Oh, I see the patches you found. Yea, that is just a problem with naming. This new x64 product is called Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. The older itanium product was just called like Windows XP 64-Bit Professional or something like that. All the naming issues on the various external web pages will be cleaned up by the time we ship so that there is no confusion. (BTW, that patch you linked to said "Date Published: 5/28/2003" on it... I'm pretty confident that in the year and a half since that patch was released that we managed to get the fix in to the core code base )
I thought you had meant you were in the beta program, where you would have some beta ID and some password to provide your beta feedback. If you just got the disk from torrent or the customer preview program you won't have those. You could try posting in one of the public newsgroups, but those are not monitored quite as much as our beta forums of course.
You could try getting the RC1 bits when they are released later this month to the general public and try again. In the mean time it may, or may not, be reassuring to know that notepad, outlook, and media player are used trillions of times a day within the Windows development team. Notepad is super useful, Outlook we couldn't do our jobs without (email, calendaring, etc), Media Player is even used as a critical business app (it could be argued that listening to music is 'critical', but really all of my voice mail messages are delivered to me as media files in my inbox).
One of the things that I oversee if signoff on all of the builds that we release externally (for Server SP1 & x64), and we have never released one that couldn't launch notepad or Outlook (I wouldn't be able to send the 'okay, release it' mail otherwise, heh).
Do you work for yourself or something where you can switch machine configurations at will for something as important as video production? Digital content creation (ack, buzzword, sorry) is going to get a huge boost when we release x64. Ignoring all the other benefits and just focusing on the addressable RAM one, man, being able to manipulate huge images in memory is going to rock. I remember how my use of Photoshop changed when I was able to upgrade from 64 megs to 1.5 gigs of RAM, and this 64-bit increase is going to be so huge it is going to make entirely new things possible.
I'd like to know a little more about what apps you are using and stuff, so why don't you shot me an email.
Glad we could help you with such an important task. I think I'll incorporate that in to my daily 'selfhosting'. All in the name of science of course - I wouldn't want to regress the scenario you've grown accustomed to!
Remember the "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" that helped people migrate between machines, and even different OS versions? (I think it was released with the original XP) It supported moving files between like Win 95, 98, XP, etc by direct cable connection or by generating a file of settings that could be transfered some other way (drive, net).
Well, it is still around. You will be able to use it to migrate your files and settings from your old 32-bit install to your new 64-bit install.
I hope that "free" sounds good to you:) Once we RTM there is going to be a program in place where you can swap your 32-bit license for a 64-bit license. I don't know all the details on it, like time frames and stuff, but we aren't going to be penalizing the early adopters.
Lots of copy protection schemes are done through drivers. Since x64 doesn't use 32-bit drivers some stuff needs to get updated, that is dictated by the timelines of those companies.
That said, application compatibility is high up on our list of things to watch, so don't worry to much. I've seen Doom 3 and Far Cry run on x64 boxes, BTW.
It has already been made available to your beta testers and MSDN subscribers, that's where a lot of people that are talking about it got it.
For the general public, the "Customer Preview Program" link you found on microsoft.com, the RC1 build will be up later this month. I won't make a guarantee, but you may want to check back on Thursday.
There are no patches on Windows Update for you to download. The new version of the site that supports x64 should be up soon (if it isn't already up).
There is support for grabbing drivers off of some USB hardware, I don't remember what all of it entailed or if all of that support made it in before the RC was released or not. There are machines that no longer ship with floppy drives, and we understand that.
There are some SATA drivers "in box", but Windows never has had drivers for 100% of hardware built in. Even for drivers that will end up "in box" by the time XP x64 ships they aren't all necessarily there yet.
In general if you have hardware or software with drivers that you want to use and they are not currently supporting 64-bit platforms then email them. If some random software company hears that their customers want a 64-bit version of the product that may help move it up their priority list.
If you weren't just trolling you could have done a web search and found plenty of data that shows the stability of Windows does, in fact, increase with every release. You should use terms such as "availability" "uptime" "reliability" "five nines" and "99." to help you find this.
If you buy junk hardware or have horrible management practices then you aren't going to be able to achieve the high availability numbers. If you buy good hardware, make wise decisions on the application vendors you support, and have solid maintenance & change management procedures in place you could find yourself in the "five nines" club.
(If I remember correctly: 99.999% uptime means only 5 minutes of downtime a year, and jumping up to 6 nines reduces that to only 20 seconds of downtime per year.)
You can't use existing 32-bit drivers in the 64-bit OS. Hardware vendors will have to provide new drivers for people to download.
What you probably heard is how the chip itself works. Until the 64-bit operating system is released you can (and many do since AMD-based machines have been available for awhile now) run an existing 32-bit operating system. Server 2003, XPSP2, even 32-bit linux installs. One of the cool things about these chips is that if you are running a 32-bit OS the chip is totally 32-bit compatible. All your existing drivers, applications, etc will work. (but you don't get the benefits of being 64-bit until you install the new OS and drivers)
There is no content on WU for XP x64 at the moment. (because there are no patches needed)
The error you are getting is misleading, don't worry about it. The current live site didn't support x64 when we released RC1, so it didn't have all the correct error messages in it. The pages that do support x64 will be live soon (if they aren't already).
I won't name any program names, but you would be really surprised. There are many modern (like last year) 32-bit applications that still make use of a 16-bit installer.
If you're an application vendor and you already own a license to an installer product that you have a lot of experience with it is possible that you might not spend the money to upgrade to a more recent version of that product if you didn't need to use any of its other new features.
We're doing a number of things to help mitigate this issue. There aren't that many 16-bit installers (the actual installer program itself) that are still being used by these app vendors, so there are some on-the-fly kind of things we can try to do to make the installation seamless. Whether we're able to do that for any particular app or not, we have good communication with different companies and it is pretty easy to make this issue known to them.
No, 16-bit applications are not supported on the 64-bit operating system for technical reasons. Some of those are probably described on the internet already, I don't want to attempt that right now, I wouldn't want to get a bit wrong going off the top of my head. (think address space, pointers, bit shuttling, overhead, etc)
In general this won't be a problem, but there are still some current apps (modern 32-bit apps) that use 16-bit installers. There are a number of things being done to mitigate this issue, including working directly with the application vendors to make sure they understand the issue.
There are tons of 'in box' drivers, and a bunch of 3rd party drivers available.
What particular pieces of hardware are you having trouble with? Support for some old video cards was removed between the Beta and RC1, I could check on your particular card.
I replied on your web page, but here is my response so the people that read/. can see it:
If you are a part of the x64 beta program you probably posted your Windows Update question to the support group already, but in case you have not had time I will fill you in. (I work at Microsoft)
The 'not an admin' error was a known issue with an incorrect error message being returned. The Windows Update service was not set up to support the x64 beta but didn't have an appropriate error message to return. That has since been corrected.
As for why you were getting errors about the patches not installing 'when in fact i did [have the correct operating system]'... Actually, you don't.:)
The error message was correct, because the OS you are running is a 64-bit one, which will require 64-bit versions of patches instead of 32-bit versions that the 'old' XP required. The error message also could have been indicating that you don't have the correct version, which is also correct. You are running a pre-release build of an operating system that is not the same version number as the previously released XPSP2. A 32-bit XPSP2 patch will not install on a 64-bit pre-release XP x64 product for both of those reasons.
Also, I'm not sure what patches you were trying to install, but none are available for this x64 build because none are currently needed.
As for our other problems, It sounds like there is something really wrong with your install. You should post to the beta support group for assistance, and so that we can find any actual OS issues and fix them.
If there was a problem where neither notepad nor Outlook worked at all it would have been noticed. Those two apps are on my 'short list' of apps I require to be able to do my daily work. Media Player too, that team (as with all the Windows components) were required to run extensive test passes before the RC could be released. I can't comment on your specific scenario, but again I would suggest you post to the support group, possibly including one of the audio files that you find crashes your system.
Oh, and build 1289 actually isn't a 'beta' it was the first 'Release Candidate'. The beta was build 1069, provided to the beta program participants in 2003.
TexVex, I want to thank you for that post!
Saying that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the 64 and 32-bit versions actually is a great compliment, and validation that we're doing our jobs.
One of our goals with the x64 product is to make sure that the experience people migrating over get is flawless. There will be a lot of 32-bit applications out there for a long time, and we're working hard to make sure we don't have any regressions in functionality from XPSP2 / 32-bit versions of the OS.
The closer we get to the final ship date the more 3rd party drivers will be available (and easier to find on those company's websites of course). Just you wait until you see some x64 apps / games, it will rock your socks.
Yes there are some tools that we use that take advantage of IE only features. But lots of people are just lazy when they write them. I have complained to a number of web teams that their app doesn't work on [whatever random browser I'm playing with that week] and I get way more 'oh well, most everyone is using IE so its fine' responses than 'oh crap, i will go see what i did wrong'.
There is plenty of nifty stuff that can be done without using IE only features using XML, Javascript, DHTML, even ASP.NET. There are also a number of nifty things that can not be done in IE - one of the tools I wrote looks better in non-IE browsers due to a way IE handles some CSS.
No, nothing so sinister as a secret version of IE. What is refered to as "IE hard" or "IE hardening" is officially called the "Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration". That feature was included, as the default, in Windows Server 2003.
Basically it wrenches security settings up pretty high, really makes use of security zones, and in general makes it hard to screw up your server by surfing the web. (yes "stupid toolbars, active-x controls and crap you don't need' gets deactivated)
There are a lot of people working on the project, not everyone is involved in every single investigation / discussion / issue. When he says 'we' he means 'we', he isn't one of those condescending people like you mention in your message. Hundreds of people had his cell phone number and knew that if they encountered a bad problem close to a deadline, or a big issue that needed to be discussed ASAP that they could call it. If you don't believe me, you could ask my wife who would not hesitate to complain about 1am+ conference calls that I was on.
"No Execute" is also called "Data Execution Prevention" now. Basically it is a way to mark pages in memory as locations for data only, and not some places that executable code can be put. If you try to execute code from one of these pages -boom-.
Here is one of the microsoft.com pages on DEP: DEP info
There are a number of ways to make a "hardened" IE functional for users in a terminal server based environment.
The simple "big hammer" approach would be to turn off the feature. Add/Remove Programs control panel -> Add/Remove Windows Components -> deselect the "Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration" option (that might not be the exact name, but it is close).
Alternatively you could live within the confines of IE Hard. Add your companies internal web sites to the 'trusted' list, and then your employees can access them with out problem. They can still view "other" web pages, they just won't be able to run flash/activex/etc on them. This is fairly reasonable for a company that tells its employees that the computers on their desk are not their personal property, and that they aren't supposed to be used for personal stuff.
The other alternative is to fidget with the various security level settings to make a happy medium between the two. There is a decent amount of documentation available on this. If you aren't certain what you're doing and just randomly change settings you could end up putting the machine in an even more insecure mode than simply turning IE hardening off though.
I'm not making any comment on the quality / focus / appropriateness of the article here (I haven't read the entire thing yet), this is just a response to your message.
Well some would say if you have no abilities, one can always become a project manager, but that would be cynical wouldn't it?
That would be both cynical and wrong. The good project managers are the ones that actually understand the technical details. When talking with one of the dev/testers about an issue it would be difficult to be able to make a good decision if you didn't understand what all the technical jargon spewing out of their mouth meant or what the code snippet that you just got in email was demonstrating. And, as with any rewarding job, I continue to learn new things every day.
For the release of Server 2003 Todd was my manager. He really is a great guy, and I wouldn't hesitate to work for him again if the opportunity came up. (As you can read in the article after Server 2003 shipped he went over to the security team, while I continued my position moving to the Server 2003 SP1 & x64 project).
He wasn't one of those managers who read the lame management books (usually written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about) and spouted stupid catch phrases ("There is no 'I' in team!") all the time if that was what you were thinking after reading that particular passage.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have the address of a site that can turn your x64 off please share, and I will happily forward it on to the appropriate people.
Which ones? We've got pretty good 32-bit compatibility, unless the application uses a 16-bit installer or installs 32-bit drivers.
Oh, I see the patches you found. Yea, that is just a problem with naming. This new x64 product is called Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. The older itanium product was just called like Windows XP 64-Bit Professional or something like that. All the naming issues on the various external web pages will be cleaned up by the time we ship so that there is no confusion. (BTW, that patch you linked to said "Date Published: 5/28/2003" on it... I'm pretty confident that in the year and a half since that patch was released that we managed to get the fix in to the core code base )
I thought you had meant you were in the beta program, where you would have some beta ID and some password to provide your beta feedback. If you just got the disk from torrent or the customer preview program you won't have those. You could try posting in one of the public newsgroups, but those are not monitored quite as much as our beta forums of course.
You could try getting the RC1 bits when they are released later this month to the general public and try again. In the mean time it may, or may not, be reassuring to know that notepad, outlook, and media player are used trillions of times a day within the Windows development team. Notepad is super useful, Outlook we couldn't do our jobs without (email, calendaring, etc), Media Player is even used as a critical business app (it could be argued that listening to music is 'critical', but really all of my voice mail messages are delivered to me as media files in my inbox).
One of the things that I oversee if signoff on all of the builds that we release externally (for Server SP1 & x64), and we have never released one that couldn't launch notepad or Outlook (I wouldn't be able to send the 'okay, release it' mail otherwise, heh).
Do you work for yourself or something where you can switch machine configurations at will for something as important as video production? Digital content creation (ack, buzzword, sorry) is going to get a huge boost when we release x64. Ignoring all the other benefits and just focusing on the addressable RAM one, man, being able to manipulate huge images in memory is going to rock. I remember how my use of Photoshop changed when I was able to upgrade from 64 megs to 1.5 gigs of RAM, and this 64-bit increase is going to be so huge it is going to make entirely new things possible.
I'd like to know a little more about what apps you are using and stuff, so why don't you shot me an email.
Glad we could help you with such an important task. I think I'll incorporate that in to my daily 'selfhosting'. All in the name of science of course - I wouldn't want to regress the scenario you've grown accustomed to!
Remember the "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" that helped people migrate between machines, and even different OS versions? (I think it was released with the original XP) It supported moving files between like Win 95, 98, XP, etc by direct cable connection or by generating a file of settings that could be transfered some other way (drive, net).
Well, it is still around. You will be able to use it to migrate your files and settings from your old 32-bit install to your new 64-bit install.
I hope that "free" sounds good to you :) Once we RTM there is going to be a program in place where you can swap your 32-bit license for a 64-bit license. I don't know all the details on it, like time frames and stuff, but we aren't going to be penalizing the early adopters.
Lots of copy protection schemes are done through drivers. Since x64 doesn't use 32-bit drivers some stuff needs to get updated, that is dictated by the timelines of those companies.
That said, application compatibility is high up on our list of things to watch, so don't worry to much. I've seen Doom 3 and Far Cry run on x64 boxes, BTW.
It has already been made available to your beta testers and MSDN subscribers, that's where a lot of people that are talking about it got it.
For the general public, the "Customer Preview Program" link you found on microsoft.com, the RC1 build will be up later this month. I won't make a guarantee, but you may want to check back on Thursday.
There are no patches on Windows Update for you to download. The new version of the site that supports x64 should be up soon (if it isn't already up).
There is support for grabbing drivers off of some USB hardware, I don't remember what all of it entailed or if all of that support made it in before the RC was released or not. There are machines that no longer ship with floppy drives, and we understand that.
There are some SATA drivers "in box", but Windows never has had drivers for 100% of hardware built in. Even for drivers that will end up "in box" by the time XP x64 ships they aren't all necessarily there yet.
In general if you have hardware or software with drivers that you want to use and they are not currently supporting 64-bit platforms then email them. If some random software company hears that their customers want a 64-bit version of the product that may help move it up their priority list.
If you weren't just trolling you could have done a web search and found plenty of data that shows the stability of Windows does, in fact, increase with every release. You should use terms such as "availability" "uptime" "reliability" "five nines" and "99." to help you find this.
If you buy junk hardware or have horrible management practices then you aren't going to be able to achieve the high availability numbers. If you buy good hardware, make wise decisions on the application vendors you support, and have solid maintenance & change management procedures in place you could find yourself in the "five nines" club.
(If I remember correctly: 99.999% uptime means only 5 minutes of downtime a year, and jumping up to 6 nines reduces that to only 20 seconds of downtime per year.)
You can't use existing 32-bit drivers in the 64-bit OS. Hardware vendors will have to provide new drivers for people to download.
What you probably heard is how the chip itself works. Until the 64-bit operating system is released you can (and many do since AMD-based machines have been available for awhile now) run an existing 32-bit operating system. Server 2003, XPSP2, even 32-bit linux installs. One of the cool things about these chips is that if you are running a 32-bit OS the chip is totally 32-bit compatible. All your existing drivers, applications, etc will work.
(but you don't get the benefits of being 64-bit until you install the new OS and drivers)
There is no content on WU for XP x64 at the moment. (because there are no patches needed)
The error you are getting is misleading, don't worry about it. The current live site didn't support x64 when we released RC1, so it didn't have all the correct error messages in it. The pages that do support x64 will be live soon (if they aren't already).
I won't name any program names, but you would be really surprised. There are many modern (like last year) 32-bit applications that still make use of a 16-bit installer.
If you're an application vendor and you already own a license to an installer product that you have a lot of experience with it is possible that you might not spend the money to upgrade to a more recent version of that product if you didn't need to use any of its other new features.
We're doing a number of things to help mitigate this issue. There aren't that many 16-bit installers (the actual installer program itself) that are still being used by these app vendors, so there are some on-the-fly kind of things we can try to do to make the installation seamless. Whether we're able to do that for any particular app or not, we have good communication with different companies and it is pretty easy to make this issue known to them.
I'm not making any promises, but check the CPP later this week (like Thursday or Friday).
No, 16-bit applications are not supported on the 64-bit operating system for technical reasons. Some of those are probably described on the internet already, I don't want to attempt that right now, I wouldn't want to get a bit wrong going off the top of my head. (think address space, pointers, bit shuttling, overhead, etc)
In general this won't be a problem, but there are still some current apps (modern 32-bit apps) that use 16-bit installers. There are a number of things being done to mitigate this issue, including working directly with the application vendors to make sure they understand the issue.
There are tons of 'in box' drivers, and a bunch of 3rd party drivers available.
What particular pieces of hardware are you having trouble with? Support for some old video cards was removed between the Beta and RC1, I could check on your particular card.
I replied on your web page, but here is my response so the people that read /. can see it:
:)
If you are a part of the x64 beta program you probably posted your Windows Update question to the support group already, but in case you have not had time I will fill you in. (I work at Microsoft)
The 'not an admin' error was a known issue with an incorrect error message being returned. The Windows Update service was not set up to support the x64 beta but didn't have an appropriate error message to return. That has since been corrected.
As for why you were getting errors about the patches not installing 'when in fact i did [have the correct operating system]'... Actually, you don't.
The error message was correct, because the OS you are running is a 64-bit one, which will require 64-bit versions of patches instead of 32-bit versions that the 'old' XP required. The error message also could have been indicating that you don't have the correct version, which is also correct. You are running a pre-release build of an operating system that is not the same version number as the previously released XPSP2. A 32-bit XPSP2 patch will not install on a 64-bit pre-release XP x64 product for both of those reasons.
Also, I'm not sure what patches you were trying to install, but none are available for this x64 build because none are currently needed.
As for our other problems, It sounds like there is something really wrong with your install. You should post to the beta support group for assistance, and so that we can find any actual OS issues and fix them.
If there was a problem where neither notepad nor Outlook worked at all it would have been noticed. Those two apps are on my 'short list' of apps I require to be able to do my daily work. Media Player too, that team (as with all the Windows components) were required to run extensive test passes before the RC could be released. I can't comment on your specific scenario, but again I would suggest you post to the support group, possibly including one of the audio files that you find crashes your system.
Oh, and build 1289 actually isn't a 'beta' it was the first 'Release Candidate'. The beta was build 1069, provided to the beta program participants in 2003.
TexVex, I want to thank you for that post! Saying that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the 64 and 32-bit versions actually is a great compliment, and validation that we're doing our jobs.
One of our goals with the x64 product is to make sure that the experience people migrating over get is flawless. There will be a lot of 32-bit applications out there for a long time, and we're working hard to make sure we don't have any regressions in functionality from XPSP2 / 32-bit versions of the OS.
The closer we get to the final ship date the more 3rd party drivers will be available (and easier to find on those company's websites of course). Just you wait until you see some x64 apps / games, it will rock your socks.
Yes there are some tools that we use that take advantage of IE only features. But lots of people are just lazy when they write them. I have complained to a number of web teams that their app doesn't work on [whatever random browser I'm playing with that week] and I get way more 'oh well, most everyone is using IE so its fine' responses than 'oh crap, i will go see what i did wrong'.
There is plenty of nifty stuff that can be done without using IE only features using XML, Javascript, DHTML, even ASP.NET. There are also a number of nifty things that can not be done in IE - one of the tools I wrote looks better in non-IE browsers due to a way IE handles some CSS.
No, nothing so sinister as a secret version of IE. What is refered to as "IE hard" or "IE hardening" is officially called the "Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration". That feature was included, as the default, in Windows Server 2003.
Basically it wrenches security settings up pretty high, really makes use of security zones, and in general makes it hard to screw up your server by surfing the web. (yes "stupid toolbars, active-x controls and crap you don't need' gets deactivated)
Here are two pages that describe it:
A page briefly describing settings that are different from Windows 2000
Another page that has a little more detail
There are a lot of people working on the project, not everyone is involved in every single investigation / discussion / issue.
When he says 'we' he means 'we', he isn't one of those condescending people like you mention in your message. Hundreds of people had his cell phone number and knew that if they encountered a bad problem close to a deadline, or a big issue that needed to be discussed ASAP that they could call it. If you don't believe me, you could ask my wife who would not hesitate to complain about 1am+ conference calls that I was on.
"No Execute" is also called "Data Execution Prevention" now. Basically it is a way to mark pages in memory as locations for data only, and not some places that executable code can be put. If you try to execute code from one of these pages -boom-.
Here is one of the microsoft.com pages on DEP: DEP info
There are a number of ways to make a "hardened" IE functional for users in a terminal server based environment.
The simple "big hammer" approach would be to turn off the feature. Add/Remove Programs control panel -> Add/Remove Windows Components -> deselect the "Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration" option (that might not be the exact name, but it is close).
Alternatively you could live within the confines of IE Hard. Add your companies internal web sites to the 'trusted' list, and then your employees can access them with out problem. They can still view "other" web pages, they just won't be able to run flash/activex/etc on them. This is fairly reasonable for a company that tells its employees that the computers on their desk are not their personal property, and that they aren't supposed to be used for personal stuff.
The other alternative is to fidget with the various security level settings to make a happy medium between the two. There is a decent amount of documentation available on this. If you aren't certain what you're doing and just randomly change settings you could end up putting the machine in an even more insecure mode than simply turning IE hardening off though.
That would be both cynical and wrong. The good project managers are the ones that actually understand the technical details. When talking with one of the dev/testers about an issue it would be difficult to be able to make a good decision if you didn't understand what all the technical jargon spewing out of their mouth meant or what the code snippet that you just got in email was demonstrating. And, as with any rewarding job, I continue to learn new things every day.
For the release of Server 2003 Todd was my manager. He really is a great guy, and I wouldn't hesitate to work for him again if the opportunity came up. (As you can read in the article after Server 2003 shipped he went over to the security team, while I continued my position moving to the Server 2003 SP1 & x64 project).
He wasn't one of those managers who read the lame management books (usually written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about) and spouted stupid catch phrases ("There is no 'I' in team!") all the time if that was what you were thinking after reading that particular passage.