Conventional wisdom seems to be that existing Microsoft customers won’t leapfrog Windows Vista and wait for "Windows Seven," currently expected in 2010. There’s a feeling of inevitability about the transition, as if it’s just a question of when to write the checks to Microsoft and do the tedious work of switching operating systems. Yet as Vista celebrates its first birthday, the chances are increasing that many users will never see it on their desktops.
Vista has certainly been slow out of the gate. Sure, Microsoft is putting the operating system on newly shipped systems, but Vista sales didn’t benefit from the upgrade surge that previous OSes got upon release. A year after it began shipping, less than one percent of corporate desktops are running Vista.
Financial issues could also work against Vista adoption during 2008. The sub-prime mortgage meltdown may foreshadow a recession; at minimum, the financial services industry is certain to scale back its computing needs. Even companies that budgeted a Vista upgrade in 2008 may reconsider the decision if the economy turns sour.
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Uncategorized January 2nd 2008
How many years does it take to create an operating system that works? How many people does it take to do the work – in other words, how many manhours does this task consume? Would Microsoft like to cast some light on this?
In June, when I looked at Windows Vista Ultimate , I realised that five years simply wasn't enough for the developers at this great company to produce something that was usable without inconveniencing people.
Having heard recently of the arrival of a service pack – the usual panacea for sick software from Microsoft – I decided to see if an additional year of development had removed some of the rough edges and taken into account some of the myriad complaints made by Vista users since the operating system was launched at the beginning of last year.
I'm using Notepad to write this – yes, painful though it is, I've been using Vista for the last two weeks in order to provide an honest picture of the changes, if any, brought about by this service pack. It has been said that Microsoft normally gets things somewhat right at the third try so I wasn't expecting a great deal. Service pack 2, I believe, will make this beast more palatable to the masses who still continue to cling to Windows.
Read more at iTWire
Uncategorized January 1st 2008
While Windows Vista has already endured a more troubled existence than your average red headed step child, things were meant to start looking up with the release of Service Pack 1, Release Candidate 1, but – as usual – there's a glitch.
While our First Impressions of SP1 revealed some moderate performance improvements, blog site Engadget has stumbled upon some major problems.
Using identical quad core Penryn HP xw8600 test rigs with NVidia Quadro FX 4600 graphics cards, 15,000rpm SAS hard drives and 4GB of RAM, tests revealed that despite a minor boost in PC Mark (we found the same) vital real world uses such as copying files across a wired network and hard disk file transfers have not only not been improved, they've actually gotten worse.
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Uncategorized January 1st 2008
