Ed Smiley's Blog

An interesting thought came to mind while reading the Windows Incident Response blog yesterday. A link provided by Claus brings up an interesting concept, XPM.  Windows XP Mode (XPM) is a “Virtual PC-based virtual environment and a fully licensed copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3). It will be made available, for free, to users of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions via a download from the Microsoft web site.”  Sound cool, but what happens with the security patches that come out after SP3?  With so many people who don’t bother to patch their systems, would this just create a bigger problem with 2 possibly unpatched operating systems available as a target to exploit?  There seems to be some kinks that need to be worked out on the security end as I have not heard any talk of how this will be patched and what will happen once XP is no longer supported.  I will be curious to see how this pans out in the near future.

EDIT: Some more interesting news has been coming out about XPM (via Slashdot):

Microsoft, Intel goof up Windows 7′s “XP Mode”

Windows 7′s ‘XP mode’: Right idea, wrong technology

Windows 7′s ‘XP Mode’: A Great Idea, on Paper

at least that I touch!

Quite often I open up a Windows command window and ‘cd‘ into a directory and type ‘ls‘ only to be returned with:

‘ls’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Lifehacker links to a set of Unix utilities that adds to over 100 commands to your windows command line Window.

I think I am going to make this a default install on all of our Windows machines.