — a version of the old Win95 Registry backup utility ERU, written for NT-based Windows versions such as Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Everybody writing me was using Windows XP.

Part of the problem was that Lars’ servers weren’t handling the volume of hits very well. He said he’d fix that (and apparently he did, because the problem reports dried up in a few days). But, while that was the triggering issue, it wasn’t the real problem that we discovered. Several of us put our heads together online and identified a nuisance of a bug in Windows XP that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

The bug is, simply, that when Internet Explorer on Windows XP is performing a file download and, for whatever reason, the download is incomplete — perhaps because the connection was interrupted, or the server at the other end fails in some fashion — Win XP doesn’t tell you that the download is incomplete. It just acts like everything went fine. The result is, you get an undersized, incomplete file which, when you click on it, obviously does nothing you wanted or expected it to do. (Sometimes it doesn’t do anything at all.) It is, as they say, “not all there.”

This sort of thing happens. Downloads don’t always work right. The only real problem is that Win XP doesn’t tell you about it.

I’m not aware of a fix for this, and it isn’t one of the items I have heard about being included in the forthcoming Service Pack 1. For now, the only solution I know is that you be aware of this behavior, and know to take it into consideration when you are trying to decide why that file you just downloaded seems not to work. Don’t blame the freeware programmer for this one. Blame Windows XP.

TRY TEOMA

(6/5/02)

Have you heard about Teoma yet? It’s a new search engine trying to put Google out of business. I seriously doubt they will succeed — but they’re pretty good. The URL is the obvious one: www.teoma.com. Check them out.

Actually, Teoma isn’t new. It’s been around a while. But, just a few months ago, its current owners took a whole new direction, and that’s what’s drawing all the attention right now. Rather than compete with Google at what Google does best — raw quantity of search results, brilliantly ranked — Teoma has sought to change the game a bit. The main difference, as best I can tell, is that while Google uses general page popularity in determining how to rank a given page — that is, they weigh in how many other sites provide links to the given page — Teoma uses what they all subject-specific popularity. They don’t just count how many links you have out there. They count how many links you have out there on related page. In other words, they’re implementing peer review in each content category on the web. It produces a different ranking of search results, and sometimes the difference is interesting. Here is how Teoma describes itself:

Teoma provides better results because it goes beyond traditional page ranking methods to determine authority, in addition to relevancy. To determine the authority or quality of a site’s content, Teoma uses Subject-Specific Popularity^SM. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site’s level of authority.

To better understand why going to this next step is important, picture yourself as a participant in a popular game show. The final question arises and you need help with the answer. For one million dollars, you could ask the audience their opinion (similar to using other leading search technologies) or you could turn to an expert on the subject (similar to Subject-Specific Popularity).

One of their claims that seems (to me) to fall flat is that they are “intuitive and contextual.” I’m really not clear how they are any more so than Google or anyone else. This just sounds like a good marketing line. Nonetheless, draw your own conclusions. You can also read more about how they do their particular flavor of magic here.

Besides, they’re good to us! <g> Search on any of the several topics for which Windows Support Center is known, and, just as with Google, we come up very quickly and near the top. That has to mean they’re smart, doesn’t it? <vbg>

I have added a link to Teoma on my Search This Site page, which not only has the site search engine, but also a variety of other “search & research” links in several categories. There have been many other additions to this page in the last couple of months, some of the more interesting of which are Netcraft Web Site Finder, Domain Surfer, SamSpade.org, and NetLingo.

LIFE AFTER DEATH FOR WINDOWS 95

(6/7/02)

I’m late reporting this item to you. I should have written about it back in March. But I still consider it newsworthy because it helps put on the record what Microsoft intends concerning collateral forms of support for its products when active support expires. Take Windows 95, for example.

Most simply put, at the end of a product’s support lifecycle, Microsoft will end active support, and continue most forms of passive support. There are exceptions to this, but that single sentence summarizes the whole pretty well. Some details, and some history, are given below. I believe these stories are important because they give us insight regarding what we can expect in the future.

My previous article on continuing Windows 95 support was in the December 24, 2001 issue of The E-List, under the heading, “How I Spent My Winter Vacation.” You may want to re-read that article (and the earlier one to which it links) for some of the history.

What happened in the first place? My best understanding of a complex situation is that Microsoft had migrated their Knowledge Base and other support services, such as Windows Update, to a new level of technology. The web tech employed (part of Windows Update v4) simply wouldn’t function with Win 95 and, apparently, someone made the decision that — since Win95 active support had just been terminated — they would drop it when the v4 tech was deployed, though keeping all the files available on the Download Center site. Contacts Ron and I have inside of Microsoft Support shared our view that at least there should have been better customer communication that the files weren’t gone, just moved — and that, just maybe, there was even more that could be done for the Win95 user base. In fact, there was, and they did it. The left hand and the right hand had to get in communication and sort it all out, and then they shook on it.

There will be a time-limit on how long this will remain available — until June 30, 2003 — so you now know exactly how long you have to get all the download items you need for the future for your Win95 needs. Here is the new policy, plan, and schedule, emailed to me by Microsoft executive, Jim Allchin:

SECURITY WARNING: BEWARE AMUHA.ORG

(6/10/02)

I was more than a little confused when a correspondent told me recently that he had pointed his browser at my site and ended up at a hacking site instead. Whoa! (I thought)... I definitely have to find out whether there is any truth to this.

Thanks to “Skeletor,” one of the regular visitors to the AumHa Forums, I now know what’s going on. For one mere typographical error or even the faintest touch of dyslexia, you easily could type amuha.org rather than aumha.org — and that’s where your journey would begin!

Amuha.org will immediately forward you to hello to yhackers space for hacking at http://x0cool.free.fr/index.html/, which in turn appears to be an alias for www.mkhacking.fr.fm. My French isn’t too bad but, on the other hand, it’s not so good that I feel like reading my way through the page. But I thought I’d let you know about it.

Amuha.org was registered on April 8 of this year to Amine Mido in New England, but with a technical contact in West Sussex and registration through Euro-Hosting.com Ltd. (through Tucows). I haven’t bothered to confirm if any of this is real.

THANKED & EXCUSED

(6/16/02)

My week of jury duty came and went. I was almost Juror No. 3 on a murder trial that actually sounded rather interesting, albeit gruesome. However, at the end of voir dire, my employee, the prosecuting attorney, thanked and excused me which, as you probably know, is the very nice language they use to say, “Get out of here!” One should not, of course, take such dismissals personally, though it is natural (I suppose) to wonder what about oneself led to being kicked out of the jury box. I didn’t have to wonder very long. As I was completing paperwork and checking out, a few more people made their way out of the courtroom, all having been thanked and excused by the same prosecutor. One pattern immediately obvious was that anyone who had any actual legal experience was let go. My 14 years of practicing Workers’ Compensation law seemed to have been a consideration, since the patent attorney from Pasadena and the paralegal with three years of law school behind him were also liberated from the continuation of our civic duty for another 12 months. It leads one to think...

WINDOWS XP: THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE

(New content 6/16/02)

They seem to love us in England. In March of last year, we made it into the London Sunday Times and, this month, the Windows Support Center is featured on page 91 of Britain’s Windows XP: The Official Magazine. (Half a page away, you can also find mention of Kelly’s XP Korner, the tip bonanza web site of my friend and fellow MS-MVP Kelly Theriot, mentioned several times in The E-List in the past.)

Now, no one seems quite sure what the word “official” means in the magazine’s title, but I’m advised that it’s easier to get away with things like that in England than here in the States. Regardless of the potentially misleading label, this is really good magazine! If all of the issues are like this July issue, I can definitely recommend it to our British readers. It is a lot like Windows Magazine during its best years, but with the pleasant change of a more upbeat, modern feel, and the unpleasant difference that the writers and editors don’t seem to have quite as much distance from Microsoft as did Mike Elgan’s crew. This issue is loaded with tips, technical instruction, news, new products, and previews of what’s coming down the track from Microsoft and other sources. Some of their tips, I must hasten to remark, are off the mark — you run into this from time to time, whether it is in PCWorld or Dr. Dobbs, so, use your discrimination. But, overall, it’s something to which I would subscribe if it were a local publication. And, of course, they had the good taste to show off the Windows Support Center in their present issue :).

THIS SITE HAS MORE ZIP!

(New content 7/16/02)

As of this morning, this site has more zip — of the gzip variety. In some cases, this also will translate to more “zip” in page loads. For a few of you with outdated bookmarks or favorites to particular pages, or very early automated page-change subscriptions, it will mean a little confusion until you change those.

Here’s what happened: Over the last week — and especially over three of the last four days — bandwidth consumption on this site went through the roof. To give you an idea how much information flows through here normally, our web host, pair.com, provides a daily average of half a gigabyte of traffic (for our particular hosting plan) before additional charges start accruing. Normally, that’s a generous amount. The largest daily average we ever had was 496 MB/day in February (the month several newsletters and a frequently-replayed TV show mentioned us repeatedly), corresponding to an average of over 95,000 hits/day. The most hits per day in February were 247,668, on a day when 1,241 MB (just over a gig) of data was transferred. Normally, we average about 70-75,000 hits/day, and about 400-475 MB/day of traffic.

But this month, there is an anomaly that isn’t explained by any of the normal statistical logs. We've had several days of 800 MB/day or more of traffic (a high of 954 MB/day), driving the daily average for the first half of July up to 528 MB. That’s over our limit. I had to look at how to reduce the traffic density without cutting anyone off from data. I’ve long prided myself on writing compact HTML code that reduces page size considerably, so I wasn’t going to get any further relief there. No, I had to think of something else. The answer was compressing the files on the server and for transmission so that a smaller bundle would carry the same amount of information.

Windows Support Center / www.aumha.org is hosted on a computer running Apache 1.3 on top of FreeBSD, a variety of Unix. One of the features available is a zipping or compression format called gzip. It only takes a couple of lines in one configuration file to gzip the entire site. One small problem: Doing so disabled something else I had to fix first!

The “something else” is Server Side Includes (SSI). This is a way to cause the web server to do a certain amount of building, or composing, of pages before they leave the server. (The server includes into the web page a block of information from some other file that I tell it to include.) Because the server can do this much faster than data can be shoved along the Internet, this doesn’t slow down page delivery. For some time now, I’ve used SSI on most pages of this site to give common top matter (so that I can change all pages by changing one or two files), and to have easy control of other volatile data that appears here and there through the site. I have also begun extensively using SSI on the Knowledge Base article pages and you can actually find the included text, sorted by KB article number, in this obscure folder: www.aumha.org/includes/. Altogether, Server Side Includes have many advantages.

But, unless I wanted to rename all the pages on the site to end in .shtml (breaking all of your bookmarks, of course!), I had to tell the server to simply treat every page as if it were an .shtml file (one that runs SSI). The problem with this was that when I turned on gzip to compress the whole site, it disabled the SSI setting. Suddenly, none of the includes would work. Almost every page was instantly “broken.” (Apache users may have some ready idea what these .htaccess lines were, and how they conflicted.)

Sooooo, new problem requires new solution. Drop SSI and switch over to using the increasingly popular hypertext preprocessor, PHP. With encouragement and backup of that very helpful Junior Wizard of PHP who prefers to call himself “Rudy,” I created the plan, started late yesterday afternoon, and (other than a dinner break and a run out to 7-11 in the middle of the night) worked until after sunrise to manually edit, reload, and test every page on this site (except the Forums) — somewhere between 250 and 300 individual pages.

One immediate problem presents itself for those of you who have subscribed to automatic notification when a page changes on this site: You probably got flooded this morning with notifications, since every page on the site was touched by the rewrite. There is another problem for those of you who subscribed to autonotifcation a year or so ago: I used to have the notification engine watch for changes to a series of pages with the letter z at the end of the name (for example, http://aumha.org/html/lernhtmlz.htm). Very soon after starting this, I switched how it all worked and didn’t tell anyone because it didn’t matter — but, as of last night, most of the Z-Files are gone. I apologize for the inconvenience. I suggest you use the email notice that you got to unsubscribe from that service, then go back to the original page — or directly to www.changedetection.com — to subscribe anew to be notified of any pages you want to monitor for changes.

This also means that if you have bookmarks to Z-Files, these are no longer valid. The solution is: Drop the z from the name. If you link to http://aumha.org/a/shtdwnxpz.htm, you really should be bookmarking, instead, to http://aumha.org/a/shtdwnxp.htm (no Z). Now is the time to update all of those. (I added a note about this to the 404 error page you will get if you try to browse to a Z-File.

I repeat: The X-Files are gone. The Z-Files are gone. For all I know, the Y-Files are gone, too. Update your bookmarks and other records!

I will get to see tonight how much traffic is cut back by this compression. In theory, it should be enormously reduced. In theory, typical daily traffic figures should be utterly altered from this day forward, to a much lower level which, however, does not reduce the number of hits or visitations. In fact, if anything, it will make it easier for all of you to get access, and to get some pages faster. Smaller cars take less room on the highway and, hey, as of this morning’s Pacific Coast dawn, this site’s got zip!

PS (later the same night) — The work was definitely worth it. In the first half-day that the change was in place, though hits on the site increased to 111% of the previous day’s hits, kbytes of traffic was reduced to 37% of the prior day’s flow! In other words, it now takes only 33% as much actual data transfer to deliver the same pages. This leaves growing room for visitation to this site to triple before traffic limits ever become a problem again.

FINAL WORD: WIN98 SUPPORT EXTENDED ONE YEAR

and No Cruelty to Animals

(New content 7/16/02)

Finally we have a final and certain answer: Free Windows 98 telephone support by Microsoft has been extended one more year, under the previous warranty plan. Instead of ending two weeks ago, on June 30, 2002, it now will end on June 30, 2003. There will not be a further year of “Extended Support” after that (during which paid telephone support would be available). On June 30, 2003 it’s all over.

Over the last six weeks, there has been a lot of back-and-forth on whether this was happening. Rapidly shifting information had my head spinning! Every headline I could think of for this present article involved some kind of cruelty to animals. Following my articles “New Life for Windows 98?” on June 7 and “Eating Crow” on June 24, the only headline that came to me for this final confirmation article was “Crow on a Yo-Yo!” Then I wondered if anyone really wanted to hear anything else about this subject (“Heck, doesn’t he ever write about anything else?”), so I moved on to “Beating a Dead Horse.” Seeing the utter imbecility of both of these, I decided simply to let you know the good news: There is new life for Windows 98 support. It’s here to stay for another year. And we should all be kind to animals.

My friend inside Microsoft Customer Support who originally wrote me over a month ago about the change in policy wrote me again last week, saying:

...as far as things are right at the moment, we are still giving customers their two warranty incidents, when they call [at no charge]. I haven’t heard anything to the contrary... Why don’t you just tuck that bird in the freezer for now. Never know when I might need a light snack, LOL.

This same person directed me to a new Microsoft web page entry. Go to support.microsoft.com, click the “Contact Microsoft” menu item, then “By Phone,” then pick Windows 98 from the menu and you end up at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?id=fh;en-us;offer32.
This page, which was updated recently, shows ongoing telephone warranty support for Windows 98.

Then, on July 8, my friend and fellow MS-MVP, Ron Martell, found a new Microsoft web page that took away all doubt. In addition to the Windows Desktop Product Lifecycles Guidelines page (which needs a lot of updating), there is a new and very useful Obsolete Products page. You can look up darn near any Microsoft product here and see when it will be officially obsolete! (That’s from a support point of view, not from the point of view of your use of the product, of course.) Go to that page, scroll to the bottom, and read the announcement: “...a change to Windows 98 No-Charge Support, which will conclude on 6/30/03.“ Click the W just above this and scroll down to Windows 98. You get the same information.

Finally, I heard a few days ago from a Microsoft lead associated with Windows 98 support: “Both warranty and paid technical support [for Windows 98] will continue until June 30, 2003.” Both paid and unpaid support programs end on that day. The same date is the end of the telephone support highway for Window NT 4.0.

I have been informed that Microsoft’s formal warranty support cycle for Win98 has just been extended one more year. I suppose you can call this an E-List News Exclusive. (Or you can call it a rumor, I suppose, since most people I've contacted inside of Microsoft haven't heard about it yet. But the tip came from inside Customer Support.)

As many of you know, Microsoft’s support policies are built on a layered fade-out. At some point, full warranty support (e.g., free telephone support) goes away, and one more year of paid phone support remains. That’s called the “Extended Warranty” phase. Then the pay-as-you-go phone support goes away, too. That begins the obviously titled “Non-Supported Phase.”

...Windows 98 (both editions) has been scheduled for quite some time to enter the “Extended” phase 23 days from now, on June 30 of this year, meaning that free phone support would end then, and all active support would end a year later, on June 30, 2003. But that has been extended further, I’ve just learned. A correspondent (and E-List News subscriber) in Microsoft Customer Service wrote me yesterday that they’ve just been told that warranty support for Windows 98 Original Flavour and Windows 98 Second Edition has been extended for another year, until June 30, 2003. And this is what they, in turn, have been telling phone support customers.

...I have long felt that Windows 98 was the high-water mark of the entire Windows 9x series, so I consider this really good news. Though NT-based operating systems, such as Windows 2000 and XP, are the definite future of Windows, and the direction I would recommend most people go as soon as possible, a lot of people have perfectly good hardware that just won't run the newer operating systems. Many of them are still running Windows 95. For these folks, I can think of no better solution (until they are ready to buy a new computer or seriously upgrade their current hardware) than to settle in with Windows 98 for the duration.

Yesterday, and then again this morning, one of my other contacts inside of Microsoft finally got back to me with a concrete answer on my request for confirmation. His news was that no, there was no further extension. The “extension” mentioned to Customer Support had simply been the entering of Windows 98 into the Extended Support Phase. The Extended Support Phase is the regularly scheduled ending of free telephone support, and the beginning of the one-year wind-down on all Win98 support telephone support. Win98 is on the same wind-down schedule as before. Free support ends about a week from now, on June 30. All support ends on June 30, 2003.

What about the word that was passed to my friend in Customer Support? My second source, writing yesterday, said, “Folks are in the process of communicating that better....”

As is well known in hand-shaking circles, sometimes the left hand and the right hand are out of touch with each other. That’s what happened here. The support extension decision had been made, but pretty much nobody inside of Microsoft was told about it, as far as I can tell — until after it went into effect July 1. You really were the first to know <vbg>.

PS — Many thanks to my friend and fellow MS-MVP Ron Badour for sharing the workload of shaking the trees for this one!

GREAT SCOT!

And a warm welcome to our 300 newest subscribers.

(New content 7/25/02)

As well they should. E-List News veterans know that I think Scot produces possibly the most topical, practical newsletter going on computer issues in general, and Windows and broadband in particular. Scot’s Newsletter was a recent E-List Featured Site. Recently, his careful journalistic standards (often more prudent than mine; I’ve grown to appreciate the occasional taste of crow) led him to sit, for several weeks, on news that Windows 98 telephone support had been extended a further year — because he couldn’t independently confirm it. Microsoft wasn’t being very free with that news (even inside of Microsoft, it appears). When he wrote about it in his latest newsletter, Scot graciously credited The E-List News with first breaking the story. He also kindly provided an E-List News subscription link.

And boy, do you folks listen when he speaks! Scot’s Newsletter hit my inbox at 4:46 PM Pacific Time. Between 4:49 and 5:12, there were 24 new E-List News subscriptions. (Are you all speed readers?) Within the first day and a half, there were 200 new subscriptions. As of now, about 300 new subscriptions to The E-List News have come in since that issue of SFNL went public. I want to welcome all of you to the newsletter and to the Windows Support Center site. I hope you enjoy what you find here.

ANOTHER MS KNOWLEDGE BASE OVERHAUL

(New content 7/25/02)

Did you miss the commotion? Last Friday night, Microsoft deployed a brand new version of its venerable Knowledge Base. It even has a new URL. Though support.microsoft.com still will get you into the neighborhood, you’ll need one more click to reach the KB, which is now at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=FH;EN-US;KBHOWTO

Along with several other Windows site providers, I discovered this about 2 AM, and also discovered that nearly all of my old links to KB articles suddenly didn’t work! Hey, that’s a big part of this site! So, I stayed up past dawn to fix as many of them as I could and get everything working again. Then, later that day, the old format began working again. Sigh! (Which wasn’t exactly my first reaction <g>.) Oh well, glad to have it working again. Those several million links Google brings up won’t all be wrong, now!

I’m not pleased with the changes this time. There seems much more emphasis on appearance than functionality, which would be fine except that it removes functionality. For example, the search window off to the left and retaining your prior search query (introduced in January) was one of the best KB improvements MS had made in its history. That’s all gone, and I don’t know why. Another great improvement they made in January, having each link open an article in a new browser window, is also gone — that was a wonderful improvement and, for some reason, somebody now has taken it out. This was at least two giant steps backwards.

However, the KB still searches and retrieves articles. And there’s a lot of information there.

I still recommend that everyone install my Registry patch for launching KB articles automatically from your browser’s address bar. That was highlighted in the July 16 issue of The E-List News, and you can still find it on the Registry Patches page. This gives you additional flexibility. Also, if you find any broken links I didn’t catch, please let me know at once so I can fix them. (You can use the Feedback link at the end of this article.) Finally, this did motivate me to get going on a project I’ve been considering for some time, of redesigning my Knowledge Base link pages to be substantially code-generated, where much of the HTML is written by a PHP script at the time you request a page from the server. Among other things, when finished it will enable me, next time MS changes its KB URL format, to make most link changes on the site by editing a single line of a single file. (That will save half a dozen hours.) The result should be completely invisible to you, the user, other than in making link deployment more consistent and more reliable. A few smaller pages already use this approach, such as aumha.org/kbpwd.htm.

WHERE DID JAVA GO?

(New content 7/25/02)

Hundreds of you have already noticed this week that the once ubiquitous Java Virtual Machine downloads on Microsoft’s site are drying up. They are vanishing almost as fast as people can find them. (It’s a huge site, y’know.) Download links to JVM on non-Microsoft sites are disappearing, too. I hesitate to write too much on this topic, since any help I provide you may dry up soon after this newsletter hits the streets (several people inside of MS are subscribers and regular readers of The E-List News). My compromise is to be careful to only give you links Microsoft already knows about. ;)

So (you ask), am I saying that Microsoft is some malicious meany making all these JVM downloads go away? No, not at all — that would require my first knowing their motivations. Details aren’t yet available on where they’re going with this. I suspect we are seeing a partial response to Redmond’s legal battle with Sun Microsystems. I think we’re in a transition phase between one way of distributing the Java engine and another. But the only thing we know for sure at the moment is that download links for the existing JVM version are being pulled as fast as people find them.

Some history: Microsoft licensed the distribution of Java from Sun Microsystems an eternity ago. Microsoft wanted more functionality in it to make it work better with Windows and Internet Explorer, and Sun wouldn’t add this functionality. So Microsoft added the code on its own, users liked the enhancements, and scads of web sites appeared relying on the Microsoft version. Microsoft’s version of Java became a virtual competitor with Sun’s! That’s like Compaq’s OEM distribution of Windows XP becoming more popular than Microsoft’s version 8~).

Sun, of course, didn’t like this. They sued. The argument went, more or less, that MS had the right to distribute Java but not to change it, and that Microsoft’s goals were to undermine Sun’s ability to compete against them — that one of Microsoft’s motives was to coopt Java, which is potentially harmful to the dominance of the Windows platform. This allegation is probably true. Similarly, Sun’s refusal to incorporate the requested changes is likely the result of the same kind of thinking in reverse. They do not want a strong, vital, expanded-function Java on Windows. Neither company really wants the other to thrive. Things like this happen when sworn enemies have to sleep together for common interests. In this case, since Sun owns the actual property, they have the law on their side. MS settled with them, agreeing to stop distributing Java no later than January 2, 2004. Then they did the unpardonable thing of complying with the settlement very fast, rather than taking until 2004 to do it. They started pulling it from their products right away! Sun didn’t like this either! “Hey, you can’t stop distributing that right away, even though we just sued you and compelled you to stop distributing it! That’s not fair!”

And that’s just part of the story of what has become serial litigation by Sun. Personally, I have found the ping-pong match to be highly entertaining.

Net effect (or, one might say, the .NET effect): It’s getting nearly impossible to find Microsoft’s version of the Java Virtual Machine download anywhere. You can, of course, go get a copy from Sun — but it won’t work on most of the Java-enabled web sites you really want to visit! Damn that Microsoft for coming up with something most people would actually prefer to use! <bg>

Rumor: There is some indication that JVM for Windows XP will be available from Windows Update once Win XP Service Pack 1 comes out in a couple of months. I have one very serious problem with this approach: Many Win XP installations have trouble reaching the Windows Update site and the most effective solution for this, in the greatest number of instances, is to install the Java Virtual Machine! Catch-22. Please note, though, that this rumor (reported by C/Net among others) may not be true. My current belief is that it is one scenario under active consideration, but with plans not yet fully settled.

At present, one place Win XP users can still get the JVM (and where I got it a couple of days ago) is that same Windows Update site, but by a circuitous route. It’s kind of hidden. When you go to Windows Update you have to click Personalize Windows Update at the left, and then Enable the Windows Update Catalog, and save your settings. This adds the Windows Update Catalog link in the left box. Click this link, and then click Find updates for Microsoft Windows systems. Pick Windows XP in the drop-down list, click Search, take Critical Updates and Service Packs, and install the March 4, 2002 Security Update. This security patch, which closes a hole in JVM, actually gives you a new full copy of JVM — and is, therefore, an effective way to download it.

Additionally, here is a download link that still works as of this writing. Being part of a university system in Germany, I suspect it will stay around longer than most of the other links.
ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/win95/fixes/VM/msjavx86.exe

Under the terms of the current settlement between Microsoft and Sun, MS cannot modify JVM hereafter even to fix security leaks — and security leaks do continue to appear in it. That’s bad. What I think we are going to see over the next two years is accelerated development of Microsoft’s competing products in an effort to make Java’s presence in a Windows environment a relatively moot point. If they succeed, Java will fall by the side of the road as web developers, targeting the 90% of the business and consumer market using Windows, move on to the new MS products. If MS fails in that time frame, it will, of course, give a strong boost to Sun’s goals — but I doubt that Redmond is without a backup plan....

THEN MY PARTITION CRASHED...

(New content 7/25/02)

But the KB wasn’t the only thing keeping me up all night (literally!) for this entire week. No, just as soon as I had those repairs completed, my primary partition — the one housing my Windows XP installation — crashed on me. After a couple of hours of recovery efforts, I gave up, deleted the partition, and started on a new installation. Thanks to backup procedures, nothing important was lost (and, actually, almost nothing at all was lost). One of the things this experience has given me is the opportunity to write a series of articles on how to protect yourself against this sort of thing — and how to go about the recovery. In this, I had much help from my MVP friends, especially Alex Nichol, who is well known to people frequenting this site, and Outlook Express Wizard Extraordinaire Tom Koch. I will spread this information out over a couple of issues.

But the first thing I want to emphasize is: BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. Nothing has saved more computer owners’ tushes more than backups. And I don’t mean just your data. Do a full system backup. Sure, you can always reinstall Windows and your programs; but there will be lots that you don’t realize is hidden in your Windows folder and other system folders. I am a strong believer in the premise that if you can’t afford to back up your entire computer regularly, then you can’t afford to put anything on the computer that really matters to you. And burning a few CDs really isn’t going to do the job for your 80 GB hard drive!

So what medium to use? I remain an avid fan of tape. It’s still the most economical serious backup medium existing. Right up next to it is backup to additional hard drives. If you have removable hard drives (say, with a drive rack), you can treat them like 10 GB floppies!

What do I do? Well, I’ll tell you, but I’ll also tell you that there is a hole in it. Though fond of tape, I didn’t have a tape drive added to my present computer when I got it a year and a half ago because I wanted to stretch the dollar a bit and get some other things I very much wanted. I also realized, at that time, that something I have never done is to do off site storage of backup copies. Why don’t I store a copy off site? It’s nothing more complicated than a personality flaw. I just don’t. I do recommend that you do off site storage, though, especially in a business environment. For home users, you’re safe from everything but theft and the house burning down if you keep all your backups on site. But, since I knew that I wouldn’t store off site, I decided not to let that get in my way in choosing my current backup approach, which is to backup to my second hard drive. It’s pretty simple. I always want more than one physical hard drive in the computer anyway. I allocated about half the second drive to backup storage. You can then use either the Windows backup program, or an imaging program, to copy your system to that other drive. I keep three generations of backups, the oldest two in zip files and the newest one uncompressed. I backup my Windows partition separately from the rest of my system. Other than those things which would damage any onsite storage approach (the house burning down or theft, for example), this approach is quite safe since there is almost nothing that would take out both hard drives at one time. (Massive electrical damage is the obvious one, and highly unlikely.)

There are, of course, many other approaches. What are your favorite ones? I would love to have input from many of you to publish here on the subject. I find that only good comes from raising consciousness by stirring the pot on backup issues.

RECOVERING YOUR OUTLOOK EXPRESS CONTENTS

(New content 7/25/02)

If I had known that I was going to need to reinstall Outlook Express, including all of my newsgroup configurations and contents, I would have handled things differently. The problem is, one doesn’t usually know when disaster is going to hit. Most recovery doesn’t arise in response to planned crashes! So you have to plan for the unanticipated.

If you want to migrate your Outlook Express setting and folder contents from one Windows installation to another, the best source of the reliable, though somewhat tedious, procedure is MS-MVP Tom Koch’s oft-lauded site, Inside Outlook Express at www.tomsterdam.com. What may not have occurred to you is that you can use the same method to enhance your backup strategies in anticipation of a possible OE recovery. NOTE: In Windows XP you can also export all of this information by running the File & Settings Transfer Wizard. (Tip from MS-MVP Richard Harper.)

Tom Koch’s method includes not only saving the OE data store, but also exporting and saving critical Registry keys. In my recent recovery operations, I did have access to the OE store, but did not have the necessary contents exported from my prior Registry. That caused me more than a bit of hassle. Save yourself from the same hassle by planning ahead.

Fortunately for me, Tom was more than willing to help me through this. In the course of it, I learned a lot about OE recovery and, with his permission, share his recommendations with you. In what follows, remember: Tom gets all the credit for what works. I get all the blame for explaining it badly.

TIP 1: Even if you are the only person who uses your computer, do not just use the default identity in Outlook Express. Click Files | Identities | Add New Identity, create a new identity, and set it as the new default. Why? Because one of the absurd pieces of coding in Outlook Express is that it stores the built-in default identity in a different part of the Registry than it stores all other OE data. That means, at best, that your backup procedures become more complicated. Make life simpler on yourself.

TIP 2: Unless you insist on having a single partition computer (I always recommend a multi-partition computer as discussed here), move your OE store to another partition and back it up. For example, I have mine on the E: partition, which is where I have all of my documents stored. (E:\ is set as the location of the My Documents folder.) To change where the store is located, in OE click Tools | Options | Maintenance | Store Folder, and set a new location. (Create the desired folder first, then let OE move the contents over to it.)

TIP 3: Here’s the juicy one. What if you have the OE store backed up — all the .dbx files and other good stuff — but don’t have the Registry entries you need to rebuild your old setup? This is a fairly common problem, but there is generally no knowledge in circulation about how to solve it. There is an easy recovery method which, however, requires an exacting set of steps. Here, thanks to Tom Koch, are the steps (designed specifically for my own need, which was to recover newsgroup accounts and contents):

JAVA BREWING

(New content 8/14/02)

It seems I hit a nerve for some people in my remarks in Where Did Java Go? (July 25, 2002). On the one hand, the article drew a lot of appreciation for explaining why the Java Virtual Machine download was vanishing from Microsoft sites (among others), and for telling you where you could find it. On the other hand, it drew some programmers out of the woodwork who took umbrage at my characterizations of Java per se, and particularly with my closing line: “And besides, who really wants to develop in Java anyway?”

Let me start, then, by admitting that I took some shortcuts in the way I wrote that piece, since it could have been easily three times as long and not covered everything thoroughly. It was (transparently) an information and editorial piece, not a technical article, and some readers rightly caught me in some “rounding errors.” So, I’d also like to give other points of view a chance to have their say this time ’round.

Several of you wrote me on a point with which I agree completely: Java was created to be a cross-platform standard, and Microsoft’s customizations to it were not platform independent. That means that they compromised one of the essential characteristics of the language. Sun not only had every right but (it can be argued) a responsibility to go after Redmond to correct this. My friend and fellow MS-MVP Ovidiu Popa was one of the first to starch my collar on this one. Among other cogent comments, he wrote:

I actually thought I had conveyed this in my statement that the law was on Sun’s side on this issue. I also tried to emphasize that the competing (and competitive) agendas of both Sun and Microsoft are easy to see in this battle. Ovidiu said it much better, and more on target.

And a couple of programmers took me firmly to task for that closing remark. Just why did I think nobody really wanted to develop in Java anymore? Well, on this I took my cue from some programmers I’ve known for several years, particularly a few who are — well, I probably shouldn’t call them “anti-Microsoft” but, let’s just say, Redmond-centric solutions would usually be the last solutions they would pick for a project, and .NET, when mentioned by them at all, is spelled dot NOT. Still, in emerging from their brainstorming sessions to discuss the direction things would go in a development project, they were commonly in agreement that Java was a solution — perhaps the only seriously considered solution — that they found even less acceptable than a Microsoft solution. I thought it pretty safe to regard the opinions of this particular bunch of engineers and programmers as being not excessively pro-Microsoft. But some people think otherwise. There actually are people in the world who really like the idea of developing in Java, and some asked me to make sure that E-List News readers know this.

In any case, as Ovidiu Popa summarized in his letter to me, “If we’ll have a battle, that will be J2EE vs. .NET, that is on the server side. That (in the enterprise) is where the billions are floating around, and not in some glitters on the web sites.”

PS — A long-time MSN newsgroup maven who goes only by “Winston” kindly provided another link that will retrieve Microsoft’s version of the Java Virtual Machine: http://www.krm.com/techsupport/tech-downloads.html

HONORING CONTRIBUTION

(New content 8/14/02)

While I do most of the labor on this Windows Support Center site, I’ve received a lot of recommendations and other support, over the years, from many people — friends, colleagues, and site visitors. Two of these friends, colleagues, and site visitors, though, have gone an extra couple of miles and written several very popular articles for the site. Recently, in an idle moment, I realized that Alex Nichol and Gary Woodruff had written so much for the site that I couldn’t bring it all to mind without stopping to think for a minute. That’s when the idea was born to create special pages to index and recognize the aggregate writings of these two contributors.

I invite you to examine two of the most obscure pages on this site — pages you probably will never stumble across unless you read all the way to the bottom of the Site Map. They are The Alex Nichol Page and The Gary Woodruff Page. I’ve included a few remarks on each gentleman, a photograph, links to their articles on this site, and a link to a Google search of many of their newsgroup posts and other online content that you may find of interest.

RESOLUTION RESOLUTION

(New content 8/14/02)

In the June 23 issue of The E-List News, I wrote in the User Interface section concerning MS Knowledge Base article Q281565. As indicated in the article on Windows XP display resolution and color depth settings for different user profiles, screen resolution remains the same when switching between different user profiles on the same machine, and this behavior is by design. There is no way to make it behave differently using utilities or commands or settings native to Windows XP.

However, as correspondent “Kevin K” reminded me, there is a way to do it involving an end run around native Windows XP capabilities. His recommendation gives useful information, and also gives me a chance to again mention one of the best Windows XP web sites around. Kevin wrote,

If this capability interests you, I recommend you download and try Doug’s utility. I also recommend that, if you aren’t familiar with dougknox.com, you take this opportunity to check it out!

OUR BIGGEST MONTH EVER

(New content 9/1/02)

In August, this site had more hits than in any prior month. I thought we were going to break 3 million — but there was a big drop-off in the last week of the month. We ended at 2,880,599 hits for August.

However, if you look at the site statistics page, you may be a little confused at first to see that “traffic” — how many KB of data flowed across the lines from this site into user computers — is taking a steep nosedive. This is really excellent news! How can hits be going up and traffic doing down? It’s because of all that work I did a while back that let me compress the pages and other download content. All content on this site now requires two-thirds less (that’s marketing-speak for, “only one-third as much”) bandwidth to deliver the same page. This not only keeps hosting charges down, but allows the pages to be delivered to you a bit faster. To see the difference this compression makes, the interested may want to check the traffic and hits graphs here.

WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 1 IS RTM

(New content 9/1/02)

One of the most popular questions on Windows XP newsgroups in recent months has been, “When is Service Pack 1 going to be available?” As of this week, we know the answer, because it now has been released to manufacturing — which is the “RTM” you’re going to be seeing all over the place. And it will be made available to the general public for download on September 9.

Personally, since I use a dial-up connection, and since Win XP has been just about as perfect for me as I could imagine an operating system being, I don’t see myself doing the download, but I do see myself installing the Service Pack when it arrives in my MSDN subscription in another month or so. And, I do recommend most users install it, especially if they haven’t been keeping up with the Windows Update patches.

So what’s in SP1? Quite a lot, actually, though very little that you are likely to see on the surface. (No, they didn’t include 14 new skins! <g>) It includes all of the Windows Update patches to date. These include the one very large patch that was released at midnight on October 25, 2001, the day of the Windows XP launch (to catch up all fixes since the OS was locked down to go to manufacturing over a month earlier), plus several others in the interim, most of which were security patches. It locks out a few of the more popular hacking attacks on Windows Product Activation (which will only affect people who, knowingly or unknowingly, installed an illegal copy). It includes the foundation on which special XP versions for tablet computers, detachable smart display monitors, and the forthcoming Windows Media Center will be built. And they’ve found a few other things and fixed them along the way, too.

Getting most of the press, though, is one feature that will be visible to the user at the UI level. In compliance with Microsoft’s pending settlement with the Department of Justice, users will have new power to disable certain standard Microsoft applets and enable competing products to take their place. As the press release describes it,

In other words, if you want not only to use a browser other than Internet Explorer, but also don’t want to be able to tell that IE is on your computer, you’ll be able to hide this altogether. Same with music playing software, messenger tools, etc. The actual code used by these native applets is an integral part of the OS as written, so the code itself can’t be removed; but, from the point of view of using Windows XP, these components will be invisible and out of the way if that’s what you choose. One limitation: Though Microsoft will provide manufacturers of competing tools with the code necessary for their programs to be recognized by the app-swap utility, you won’t be able to make your favorite utility the “standard” browser, media player, messenger, etc. on your computer unless its manufacturer actually releases a compatible version that includes this link-up code. This does mean that older versions of alternate tools won’t be on the choice list. One more good reason to get rid of that Netscape 4 you’ve been holding onto!

Where to get it? Next Monday, September 9, you and half the free world can compete for download bandwidth to drag this off the Microsoft site. (Man, do I hate those first day download battles! <bg>) Or, you can ask them to send you a CD for a small fulfillment cost. If you buy a new copy of Windows XP in the store, beginning in the very near future, it will be the SP1 version. And, as mentioned above, I’m counting on this being in the MSDN subscription I already have, and showing up by UPS in the next month or two (unless someone at Microsoft would like to help out their favorite reviewer and send one a little sooner? <g>).

As you might have guessed from the foregoing, I’m not overly concerned about this SP one way or the other. I haven’t found Windows XP to need a significant amount of fixing, and Windows Update plugs the security holes that invariably appear. I know there are many people, though, who always wait for the first Service Pack before going with a new OS, meaning that this fall is the time for jumping aboard if you’ve been waiting.

Will we see a new wave of Windows XP installations? That will be interesting to watch. It does seem that, with SP1 pending, a lot of people have been holding off, during the last month or so, on new XP installations. I base this on the fact that MVP Gary Woodruff’s excellent article on this site, Upgrading to Windows XP, has been in the Top 10 most visited pages on this site pretty consistently since Windows XP’s release — until August, when it dropped to No. 17. This tells me, quite simply, that significantly reduced numbers of people were consulting this site to learn how to upgrade to Win XP — which might mean that there has been a big drop-off in upgrades. If, in the next two months, this article shoots back into the Top 10, and the percentage of users hitting this site with Win XP also takes a leap, it will be a pretty good hint that people really were waiting for SP1 — at least, once they knew it was close at hand. As we begin September, a new statistics cycle begins, and you can start to track these changes yourself on the AumHa.org Site Statistics page, if such things interest you. (These numbers are updated daily, and usually go through a lot of fluctuation in the first few days of a month until they settle into a pattern.)

JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE, TAKE 3

(New content 9/1/02)

In the last two issues, I have responded, with the information then available, to the many inquiries about why Microsoft’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM) download is no longer available. You can still read those archived articles, Where Did Java Go? and Java Brewing.

PAGES YOU AREN’T READING

(New content 9/1/02)

Y’know how TV Guide does a special issue once or twice a year on “Shows You Should Be Watching,” discussing low-rated TV shows that they think are worth saving? Usually they mobilize enough viewers to pull the quality show back from the brink of cancellation.

I was thinking about this recently when mulling over the pages on this site that nobody is reading. There are two big differences between the pages you aren’t reading here and the shows TV Guide knows you aren’t watching. First, these pages are not at risk of cancellation. Second, I’m not suggesting that these pages will ever hit the standards of Cagney & Lacey or Party of Five. But it does seem worth mentioning them to you just in case you didn’t know they were here. These are pages that don’t get a lot of Internet media hype or newsgroup mention, but which (in my highly subjective view) would be really helpful to a lot of computer users if folks just knew about them.

Here’s my “Top 10 List of Bottom 10 Pages on This Site,” with a brief description of each, listed in the order of how much I like them.

I DON’T LEND MONEY TO BILL GATES

(New content 9/1/02)

With all of the corporate scandal of late, and in the spirit of financial disclosure, I wanted to let all of you know that I do not make cash donations to Bill Gates. I do buy Microsoft software, but I don’t just call up Bill and say, “I have an extra $20 sitting around, shall I send it along?”

I’m not just being arbitrarily silly here. I learned this week that some readers need this explanation. I got the following email this week. I’m not making fun of anyone because, as a subsequent email round made clear, the person really was confused by my page. Here’s the letter:

This reader had seen my Donate to This Site navigation bar link, leading to How You Can Help Support This Site. I answered him, in part:

“SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE”

(New content 9/1/02; revised 9/2/02)

Tongue-in-cheek aside, answering this fellow’s letter did bring to mind one idea that was very new to me. It involves the issue of subscription software and its necessary relationship to technical customer support. Most of you already know that Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer announced a direction change for Microsoft a couple of years ago. The direction is toward viewing “software as a service.” While there are many interpretations of this marketing phrase, one of them that has been discussed much is the question of subscription software. Many people believe that Windows Product Activation in Windows XP is “just the tip of the iceberg” on this idea. The fact that so much reaction to the idea is in “just the tip of the iceberg” language reflects how very nervous people are about this. That is, most consumers who have heard a little bit about it think of it as a bad, and possibly scary, idea.

I am among those made nervous about the idea of having to pay a monthly fee to continue using Windows, Office, etc. on my personal computer. I do believe that WPA is a step in the direction of developing technology that might make this possible in the future, but I don’t see anything nefarious in it. It’s a lot harder to be nefarious about something when you come out and tell people what you’re planning to do. I think MS has been pretty candid about what it has in mind.

In both private conversations and public statements, Microsoft executives and managers have said quite clearly that the company does have active plans for developing a subscription-based software delivery model for business customers, but has no present plans ever to do this for the general consumer. While one can fret over that word “present,” and while it is always possible that the people speaking to me (or making the public statement) didn’t know everything, I feel that I’ve gotten honest face-to-face statements on this from people who are likely to know what is on the drawing boards. YMMV. Business licensing models have long been quite different from consumer licensing models, so it isn’t strange to me that this should be aimed at one group of customers and not another. It is also consistent with the general direction Microsoft has been taking corporate licensing of late. Subscription-based software licensing does have advantages that, from an IT perspective within a company currently committed to Microsoft products (which means most of the business community), actually start to make sense. It is mostly among private consumers that the idea triggers all sorts of panic reactions.

My biggest concern about consumer-level subscription-based OS and application delivery is probably not the same as most people’s concerns. My concerns have little to do with privacy or autonomy, for example. They have to do with my belief that Microsoft is incapable of handling the billing correctly such that they really would know, at any given moment, whose subscription was paid up! That’s a real nuts-and-bolts concern. I’ve had an MSN account since 1995. I went through several years of really bad billing issues. At any given time, MSN didn’t know what my billing and payment history were within, say, the prior six months. My credit card would get no billing for months at a time, then suddenly get slammed with several months at once.

Though there has been some improvement in this, many MSN users tell me it still isn’t close to where it should be. One friend just went through seven months of trying to get her MSN billing records corrected. At various stages in this process, no one account rep had access to the whole record either of her accounts or of her history of trying to get it resolved.

I assume they’ll work out the issue of the Subscription Validation Server going down just as you’re trying to logon in the morning. I don’t trust them to handle the billing. It’s one thing to have your Internet connection go down because they don’t think you’ve paid the bill that you paid two months earlier. It’s quite another to have your operating system or Office applications suddenly fail to be available! This is just too scary.

Though I no longer have any personal investment in MSN as a product, I do think that it’s the key to Microsoft’s chances of establishing credibility as a subscription service provider. If MS could turn MSN service delivery, billing, technical support, and customer relations into a world-class operation, they would gain the credibility they need for the direction they want to go. On the other hand, if the can’t manage this, then why should anyone take the risk of employing them to deliver software as a service?

There is, of course, another major limitation, at present, to the widespread deployment of software through a service delivery model: The lack of universally available and universally affordable broadband. I’m still using dial-up. I can’t afford DSL at my barely-just-rebooted income level. I doubt that I’m unique in this. And, for most purposes, I’m entirely satisfied with dial-up connectivity. Furthermore, broadband isn’t available in all locations. Though Internet access overall in America is now just over 50% broadband-based, this includes corporate and other business access. If you count only private consumer use, the numbers look very different. Most people are still using dial-up.

Without universally available and universally affordable broadband access, subscription-based operating system and application software has serious problems at best. This is even more true when you consider the many innovations Microsoft wants to make available as part of its services offerings, things that just aren’t feasible today. All sociological, public relations, legal, economic, and user trust issues aside, the technology simply has too many hurdles at this moment in time.

But it makes more sense for a business environment, especially a large corporate environment, for all the reasons stated previously plus the nearly universal availability of very rapid Internet access for business.

The really new idea I had not thought of until answering the fellow who thought I was panhandling for Bill Gates, is the intimate role, in a subscription model, of technical customer support. This thought brought me up short — it was a new angle on the topic for me. Businesses that provide services in an ongoing fashion — using large ISPs as an example — do provide free support, usually 24/7, as part of a subscription plan. See, it isn’t really free support — it’s prepaid support, as part of your subscription. That’s all been figured into the cost. In contrast, operating systems and applications software are, historically and at present, one-time purchases that cannot effectively factor in years of ‘free’ user support. (Not without jacking the price up a great deal higher for everyone!)

This is something that might actually make a subscription model worthwhile to a lot of users. On the other hand, the real key is the quality of the support. Microsoft’s only big venture into subscription-based services with ongoing free support is MSN and (with sincere respect to the few experienced upper-tier people who are excellent) that support sucks! My correspondent used AOL as his example, which I found fascinating since user reports do not necessarily rate AOL’s support as top-notch. (Since I’m not exactly in a political position to be overly detailed on complaints regarding AOL’s support team at the moment, I have to mostly rely on my readers’ own experiences to fill that out a bit more. Work with me a little, okay? <g>)

But, this support angle also makes the most sense if we only think of corporate clients. Subscription service with VIP-level 24/7 support might be really attractive if Microsoft can, indeed, deliver world class support. This is easier to do for a corporate user base. The hardware, applications loaded, and scope of use are typically much narrower than with a general consumer user base, allowing for a more controlled and effective support environment. Compare this to the philosophy of NT support only for systems using approved hardware. Compare it to the advantages Apple has in controlling most aspects of what hardware, OS, and even (to a great extent) software their user base employs, with broad disregard for legacy hardware or software.

I have no further idea where this will all go in the next three years. But I find it all interesting, and I’m sure it will occupy a lot of our attention as those years unfold. I also know that, in the current economic climate, support services are the area where many computer companies are turning to generate new income. HP is an excellent example of a company that is juggling its significant reduction in revenue from hardware sales by expanding its outsource support services offerings. I believe we will see this trend expand over the next year, providing a new business landscape for computer manufacturers when hardware sales turns around — which won’t be anytime this year!

But in this same climate, Microsoft isn’t visibly developing in the same direction. The company even outsources its internal help desk to HP. Before Microsoft can deliver “software as a service,” Redmond needs to understand service as well as it understands software.

THE SWEET SPOT

(New content 8/14/02)

We use the term “sweet spot” to refer to that purchase point where you can get “the most bang for your buck” — the best value for a comfortably low price.

Most consumers will understand this intuitively, but it is surprising how many computer buyers don’t. For example, most will understand that you will probably never get “the most bang for your buck” by buying the newest item. I don’t know whether to chuckle or cry when I read of someone having just gone out and spent top dollar on the best new hardware they could find — often to create the best imaginable gaming machine, for example — only to see something even better hit the streets a week later. Listen closely folks: This is always going to happen. You can’t keep ahead of the progress in hardware pouring out from top manufacturers. There are times when you want to buy the newest and best available for other reasons, but keeping ahead of everyone else isn’t going to be a fruitful goal.

Until a couple of years ago, I recommended that most people buy computer hardware that had been the “leading edge” one year earlier than their point of purchase. This gave it time to shake out the bugs and firm up the drivers, and for the cost to drop significantly — because the hardware had, by then, been replaced by something better. This used to be the “sweet spot.” But no longer! These days, from all but specialty stores, you usually can’t even buy last year’s hardware! The life-cycle has shortened to six months — or even less.

When hitting a computer store with a glint in my eye, my checkbook in my pocket, and my pen in my hand (or pocket-protector, as the case may be), I have a pretty simple technique for identifying the best bang-to-buck ratio. If you are comparing several models of an item, all of which are adequate for your needs, and you want to balance present sufficiency with forward-looking expectations of using the item for a long time to come, look at where the “curve” in the prices takes a sharp upward leap. In other words, find the spot where moving up one more grade in product will lead to a much bigger jump in price. Then, make your purchase immediately under that point. For example, the most satisfying computer purchase I ever made was my Pentium 233-MMX, which I bought because the P-200 was $20 less, but the P-266 was $80 more. In other words, the price leap was in the hop up to the 266, and the 233 was “the most bang for my buck” at the time. It kept me happy for many years.

Recently I went hard drive shopping. I’ll lead into this anecdote by mentioning that I am a raving fan of Maxtor drives, both for their inherent quality and reliability, and for the integrity and customer-mindedness of the company standing behind them. I have bought nothing but Maxtors for myself in the last five or so years, and see no reason to change that practice in the foreseeable future. On this shopping expedition, I learned where the current hard drive “sweet spot” is located, and thought I’d pass this along for those interested. Comparing a couple of different chain discount stores, I found that their prices agreed within a few dollars. In round numbers, the 40 GB Maxtor drive was priced at $100; the 60 GB drive at $150 but with a $50 mail-in rebate; and the 80 GB drive at $150 with no rebate. Then there was a big jump up to the 120 GB, and an even further jump beyond that. I bought the 80.

Right now, 80 GB drives are probably the sweetest deal for long-term ownership. You can get a price break on the 60s (which retailers seem to be liquidating), and can’t yet get nearly as good a deal on the 120s. That’s because the 120 GB drives are pushing the “natural limit” of internal hard drive size on a lot of computers right now, the moderately well-known “137 GB limit.” This being the case, there isn’t yet any reason to discount their prices. By the way, all of these were 7200 RPM drives (as was the older 15 GB drive I replaced). And, of course, you can get even better prices if you’re willing to track down the deals. But it’s good to know where the market stands in general.

About the same time, I was forwarded information that Western Digital is coming out soon with a 200 GB drive for about $400. My experience with Western Digital drives is that usually they are entirely satisfactory and, for their generally lower prices, can, therefore, be a great deal! But every couple of years they hit a snag and have to recall a large batch. WD is very good about the recalls, and always makes due reparations but, frankly, I just don’t want to be part of history in that particular way. Also, WD drives don’t particularly “play well” with other makes of drives in the same computer.

Because the new 80 GB drive is so much larger than what I had before, I was inspired to revise my partitioning scheme, and took the opportunity to update my article on Planning Your Partitions. I still haven’t exhaustively rewritten it to fully embrace some different considerations in Windows XP, but I think it stands pretty well as it is.

Also, if you would like to read about the “137 GB barrier” in hard drives — a limitation in most current hardware, but which we are about to outgrow — I recommend the following article here on the Western Digital site.

AWARDING NOBLE SERVICE

(New content 11/3/02)

John Eshelman with Korean War Service Medal

Fifty years ago, in the first conjoint military action by the infant United Nations, the United States led an international Unified Command in a “police action” that came, more casually, to be called the Korean War. One writer called this “a bloody, inconclusive combat, at a tremendous loss of life,” which, however, was essentially concluded by an armistice signed July 27, 1953. During the years 1950-1953, an estimated four million Koreans, one million Chinese, 55 thousand Americans, and four thousand others lost their lives to war.

Among those wounded was my father, PFC John Eshelman. He was awarded the Purple Heart, which, through bureaucratic confusion, was over four decades in arriving. Then, on September 21 of this year, half a century after his tour of duty, Dad received the Korean War Service Medal from Republic of Korea Consul General Kyu-ho Choo. (Pictures of that event, reproduced here, were taken by my brother, Dennis Eshelman.)

On New Years Eve 2001, I attended a city-sized street party on Hollywood Boulevard. Sometime between midnight and 1:00 AM I found myself waiting at a bus stop with two young Korean men who had just moved to Los Angeles for a year of study. While awaiting the bus, we talked about many things, and they eventually asked me if I had ever been to Korea. I said no, but my dad had fought there in the war. These two party-happy guys, born a generation after that war concluded, suddenly became very serious, the one with better English saying: “Please tell your father that he did a very great thing for my country and for my family, and I thank him.”

It recently occurred to me that I never remembered to tell him that, so I’m doing it now, and including the story here with this small honoring of Dad in particular, and of all of the infantrymen of our nation who found themselves cast onto the front lines far from their homes in all the bloody conflicts in which we have been involved then and since. I salute you!

NOT IN OUR NAME!

(New content 11/3/02)

My respect and admiration for those American servicemen who have endured the conditions of war in the name of their nation and of humanity should not be confused with my feelings about those politicians, especially in the present Administration, who would send soldiers to war. Within days after I last wrote on this subject, most of what I pleaded for became standard fare of the nightly news. Since then, the executive who, saber a-rattling, promised to lead us into war regardless of what the United Nations and U.S. Senate might say, has consented to the jurisdiction of the latter and sought cooperation with the former. This is definitely a move in the right direction, though scarcely enough.

I shan’t argue the matter at any great length right now, as I did before. I really just wanted to share a powerful and compelling document with you, which moved me enormously and of which I became a signer and supporter. It is titled Not in Our Name: A Statement of Conscience. If you are interested, you may read it here and learn more about it at www.nion.us.

UPGRADES, RENEWALS & RESOLUTIONS

(New content 11/3/02)

UPGRADES: If you’ve noticed a small increase in our already-fast page loads over the last six weeks, thank our wonderful web host, pair.com. On September 17, they upgraded our hosting machine to a new version of the FreeBSD UNIX operating system. We’re now running on FreeBSD version 4.6-STABLE. The prior stable version had a few time-lag problems when dealing with large folders. I think we also got one of the hardware upgrades they were installing concurrently. Downtime for this was only a few minutes. Users immediately began telling me that the site was even faster than before.

RENEWALS: I am pleased to be able to announce that, on October 1, Microsoft again honored me with its Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. My thanks for this go out to Microsoft’s Tony Hynes and Janni Clark in particular. This 2003 award is the fourth I have received. This year, they reorganized the categories a bit, and the award (previously attached to “Desktop Support,” then Windows 9x operating systems, then Windows XP) is, this year, in the area of Windows – Shell/User.

When I first received the MVP award in 1999, there were only a few hundred MS-MVPs world wide. Microsoft has now begun pouring more substantial resources into the program (especially in the area of training opportunities), and to otherwise growing the program. Almost twice as many people were awarded this year as last. Among the renewals were some other names that will be familiar to visitors of this site, including contributors Gary Woodruff (also in Windows – User/Shell), Alex Nichol (in the new Storage Management/File System category), and Felix Kasza (for Visual C++). Also receiving the award were AumHa VSOPs Andreas Kaestner (for Windows 9x), and Tom Porterfield, Jason Tsang, and Harry Ohrn (all for Windows – Shell/User). Congratulations to all! You can see the entire list of this year’s awardees (and follow links to more information about the Microsoft MVP program) here.

RESOLUTIONS: Finally, barring appeals, the MS vs. DOJ case is over. I’ve managed to stay away from the topic in this newsletter (though not on the newsgroups! <evil grin>), and don’t want to get deeply into it now. I will say only: Let’s move on!

HISTORY OF WINDOWS SUPPORT CENTER

(New content 11/3/02)

For those few of you that are interested in the history and growth of this Widows Support Center site over the last three years, I’ve recently restructured the “Honors & Recognitions” section of my Site Statistics page to be more of a history of the site.

For completely understandable reasons, Site Statistics is one of the least visited pages on the site. In fact, I’m just about the only one who ever looks at it! <g> I do like to track what’s happening, though, which includes not only total number of visitors in a given month, but also how this has fluctuated over time. I’m interested in evolving trends in which browsers and operating systems people are using, and so I track that. I enjoy seeing which pages have the most viewer interest, and seeing what causes this to change, just as I watch the search stats to see what you might be trying to find on this site that isn’t here yet. (All of you that unsuccessfully searched on vsmon for the last two weeks should try again — and also should update your antivirus software!)

In the newly revamped section, “History, Honors, Recognitions, & Records,” I now give more information on the site history, though the section primarily tracks notable recognitions the site has received and how this impacted visitation. A few lessons about ISP selection and site management work there way through the cracks. I recommend you start at the bottom and read your way back to the top — if you’re interested in this sort of thing. (I find it kinda fun.)

NEWS & VIEWS ARCHIVES

WELCOME TO THE E-LIST NEWS
(6/4/02)

AumHa VSOPs
(6/4/02)

SNIPPETS OF SITE NEWS

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUMS
(6/4/02)

WHITHER GOEST WINDOWS 95?
(6/4/02)

ANTIQUATED KB ARTICLE AWARD
(6/4/02)

THE STRANGE WINDOWS XP DOWNLOAD BUG
(6/5/02)

TRY TEOMA
(6/5/02)

LIFE AFTER DEATH FOR WINDOWS 95
(6/7/02)

SECURITY WARNING: BEWARE AMUHA.ORG
(6/10/02)

THANKED & EXCUSED
(6/16/02)

WINDOWS XP: THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE
(New content 6/16/02)

THIS SITE HAS MORE ZIP!
(New content 7/16/02)

FINAL WORD: WIN98 SUPPORT EXTENDED ONE YEAR
and No Cruelty to Animals

(New content 7/16/02)

GREAT SCOT!
And a warm welcome to our 300 newest subscribers.

(New content 7/25/02)

ANOTHER MS KNOWLEDGE BASE OVERHAUL
(New content 7/25/02)

WHERE DID JAVA GO?
(New content 7/25/02)

THEN MY PARTITION CRASHED...
(New content 7/25/02)

RECOVERING YOUR OUTLOOK EXPRESS CONTENTS
(New content 7/25/02)

JAVA BREWING
(New content 8/14/02)

HONORING CONTRIBUTION
(New content 8/14/02)

RESOLUTION RESOLUTION
(New content 8/14/02)

OUR BIGGEST MONTH EVER
(New content 9/1/02)

WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 1 IS RTM
(New content 9/1/02)

JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE, TAKE 3
(New content 9/1/02)

PAGES YOU AREN’T READING
(New content 9/1/02)

I DON’T LEND MONEY TO BILL GATES
(New content 9/1/02)

“SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE”
(New content 9/1/02; revised 9/2/02)

THE SWEET SPOT
(New content 8/14/02)

AWARDING NOBLE SERVICE
(New content 11/3/02)

NOT IN OUR NAME!
(New content 11/3/02)

UPGRADES, RENEWALS & RESOLUTIONS
(New content 11/3/02)

HISTORY OF WINDOWS SUPPORT CENTER
(New content 11/3/02)

MORE PROBLEMS WITH IE 6 ON WINDOWS 98
(New content 3 Nov 02)

KEEP YOUR ISP CONNECTED!
(New content 11/3/02)

THE	E	LIST	N	EWS
by Mr. E

NEWS & VIEWS ARCHIVES

WELCOME TO THE E-LIST NEWS (6/4/02)

AumHa VSOPs (6/4/02)

SNIPPETS OF SITE NEWS

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUMS (6/4/02)

WHITHER GOEST WINDOWS 95? (6/4/02)

ANTIQUATED KB ARTICLE AWARD (6/4/02)

THE STRANGE WINDOWS XP DOWNLOAD BUG (6/5/02)

TRY TEOMA (6/5/02)

LIFE AFTER DEATH FOR WINDOWS 95 (6/7/02)

SECURITY WARNING: BEWARE AMUHA.ORG (6/10/02)

THANKED & EXCUSED (6/16/02)

WINDOWS XP: THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE (New content 6/16/02)

THIS SITE HAS MORE ZIP! (New content 7/16/02)

FINAL WORD: WIN98 SUPPORT EXTENDED ONE YEAR and No Cruelty to Animals (New content 7/16/02)

GREAT SCOT! And a warm welcome to our 300 newest subscribers. (New content 7/25/02)

ANOTHER MS KNOWLEDGE BASE OVERHAUL (New content 7/25/02)

WHERE DID JAVA GO? (New content 7/25/02)

THEN MY PARTITION CRASHED... (New content 7/25/02)

RECOVERING YOUR OUTLOOK EXPRESS CONTENTS (New content 7/25/02)

JAVA BREWING (New content 8/14/02)

HONORING CONTRIBUTION (New content 8/14/02)

RESOLUTION RESOLUTION (New content 8/14/02)

OUR BIGGEST MONTH EVER (New content 9/1/02)

WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 1 IS RTM (New content 9/1/02)

JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE, TAKE 3 (New content 9/1/02)

PAGES YOU AREN’T READING (New content 9/1/02)

I DON’T LEND MONEY TO BILL GATES (New content 9/1/02)

“SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE” (New content 9/1/02; revised 9/2/02)

THE SWEET SPOT (New content 8/14/02)

AWARDING NOBLE SERVICE (New content 11/3/02)

NOT IN OUR NAME! (New content 11/3/02)

UPGRADES, RENEWALS & RESOLUTIONS (New content 11/3/02)

HISTORY OF WINDOWS SUPPORT CENTER (New content 11/3/02)

MORE PROBLEMS WITH IE 6 ON WINDOWS 98 (New content 3 Nov 02)

KEEP YOUR ISP CONNECTED! (New content 11/3/02)

WELCOME TO THE E-LIST NEWS
(6/4/02)

AumHa VSOPs
(6/4/02)

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUMS
(6/4/02)

WHITHER GOEST WINDOWS 95?
(6/4/02)

ANTIQUATED KB ARTICLE AWARD
(6/4/02)

THE STRANGE WINDOWS XP DOWNLOAD BUG
(6/5/02)

TRY TEOMA
(6/5/02)

LIFE AFTER DEATH FOR WINDOWS 95
(6/7/02)

SECURITY WARNING: BEWARE AMUHA.ORG
(6/10/02)

THANKED & EXCUSED
(6/16/02)

WINDOWS XP: THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE
(New content 6/16/02)

THIS SITE HAS MORE ZIP!
(New content 7/16/02)

FINAL WORD: WIN98 SUPPORT EXTENDED ONE YEAR
and No Cruelty to Animals

(New content 7/16/02)

GREAT SCOT!
And a warm welcome to our 300 newest subscribers.

(New content 7/25/02)

ANOTHER MS KNOWLEDGE BASE OVERHAUL
(New content 7/25/02)

WHERE DID JAVA GO?
(New content 7/25/02)

THEN MY PARTITION CRASHED...
(New content 7/25/02)

RECOVERING YOUR OUTLOOK EXPRESS CONTENTS
(New content 7/25/02)

JAVA BREWING
(New content 8/14/02)

HONORING CONTRIBUTION
(New content 8/14/02)

RESOLUTION RESOLUTION
(New content 8/14/02)

OUR BIGGEST MONTH EVER
(New content 9/1/02)

WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 1 IS RTM
(New content 9/1/02)

JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE, TAKE 3
(New content 9/1/02)

PAGES YOU AREN’T READING
(New content 9/1/02)

I DON’T LEND MONEY TO BILL GATES
(New content 9/1/02)

“SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE”
(New content 9/1/02; revised 9/2/02)

THE SWEET SPOT
(New content 8/14/02)

AWARDING NOBLE SERVICE
(New content 11/3/02)

NOT IN OUR NAME!
(New content 11/3/02)

UPGRADES, RENEWALS & RESOLUTIONS
(New content 11/3/02)

HISTORY OF WINDOWS SUPPORT CENTER
(New content 11/3/02)

MORE PROBLEMS WITH IE 6 ON WINDOWS 98
(New content 3 Nov 02)

KEEP YOUR ISP CONNECTED!
(New content 11/3/02)