Twenty-one months after its initial release, what do we know about Windows Vista? That home users hate it, businesses are uninstalling it and — according to Gartner Inc. — it’s proof that the 23-year-old Windows line is “collapsing” under its own weight.
Microsoft Corp.’s head of engineering for the Windows 7 operating system said there are 25 “feature teams” of about 100 employees each working on the upcoming replacement to Windows Vista. Windows 7 teams work on anything from external features, such as user interfaces, to under-the-hood areas such as networking, according to Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft senior vice president for Windows and Windows Live engineering, in a Monday posting at the new “Engineering Windows 7″ blog.
Another month, another Forrester Research report on Windows Vista. But wait! Rather than the negative spin of last month’s report, in which analyst Thomas Mendel opined that Vista was in danger of becoming as big a failure as “New Coke,” this report by analyst Benjamin Gray comes to a different conclusion.
Dissatisfaction with the original version of Windows Vista has prompted an overwhelming majority of users to download and install the operating system’s first service pack, according to a group of researchers. Industry watchers at Devil Mountain Software said 86% of Vista users had installed SP1 as of the end of July, compared to the 69% of Vista users that were running SP1 at the end of April.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld will headline Microsoft’s upcoming $300 million Windows Vista ad campaign, along with Chairman Bill Gates, according to anonymous sources quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Seinfeld will get $10 million for his work on the campaign, whose slogan is along the lines of “Windows, Not Walls.”
A first glimpse at the technology inside the next version of Windows will be given in October. Microsoft has said that engineering information about Windows 7 will be shared with attendees at two technical conferences it runs. Windows 7 developers will show off their work at both the Professional Developers Conference and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.
Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft knows that Windows Vista was a huge letdown for them, which is why the software giant has been working hard on a new operating system. Windows 7 is hoped to be a huge leap forward over Vista, but what Microsoft has in store for the new OS is anyone’s guess.
Read the rest of this entry »
For all the features it contains and all the personal computers it populates, Windows Vista may go down in Microsoft history as the operating system that was saddled by one question asked to the point of exhaustion: How many people are really using it. Introduced to businesses in late 2006, Vista found itself hit by compatibility problems and a chorus of critics. Many focused on what they thought to be a relatively slow adoption rate.
New details have appeared about the future availability of a new feature pack for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The ‘Windows Feature Pack for Storage’ has been in beta testing for a while, but has now appeared on Microsoft Connect. This was spotted by Mary-Jo Foley who has received excited beta tester feedback. We’re not sure there’s that much to get excited about.
Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista recorded about half as many vulnerabilities in its first full year of availability as Windows XP did in its opening 12 months, company security executives said yesterday. In an update to earlier 90-day and six-month reports, Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in the company’s trustworthy computing group, cited vulnerability and patch statistics to show that Vista logged 66 bugs between November 2006 and November 2007, 30 of which had not yet been patched. In the first 52 weeks Windows XP was in use, on the other hand, it was pegged with 129 vulnerabilities, 54 of which were not fixed by the end of that 12-month period.
Microsoft Corp. today said it will issue eight security updates next week, five tagged as “critical” to patch Windows, Office and Internet Explorer. One of the critical Windows updates scheduled for next Tuesday affects every version of the operating system Microsoft supports, including the just-released Service Pack 1 for Vista and the newest server operating system, Windows Server 2008.
Microsoft takes aim at 26 vulnerabilities this month, spread across 11 patches, 6 of which carry a “critical” rating. The sheer number of vulnerabilities, especially those on the critical side of the scale, isn’t lost on security watchers. Indeed, Microsoft hasn’t tackled as many vulnerabilities in a single Patch Tuesday in at least two years.
Read the rest of this entry »
When you work with computers, some things are inevitable. You can push them aside, but sooner or later they confront you. I’m talking, of course, about Windows Vista. You still can buy Windows XP, but the majority of off-the-shelf PCs now come with some variation of Vista. Although there’s a list of things about Vista that infuriate me - lack of stability, compatibility and intuitive design, among others - I have to admit that certain aspects of Vista’s interface are quite useful. Call it the computer equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome.
Somehow you’ve managed to overwrite the report you’ve been working on for weeks, and now all your effort has just vanished in a few spins of the hard drive. But wait! Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions include a feature called Shadow Copy that lets you browse backward in time, recovering a specific version of your file, not just the most recent copy. Each system-restore point or backup point that Windows creates initiates a new Shadow Copy. So at least once a day, Vista creates another copy of your precious files, without your having to lift a finger.
Samsung isn’t just pushing the envelope in storage capacity of SSDs (solid-state drives), it is also working with software makers to boost SSD performance on operating systems. The company on Wednesday said it was in talks with Microsoft to improve the performance of SSDs on the Windows OS.
Recent Comments