Lawyers for plaintiffs in a case brought against Microsoft over Vista’s marketing have claimed that even the software giant’s marketing director was confused by the prelaunch campaign in the U.S.
With Vista’s first service pack due for wide release early next year, Microsoft is intent on addressing the many things which need to be fixed in its still-young operating system. The question is, are they going to fix the right things? I think not, since the problems this time ’round aren’t bugs so much as performance. Read on for my list of five must-have Vista corrections.
Businesses feel a move to Microsoft’s Windows Vista OS isn’t worth the effort yet, due to compatibility issues and it offering too few benefits over XP. Almost a year after the businesses version of Vista was released, it seems take-up remains sluggish and analysts predict this won’t change significantly for a while.
Security researchers warn that attack code targeting an unpatched bug in Apple Inc.’s QuickTime has gone public, and added that in-the-wild attacks against systems running Windows XP and Vista are probably not far behind. There was no word as of Sunday whether the Mac OS X versions of the media player are also vulnerable.
A Microsoft Corp. product manager couldn’t correctly explain the “Vista Capable” marketing slogan, according to recent filings in a lawsuit that claims the company misled consumers with a prerelease Vista campaign last year. The case, first filed in March by Washington state resident Diane Kelley, charged Microsoft with deceptive practices in letting PC makers slap a “Vista Capable” sticker on PCs, when “a large number” of the machines would be able to run only Vista Home Basic, the simplest version of the operating system.
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Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), the update scheduled to release next year, runs Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite 10% faster than XP SP2, a performance testing software developer reported Friday.Devil Mountain Software, which earlier in the week claimed Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3, the service pack recently issued to about 15,000 testers.
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As the anniversary of Windows Vista’s release to volume customers approaches, enterprise adoption of Microsoft’s latest operating system is still sparse. But many more firms now have plans to migrate in the near future, according to Forrester Research, which expects nearly a third of businesses will have begun deployment by the end of 2008, and that Vista will be on a quarter of enterprise PCs by the middle of the year.
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Microsoft’s emphasis on improvements to security features in Windows Vista may have undermined business adoption of the OS, as many business and enterprise customers are still holding off on upgrading to the OS nearly a year after its release to them.
Despite of widespread critics among certain groups of end-users, Microsoft Windows Vista operating system (OS) captured additional part of the market in October, whereas other operating systems from Microsoft reduced their installed base. At the same time, platforms from Apple reduced the shares of the market they command.
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One of the coolest underutilized features of Windows Vista is SideShow. Essentially, SideShow lets you access certain Vista feature from a secondary display. For example, check your email or calendar on your laptop without actually opening your lid. Or better yet, schedule a recording in Windows Media Center using a touch panel on the front of your PC case.
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It seems that the more Microsoft touts the benefits of its Vista operating system to the enterprise, the more resistance it runs into from IT executives who simply cannot justify the upgrade and migration costs.According to new research from appliance vendor KACE, more than 90 percent of IT professionals were still not sold on the virtues of Vista, with only 1 percent reporting that they had fully migrated over.
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It seems that Microsoft’s Windows Vista might well have an enemy within - Windows Live. Microsoft recently re-launched a raft of Windows Live services and some of the key guys from the UK development team popped into the Tech.co.uk offices to tell us all about them. Quite a few of the developments look rather familiar.
Microsoft Tuesday said sales of Vista have hit 88 million and the company highlighted a number of customer migrations it says signify that users are gearing up to switch to the year-old OS despite recent surveys that say many are taking a cautious approach.Company officials say the ebb and flow of new contracts and expiring contracts means the overall number of volume licensing copies of Vista doesn’t change dramatically from quarter to quarter.
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Information overload overran me long ago. No matter what the organization technique I use, I’m always struggling to locate a document or file based on some little artifact I can remember about it. While I have my issues with Office 2007’s ribbon menus, the killer application for me is the search capabilities in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.
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Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is not measurably faster than the original stock edition, a Florida-based developer of performance testing and network metrics software said today.”Microsoft has hinted that SP1 is faster than Vista RTM,” said Craig Barth, the chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, referring to the release to manufacturing version of the operating system. “But we found pretty much nothing measurable. It surprised me as much as it surprised everyone else, but the numbers are the numbers.”

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