[70] in sw-release-announce
Windows XP Advisory - Wait!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan McIndoe Hunt)
Fri Oct 5 14:53:46 2001
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20011005113623.07d57e98@hesiod>
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 14:50:01 -0400
To: itpartners@MIT.EDU, winpartners@MIT.EDU, sw-release-announce@MIT.EDU
From: Jonathan McIndoe Hunt <jmhunt@MIT.EDU>
Cc: infosys@MIT.EDU, itag@MIT.EDU
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Date: Friday, 5 October 2001
From: Jonathan Hunt <jmhunt@mit.edu>
To: itpartners@mit.edu, winpartners@mit.edu, sw-release-announce@mit.edu
Subj: Windows XP Advisory - Wait!
Cc: infosys@mit.edu, itag@mit.edu
------------
Good afternoon,
Microsoft will release the retail version of Windows XP on October 25,
2001. The two separate families of Windows operating systems, 95/98/ME and
NT/2000, will finally combine to have a single kernel in XP. Even though
the families are combined, two versions of XP will still exist:
Professional and Home Edition. The Home Edition will not be able to join
domains, significantly impacting its usefulness at MIT.
MIT's Software Release Team will be testing Windows XP with MIT critical
applications before the release date and will make the results available at
http://mit.edu/swrt/winxp/.
One critical application that does not work with Windows XP is Kerberos for
Windows 2.1, which means that Eudora and other Kerberos dependent
applications will not work. The Windows developers are working on a new
release of KfW to fix this problem. More information is available at
http://mit.edu/swrt/kfw/ .
Another area of concern centers on "Activation." Microsoft has reworked its
piracy protection, requiring all retail licenses be activated within 30
days of installation. Microsoft has also reworked its volume and
educational licensing agreements, so licensing for MIT is unclear.
IS strongly recommends that you neither buy machines pre-configured with
Windows XP nor upgrade existing machines to XP. MIT will work with our
vendors and MIT development teams to gear up for Windows XP support over
the next year. Until the applications critical to your area are supported
by their vendors under XP, running Windows XP will be a costly hassle.
If you have any questions or additional information on XP, please contact
winxp-release@mit.edu.
Please share this information with members of your department that are
responsible for ordering computers. A slightly shorter version of this
statement will appear in the Bits & Bytes column in the September/October
issue of the IS Newsletter scheduled to come out later this month.
Thanks,
Jonathan
______________________________________
Jonathan M. Hunt
Windows Platform Coordinator and
Co-Team Leader for Software Release Team
Information Systems
W92-191 x3-0172
