Businesses planning a move to Windows 7 need a more rigorous planning and assessment tool than the consumer-grade Upgrade Advisor. The early success of the operating system notwithstanding, you need to do some due diligence up front to determine if the existing hardware and software you rely on will work with the new operating system. If you only have a handful of systems to assess the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor should do the trick. For larger deployments, the more appropriate tool is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 4.0–or MAP.

MAP is a Solution Accelerator from Microsoft that allows you to inventory and analyze the systems in your organization without requiring any sort of agent software to be installed on the endpoints. MAP leverages existing Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory Domain Services, the Remote Registry Service, and the Computer Browser Service to gather information and produce informative reports to help guide your IT planning.

MAP analysis and reports can help with a variety of IT planning scenarios. MAP can help inventory servers and clients on the network, identify physical servers that are not being utilized effectively, and make recommendations for consolidating servers and virtualizing roles using Hyper-V. In this case though, we’re mainly interested in the ability of MAP to determine hardware compatibility and readiness for upgrading to Windows 7.

MAP identifies systems running earlier versions of Windows like Windows XP and Windows Vista, then compares the MAP scan results against Windows 7 minimum and recommended system requirements. Systems that do not meet the needs of Windows 7 for things like memory, free disk space, or processor speed are identified, and MAP makes specific recommendations for actions to take to make the system ready for Windows 7.

The resulting Windows 7 Readiness Summary report provides a simple overview of the number of systems that are ready for Windows 7, the number that are not ready, and the number that will never be ready. The MAP results deliver the information you need to get your hardware up to speed for Windows 7.

MAP is great, but it actually only tells half of the story compared with the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. You also have to consider the software you rely on and whether those applications will work in Windows 7. Microsoft has another Solution Accelerator to fill that need–Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT).

Similar to MAP, ACT will scan the systems on your network and identify any software that is incompatible with Windows 7. Most applications should be able to run under Windows 7. For those critical applications that don’t work in Windows 7, Microsoft provides XP Mode to bridge the gap and let you continue to run them in a virtual Windows XP system within Windows 7.

Armed with MAP and ACT results, you can plan your upgrade to Windows 7 to make it as efficient and hiccup-free as possible. A little due diligence and planning goes a long way to ensuring a smooth migration experience for your organization.

Next, determine which version of Windows 7 is right for you, and start planning your upgrade.

For more real-world tech solutions for small and midsized businesses–including cloud services, virtualization, and complete network overhauls–check out PC World’s Tech Audit.

Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He tweets as @PCSecurityNewsand provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com.

Consumer retail sales of Microsoft Corp.’s newest computer operating system topped those of Vista by 234% on a unit basis within the first few days of its Oct. 22 launch, according to a report released Friday by the market research company NPD Group. The report did not include sales to businesses and large organizations.

News that Windows 7 was outperforming Vista, the previous Windows OS version, in sales was not too surprising. The buzz for Windows 7 was relatively positive and largely void of the savage language that reviewers heaped on Vista when it was launched in January 2007.

This time, Microsoft also attempted to woo reluctant buyers with discounts and specials, such as a 50% discount on a copy of the software when buyers spring for a new PC, or a free upgrade from Vista for those who bought a PC after June 26.

“We definitely saw the results of aggressive pricing,” said Stephen Baker, NPD’s computer software analyst.

Though helpful in pushing volume, the discounts may have crimped Microsoft’s overall revenue from the product. The NPD report was mum on the sales impact on Microsoft’s top line.

It may be too early to say whether the software would help ignite sales of personal computers. With consumers making do with their old computers or opting for ultra-cheap netbooks, average PC prices have dropped around 20% since last year, Baker said.

Although unit sales of Windows 7 software were up in the first days of launch over those of Vista, sales of computers with Windows 7 were down 4% compared with sales of Vista-based computers when Vista launched.

But the comparison is not a fair one, Baker cautioned, because Vista launched in January, when PC sales tend to do better, and Windows 7 launched in October, one of the slowest months for PC sales.

Still, the slow economy may have helped Windows 7 sales in one respect, said Richard Shim, a PC analyst with the technology research company IDC.

“Usually upgrades are not very popular. People have tended to buy new PCs when new operating systems come out,” Shim said.

“Windows 7 seems to be an exception,” he said. “One reason is that it can work well with older computers because it’s designed to be streamlined.”

In other words, instead of spending $500 for a new computer, some consumers are springing the $120 to $220 for Windows 7 upgrades and souping up their old machines.

In a Monday blog post, Eric Ligman, global partner experience lead in Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Group, said his now-infamous blog post titled “Regardless of what any hack says, a Windows 7 upgrade is an upgrade” wasn’t aimed at Microsoft bloggers, but at technical workarounds that make it possible to clean install Windows 7 using upgrade media.

“So for anyone out there thinking my post was trying to ‘make an example’ of someone as a ‘hack’ or that I was calling someone specifically a ‘hack,’ sorry to disappoint you,” Ligman wrote in the blog post.

For the past several months, Windows 7 testers have been asking Microsoft for technical details on Windows 7 upgrades but the company hasn’t responded. So some Microsoft bloggers have developed workarounds for clean installing Windows 7 using upgrade media, something Microsoft says is illegal if a machine doesn’t have an existing version of Windows installed.

Ligman, as the public face of Microsoft’s Byzantine software licensing program, has been particularly vocal about the consequences of using improperly licensed software, often invoking the specter of Business Software Alliance audits and other legal troubles.

Some media reports have assumed Ligman’s “hack” reference was to Paul Thurrott of the Supersite For Windows blog, who published details on the Windows 7 upgrade workaround last week. Ed Bott, another noted Microsoft blogger, has also called out Microsoft over the issue. So have dozens of posters who’ve left comments on Ligman’s Microsoft SMB Community blog.

But Ligman insists he wasn’t using the term “hack” in a pejorative sense. “There appears to be a lot of reading through ‘pre-determined conclusion’ lenses,” Ligman wrote in the blog post.

Although Ligman is downplaying the issue, Thurrott sees it as an example of Microsoft’s heavy-handed approach to software licensing and its tendency to punish its body of customers for the actions of a few software pirates.

“This is very much about how Microsoft communicates with his customers, and while Ligman tries to make the case that Microsoft cares very much about its customers, this little episode is telling them otherwise,” Thurrott wrote in a Monday blog post .

The good news is that the Windows 7 upgrade kerfluffle has led to a great deal of feedback that Ligman says he has shared with higher-ups.

“I have submitted your various comments on this topic to the appropriate people for that topic and will be happy (believe me) to post the exact link to where you should go for this information as soon as I hear back,” Ligman wrote.

Kleinrock, while still a student at MIT, developed the principles of “packet switching,” which allows the basic data-transfer functions of the Internet. As a professor at UCLA, Kleinrock helped develop ARPANET, the interconnected computer network from which the Internet evolved. Today more than 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to the network.

What was that first momentous message, you may be wondering? It said simply “lo” — the message was meant to read “login,” but the computer crashed almost immediately.

That was the research network commissioned by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) to see whether computer-to-computer communications could be made faster, more reliable and more robust by using the novel technique of packet switching instead of the more conventional circuit switched networks of the day.

Instead of connecting computers rather as telephone exchanges work, using switches to set up an electric circuit over which data could be sent, packet switching breaks a message into chunks and sends each chunk – or packet – separately, reassembling them at the receiving end.

Late on October 29 1969 Charley Kline sat down at a computer in the computer laboratory at UCLA, where he was a student, and established a link to a system at the nearby Stanford Research Institute, sending the first data packets over the nascent Arpanet.

Later in the year permanent links were made between four sites in the US, and over the following years the ARPANET grew into a worldwide research network.

Arpanet was one of the computer networks that coalesced into today’s internet, and the influence of the standards and protocols established there can still be seen today, making this anniversary as important for historians of the network society as July’s celebration of the 1969 Apollo 11 landing is for those who study space science.

Technology does not stand still, and over the years the way computers communicate with each other has changed enormously. Early Arpanet computers used the Network Control Protocol to talk to each other, but in 1983 this was replaced with the more powerful and flexible TCP/IP – the transmission control protocol and internet protocol.

Today we are in the process of migrating our networks from IP version 4 to IP version 6, which allows for more devices to be connected to the network and is more secure and robust, but work continues to improve and refine all aspects of the network architecture.

One area that is changing is the domain name system, DNS. This links the unique number that identifies every device on the internet with one or more names, making it possible to type in “www.bbc.co.uk” and go to the right web server without having to remember its number.

Designed by engineer Paul Mockapetris in 1983, DNS is a vital component of the network as well as the web, including e-mail and instant messaging. Every time a programme uses a name for a computer instead of a number, DNS is involved.

However DNS, like so much of the network’s architecture, was developed by English-speaking westerners, and its original design only allowed standard ASCII characters to be used in names.

ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a way of representing letters, numbers and punctuation in the binary code used by computers, and was originally based on old telegraphic codes.

It works really well for English, but had to be extended and updated to cope with other alphabets, and has now been replaced by the much more powerful and capable Unicode standard, able to represent non-Latin languages as well as those based on the Latin alphabet.

Being able to write in your own language is one thing, but it’s also important to be able to have e-mail or website addresses that use it. Unfortunately the design of DNS meant that key aspects would not work with anything other than ASCII, making it impossible to simply add in Chinese or Arabic characters to domain.

Work has been going on since the mid 90′s to change this and provide what are called “internationalized domain names”, and many organisations are now able to have websites and email addresses that include Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and many other alphabets.

The process took a significant step forward this week when Icann, the international body that looks after domain names, fast-tracked a proposal to provide internationalised versions of two letter country domains, such as .uk and .jp.

This will finally allow users of these domains to have a domain name that is entirely in characters based on their native language, and marks an important point in the internationalisation of the whole internet.

It has taken a long time to make this happen, but the problems of re-engineering such a key part of the network infrastructure without breaking anything are enormous, and anyone who reads through the technical documentation will see just how complex the process has been.

And it was definitely necessary to do it properly – the fuss over the recent retuning of Freeview boxes in the UK was bad enough, but trying to persuade a billion internet users to update their software to support a new form of DNS would have been impossible.

Over the next five years the majority of new internet users will come from the non English-speaking world. It’s good to see that those of us who have helped build the network so far are making it more welcoming for them.

The computers at Microsoft Stores don’t have the crapware that Windows PCs typically come with, but they still have an assortment of Microsoft and Adobe software. Most controversially, they include Windows Live Essentials and Microsoft Security Essentials.

By Emil Protalinski | Last updated October 28, 2009 8:15 AM CT

The company made a lot of changes in the development of Windows 7 and marketing of Windows 7; now it appears the company is trying to change the software that comes with Windows 7. It's a shame that OEMs are unlikely follow suit.

For all the stories about enterprises holding off on Windows 7 deployments, Windows XP’s dominance in the enterprise is at the beginning of the end, says one industry analyst.

This will not happen overnight, writes Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray in a new research report, but there are enough reasons for IT managers to “shake the status quo, and finally end Windows XP’s corporate reign.”

XP, now an eight-year-old OS, “has delivered the compatibility, security, and reliability that firms had hoped for and to this day remains the desktop standard for most businesses and government agencies,” Gray writes.

Windows 7 Bible: Your Complete Guide to the Next Version of Windows

Indeed, Windows XP still powers almost 80 percent of commercial PCs, according to a survey of 665 IT decision-makers that was part of the Forrester report entitled “Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook.”

Nevertheless, many factors point to XP’s demise.

Two-thirds (66 percent) of the 655 surveyed IT decision-makers from North American and European enterprises and SMBs are planning to migrate to Windows 7 eventually, although most don’t have firm plans yet.

Additionally, the research shows that 51 percent of respondents plan to have Windows 7 as the primary OS on their PCs within 12 months. Forrester also urges that companies should prepare for employee requests for Windows 7 as it becomes more popular with consumers.

Here are five other key factors that Forrester believes will loosen Windows XP’s grip on the enterprise and make way for Windows 7.

Businesses Are Supporting Old Infrastructure

Forrester’s Gray writes that because of the recession, IT managers needed to lower costs by extending the life of existing desktops and laptops. Many also held off on hardware upgrades because they wanted them to coincide with a Windows 7 deployment. For global companies that support thousands of apps, compatibility testing can take up to 18 months. So if they’ve been testing in anticipation of Windows 7′s release, full deployments will conclude by the end of 2010.

Windows XP Support Is Waning

Since April of this year, Windows XP SP2 has been in the extended support stage, which means support is no longer free and only includes security updates and patches. Next July, XP SP3 will enter extended support as well. All support for Windows XP SP2 and SP3 will end in April 2014.

Windows XP Availability Will Get Pinched

The ability to buy Windows XP machines will change after Windows 7 becomes generally available this week, Gray writes. With the release of Windows 7′s first service pack, scheduled to be a year or so after its initial release, OEM licenses bundled with every PC will no longer have downgrade rights to XP.

This means that to deploy Windows XP on a new PC, companies will have to purchase volume license copies of Windows along with the new PCs or use existing, unused Windows volume licenses.

Business Reasons Encourage Upgrade to Windows 7

Forrester has found that the enterprise features in Windows 7 will help companies improve networking and security and ultimately cut costs. Some features that Forrester recommends IT departments prepare for include:

DirectAccess, which lets remote workers connect to corporate networks without the use of a VPN; BranchCache, which speeds up access to networks in remote offices that are away from corporate headquarters; BitLocker To Go, an extension of the BitLocker hard-drive encryption feature introduced in Vista that will now protect removable devices like external hard drives and USB thumb drives; AppLocker, which aims to protect users from running unauthorized software; and federated search, which promises to simplify access to data across local and remote networks.

Improved Client Virtualization Can Accelerate Deployment Plans

Windows 7 ships with Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode, which provide the ability to run apps not yet compatible with Windows 7 in an XP-compatible virtual machine.

Moreover, customers with software assurance agreements can use MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack), a subscription-based suite of apps that includes virtualization technologies allowing IT pros to deploy and manage virtual images, “thus removing the last barriers to deploy Windows 7,” writes Gray.

“I’m Steve Ballmer and I’m a Windows 7 PC,” he announced.

The idea behind the new OS is to make computing “simpler, faster, more responsive,” he said. That was possible thanks to an “intense collaboration” between Microsoft and its partners – 50,000 software, hardware, and peripheral vendors, as well as 8 million beta testers, he said.

“Windows needs to be an incredible opportunity for innovation, for hardware companies [and] software companies, and it needs to be a place that is simple and easy to use and opens up the world of diverse innovation … in a way that is manageable and consumable by billions of people around the world,” Ballmer said.

Ballmer pointed to three key components of the OS: it works in the way you want it to work, it simplifies, and it enables new technologies.
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Users want their PC to fire up quickly, to be responsive, and have a longer battery life, and “I think we’ve accomplished that” with Windows 7, Ballmer said.

“The things that you do all the time need to be simpler,” Ballmer said. “You want to manage the windows on your desktop [and] make that stuff super, super simple.”

New technologies include the OSes multi-touch computing capabilities, he said.

“Frankly, there’s more you can do with this system,” Ballmer said. “Ninety-five times out of 100, if people have a choice, they choose a PC.”

Microsoft announced that next month, Amazon will launch a beta version of the Kindle Reader for Windows 7, which will allow users to peruse books using multi-touch. Scroll through a book with the touch of a finger, and zoom in or out by pinching the screen.

“From the end-user perspective, you get dozens or hundreds of new features – everybody finds their own unique set of features to fall in love with,” he said.

Ballmer was introduced by Kylie, the precocious five-year-old who is the star of Microsoft’s latest ad campaign. “You were late,” she informed him when Ballmer asked if she had enjoyed their meeting yesterday. He blamed airport delays and then presented her with a pink netbook as a consolation prize.

I’m all for technology advancements–a new OS, a slicker smartphone, Tang, whatever. Now Acer’s making an odd-but-interesting bet with its new Aspire 5738DG laptop: a 3D display. Yep, the future is now–watch out for flying DeLoreans!

Before I crack any more jokes, let me explain what goes into Acer’s 3D technology. Ray Sawall, senior manager of product marketing for Acer America, took a few minutes to break it down for me. Forget fancy proprietary names (TriDef 3D screen!), what’s at work here are polarized plastic shades, a 60-Hz polarized display, and software working in tandem to trick the image into seeming three-dimensional.

With 3D movies (like, say, Monsters vs. Aliens), it works. It also does the best it can to represent 2D images in 3D. I haven’t had a chance to test it just yet, but the spokespeople say I need to check out The Lord of the Rings–and I will soon, since I expect to see a review unit any day now.
3D: Must-Have Tech, or Gimmick?

Obviously, the big deal here is what this could mean to gamers. I should know; I’m a card-carrying member. The video game crowd’s been chasing that 3D dragon for ages, with some of the best results coming from real-time strategy titles like Command & Conquer 3. Most recently, Resident Evil 5 is a great example of what 3D can do to make the action jump off the screen.

Or maybe Excel spreadsheets will come alive as you get lost in cells–exciting, I know.

Is 3D too much of a niche gimmick? I’m inclined to think so. 3D seems to be the new rationale to sell movie theater tickets, special-edition Blu-ray discs, and apparently PC hardware.

Even Acer’s Sawall seems to agree: “My gut is that [touch-screen technology] has more traction than 3D. Honestly, I’m not sure if there’s a home for 3D in mobile.”

Still, Sawall says the Aspire 5738DG’s been better received by retailers than expected.
Decent Specs for a Good Price

The Aspire 5738DG, available later this week with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit edition, packs decent hardware for the $780 asking price: an Intel Core 2 Duo processor T6600, an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 GPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB 5400-rpm hard drive. Stay tuned and I’ll give you the skinny on how well this machine works when I get my hands on it.

What are your thoughts? Substance, style–or something in-between? Hit the Comment box below or send e-mail to PC World with “ATTN: Laptops (3D? I can barely handle two dimensions)” in the subject line.

Need even more nerdity? Follow PC World Senior Writer Darren Gladstone on Twitter (gizmogladstone) for oddball links, 140-character game reviews, and whatever else comes to mind.

For those of us still waiting for Linux to hit the desktop, this type of packaging may be exactly how the move from Windows starts to pick up steam.

The IBM Client for Smart Work was first launched in South Africa in September and was initially geared toward emerging markets. IBM found that there was strong interest in the U.S. and other markets that had aging PC infrastructure and little desire for continued Windows upgrades.

The U.S. version of the package contains a number of IBM products including word processing and spreadsheets via Lotus Symphony, e-mail via Lotus Notes or LotusLive iNotes, and collaboration tools from LotusLive.com. As with the previously launched initiative, the package runs on Ubuntu Linux.

Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of Linux and open source, told me that the target is not a drop-in replacement scenario, but rather something for IT shops that don’t want to be stuck in an endless cycle of upgrading desktop operating systems and applications.

This is an interesting development for multiple reasons:

* IBM and Canonical are teaming up to bring Linux to the desktop, offering what could be considered a next-generation thin-client that relies on cloud services but remains based on an actual operating system rather than just running in a Web browser.
* IBM is targeting Windows installations in the co-opetition model the company excels in–effectively insulating itself regardless of who wins the desktop.
* Canonical is building a channel to deliver solutions rather than depend on individuals and organizations to roll their own.

IBM has been making some interesting moves of late, launching a cloud-based e-mail and collaboration suite to rival Google Apps and now a direct attack on Microsoft’s operating system footprint.