Windows Vista kicked out of Olympics PCs

Microsoft's latest version of Windows is too risky to implement for the important computers managing the 2008 Olympic summer games in Beijing, said the event's computer supplier and sponsor Lenovo. The ThinkPad manufacturer's chairman Yang Yuanqing warned that a new and likely unstable OS such as Vista "could have some problems" if it were brought into an environment where reliability is important, such as tracking athlete statistics. All of the 12,000 critical systems will run the 6-year-old Windows XP, while Vista will only be allowed on shared terminals for the athletes where the danger of a crash is low, Lenovo said.

The warning reflects both a general cautiousness from business and concerns that Vista's business release came too soon for many companies, failing to support some of the necessary hardware and forcing numerous software developers to rewrite significant portions of professional software to let them run on the new OS.

Lenovo also noted that Wi-Fi has similarly been ruled out of the Olympic network, as the reliability and the security of wireless Internet made it impractical for both backups and parts of the main network.