Businesses have dragged their feet on upgrading from the ten-year-old Windows XP to newer versions of Microsoft’s operating system. First, they skipped Windows Vista en masse after the OS was the target of scorn from critics and IT analysts. Now, they are making the upgrade to Windows 7, but analysts at Gartner are worried some XP-using businesses will consider skipping Windows 7 in anticipation of next year’s release of Windows 8.

This would not be wise, Gartner and other analyst firms say. Microsoft will end support for Windows XP in April 2014. For a home user, that is a long time away. But enterprises have long deployment cycles for new operating systems that depend heavily on budgets, internal processes and third-party vendors updating applications to support the latest version of Windows.

Businesses have dragged their feet on upgrading from the ten-year-old Windows XP to newer versions of Microsoft’s operating system. First, they skipped Windows Vista en masse after the OS was the target of scorn from critics and IT analysts. Now, they are making the upgrade to Windows 7, but analysts at Gartner are worried some XP-using businesses will consider skipping Windows 7 in anticipation of next year’s release of Windows 8.

This would not be wise, Gartner and other analyst firms say. Microsoft will end support for Windows XP in April 2014. For a home user, that is a long time away. But enterprises have long deployment cycles for new operating systems that depend heavily on budgets, internal processes and third-party vendors updating applications to support the latest version of Windows.

PC users who run Windows and Linux on the same machine will want to do some research before purchasing a Windows 8 computer. That's because systems with a "Designed for Windows 8" logo must ship with UEFI secure booting enabled—a move that prevents booting operating systems that aren’t signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.

This could pose a problem for Linux users, though in practice most can just change UEFI settings to disable secure boot before installing the open-source OS. But users will have to depend on hardware vendors to make this option possible in the first place.

The Windows Live outage that took down Hotmail and SkyDrive on Sept. 8 was caused by a failed upgrade to a tool that balances network traffic, Microsoft has explained. The update went awry because of a corrupted file in Microsoft’s DNS service.

“A tool that helps balance network traffic was being updated and the update did not work correctly. As a result, configuration settings were corrupted, which caused a service disruption,” Windows Live test and service engineering VP Arthur de Haan wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “We determined the cause to be a corrupted file in Microsoft’s DNS service. The file corruption was a result of two rare conditions occurring at the same time. The first condition is related to how the load balancing devices in the DNS service respond to a malformed input string (i.e., the software was unable to parse an incorrectly constructed line in the configuration file). The second condition was related to how the configuration is synchronized across the DNS service to ensure all client requests return the same response regardless of the connection location of the client. Each of these conditions was tracked to the networking device firmware used in the Microsoft DNS service.”

DNS problems also took Office 365 offline on the same day, although de Haan’s blog post only discusses Windows Live. The Windows Live outage took more than an hour to resolve “although it took some time for the changes to replicate around the world and reach all our customers,” he writes. To prevent future outages, Microsoft promised to implement better processes for monitoring, problem identification and recovery, as well as a “further hardening [of] the DNS service to improve its overall redundancy and fail-over capability.”

“We are also developing an additional recovery process that will allow a specific property the ability to fail over to restore service and then fail back when the DNS service is restored,” de Haan writes. “In addition, we are reviewing the recovery tools to see if we can make more improvements that will decrease the time it takes to resolve outages. We are determined to deliver the very best possible service to our customers and regret any inconvenience caused by this outage.”

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Cisco is collaborating with Microsoft to bring its virtual switch to Hyper-V next year when Windows Server 8 is released. While Cisco’s Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch already supports VMware software, Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 does not get the same love. The new support for Hyper-V will only apply to the forthcoming Windows Server 8, which introduces greater ability to integrate third-party modules than its predecessor, according to Cisco.

Today, Hyper-V customers can use a virtual switch included with Microsoft’s hypervisor, and connect to Cisco physical switches and other Cisco products like the Unified Computing System. The new step of bringing Cisco virtual switch software to the hypervisor layer, however, will achieve greater visibility into virtual machines and better provisioning and management capabilities, Cisco says.

Microsoft will restrict general distribution of Metro apps to the Windows Store, but grant exceptions to enterprises and developers, allowing them to side-load applications onto Windows 8 devices. While Windows 8 will be an operating system for both desktops and tablets, Microsoft is creating two sets of rules for traditional desktop apps and Metro-style apps, which are optimized for touch screens but will run on any Windows 8 device.

A primer for Windows developers on Microsoft’s website states that distribution of traditional desktop applications will proceed as usual. “Open distribution: retail stores, web, private networks, individual sharing, and so on” will be allowed, Microsoft says. Metro apps, on the other hand, will be “Distributed through the Windows Store. Apps must pass certification so that users download and try apps with confidence in their safety and privacy. Side-loading is available for enterprises and developers.”

This approach is similar to the one taken by Apple with its iPhone and iPad App Store, and also similar to Microsoft’s own Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, although jailbreaks and workarounds allowing side-loading have been released by independent developers for both iOS and WP7. With Google’s Android, by contrast, it is easy for any user to install non-market applications from either third-party app stores such as Amazon’s or by downloading software directly from an app maker’s website. The exceptions carved out by Microsoft will let developers test apps and businesses distribute custom or private apps to employees.

Windows Phone 7 uses a 70/30 revenue split in which Microsoft keeps 30 percent of app payments, and a similar split seems likely for Windows 8 Metro apps. According to the IStartedSomething.com blog, Microsoft’s primer for Windows developers briefly confirmed the 70/30 split for Metro apps but later deleted the information. In other news, we learned last week that while Windows 8 devices with ARM processors won’t run apps originally built for Intel-based computers, Microsoft is working on a Metro version of its popular Office software.

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Though aimed primarily at software developers, last week's BUILD conference introduced a few new Windows 8 features that will make the lives of enterprise IT departments easier. Windows 8 Refresh and Reset will both make it easier to clean malfunctioning systems and restore them to a working state, and Windows To Go offers new deployment features using Windows installations that run directly from USB.

Refresh and Reset both revert Windows back to its system defaults. The difference between the two is the extent to which the system gets reset. "Refresh" preserves user settings, user data, and applications bought through the Windows store. Everything else is removed and restored to defaults. The process is quick, taking just a few minutes to complete.

Hands-on with Windows 8: it's good stuff on the PC, too: Windows 8 will be an exciting and capable tablet operating system. But traditional PC users are more than a little worried about how it'll work for them. They probably shouldn't be—Windows 8 is set to be a thoroughly good PC OS, too.

Hands-on with Windows 8: A PC operating system for the tablet age: Microsoft has at last opened the floodgates and started talking about Windows 8. Will the software giant finally have an operating system to take on iOS in the tablet space?