After Marketing Frenzy, a Tame Release for Vista
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Last night at midnight, Microsoft put its latest successor on sale.
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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A Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft's biggest desktop operating system is just too big to believe."Who can justify a 15GB operating system?" asked Dino Nuhagic, a fifth-year student from Split, a Croatian city on the Adriatic. Not Nuhagic, or the uncounted users who have turned to his creation, vLite.The free program lets users pick and choose which Vista components, hot fixes, drivers, and even language packs are installed, then builds a disk image that can be burned to a DVD for unattended installation of the operating system."Why did I do it? Well, it's performance and work environment," Nuhagic said when asked why he came up with vLite. "Performance, that's easy to explain. The less things running, the more responsive the OS. But the environment part is where it gets down to personal preference."Those preferences include options for leaving out virtually every component of Windows Vista, from the minor -- such as the bundled screensavers -- to the major, such as the firewall or Universal Plug and Play.Some vLite users, in fact, have made it a contest of sorts to come up with the puniest-possible installation package for the operating system. While Microsoft recommends that users set aside 15GB of hard-disk space to install its pride and joy, Nuhagic's fans boast of squeezing it into an image file as small as 515MB that takes up just 1.4GB on the hard drive.One user reported condensing Windows Vista Home Basic into a 526MB .iso file and installing it in a virtual machine that used just 1.3GB of drive space. "It worked well inside the virtual machine and since I have 1GB of RAM on the host I guess the little Vista would work well," said amocanu.Nuhagic didn't come right out and say it, but he hinted that he -- like more critical users and pundits -- thought Vista was bloated and could use some reducing. "To be frank, I don't need 90 percent of Windows. But that 10 percent, which guarantees that you can run [the] majority of games out there, is what is worth isolating."Crafting vLite wasn't easy, he said. But the time Nuhagic spent on its predecessor, nLite, which similarly squeezes Windows 2000 and Windows XP, paid off in spades. "Since I had four years of experience with tampering [with] older Windows, it was a lot easier than nLite," Nuhagic said of the development of vLite. "Also, it was easier than in XP because Vista does not have the old-style installation. It doesn't install components one by one, but simply extracts the image. Where XP would fail during install because a certain file was missing, that issue is not present in Vista."Even though vLite features a simple graphical interface that lets users remove a component with a click, Nuhagic warned that the utility isn't designed for the average user: "Because of certain possible compatibility issues with the programs out there [that] expect full Windows, I'd recommend [it] only to users [that] want exactly that kind of tool. In other words, I would not recommend it to someone who installs their OS once every few years. But if you do it every few months, then it's a must."Nuhagic couldn't say how many people use vLite, or even the number of times it's been downloaded from his Web site. "I don't have counters installed because the FTP mirrors were donated, and I would have to upgrade my hosting for some extra script processing," he said of his shoestring operation. It shouldn't be a surprise, however, that nLite, the Windows XP miniaturizer, remains four to five times more popular than vLite, based on the number of visitors to the different nLite and vLite Web sites.Microsoft knows of the tools -- Nuhagic said the company has contacted him in the past about possible employment -- but it's done little to quash the condensing. When asked whether it had any thoughts on vLite, a company spokeswoman e-mailed a lukewarm warning."Microsoft does not recommend using any tool to strip out applications from Windows Vista prior to installing it on your system, as it may affect your ability to download future Windows Updates and Service Packs, and may cause your system to become unstable," she said.But vLite's users praised Nuhagic's efforts with blunter language. "Thanks for spending your time making our OS less bloated," said one.VLite 1.1 can be downloaded from Nuhagic's Web site.
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Here are some details about Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, which became available to consumers Tuesday:
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The pick of the bunch Site offer Vista has finally arrived. As of 30 January, Microsoft's new operating system was released to the general public.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - As Microsoftâs five-year-long development effort slouches toward completion, details began to emerge last week that showed the company is (finally) gearing up to release Windows Vista after the new year, as promised. Pricing information popped up on a Canadian Web site, and Amazon.com told visitors that the new OS would be going out on Jan. 30, only to replace that date with a squishier âEarly 2007.â Finally, by the time you read this, Microsoft has promised to release the penultimate test version of its Vista operating system, dubbed âRelease Candidate 1â to an army of testers around the world. Are anticipatory chills running down your spine? They shouldnât be. Because a Release Candidate must be stable enough to allow corporate buyers to evaluate the product for deployment, Microsoft will have done quite a bit of work to RC1 over Vistaâs previous beta incarnations; so get set for a number of improvements. On the other hand, because of this concentration on stability, donât look for any noteworthy new features. Hereâs what Vista RC1 will likely have to offer: Installation: A late beta release dubbed âPre RC1â received kudos from more than one online reviewer for the improvements in this area, and rumors out of Microsoft say RC1 is the first version of Vista (or any Windows version) that has seamlessly installed on a variety of new notebooks and desktops â no muss, no fuss, and with full detection of PC Card and USB peripherals. Graphical interface: Aero has reportedly given Microsoft quite a few Advil moments, and even Beta 2 users were reporting intermittent difficulties. Look for this to be smoothed out in anything that receives RC status. That doesnât mean, however, that you should try to run it on your anemic graphics subsystem from 2003. Microsoft recommends at least 32-bit-per-pixel graphics capability. To you and me that means that for really smooth Aero-nautics, you should have a DirectX 9-capable 3-D accelerator card with 128MB of dedicated video RAM. If your test box lacks this video muscle, RC1 will support a non-Aero interface for weaker or older PCs. Audio: Microsoft has been having trouble with audio in even its most recent Vista Beta release. Toolsmixer controls are intermittently absent, and audio playback is often interrupted or missing. This should be solved in an RC1 release. If youâre a systems or network administrator, RC1 wonât be much different from Beta 2. The new release will ship with Internet Explorer RC1 installed, but even that has few differences from IE7 Beta 2. There will be a new, easier-to-use integrated backup tool, but itâs of little interest to corporate users whoâll most likely be using a centralized third-party app or Windows Shadow Copy. The pricing and availability info â coupled with the OSâs slow march toward âgold,â aka a finished version of Windows Vista ready for manufacturing â shows that Microsoft is serious about meeting its ship date. However, the key criterion for Vista RC1 will be stability. If it installs smoothly, runs smoothly, and gives us the full Vista experience that Microsoftâs been promising, consider it a success. If not, itâs back to the drawing board.
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By Ken Dey, The Idaho Statesman, Boise  Jan. 31--The long-awaited Microsoft Vista operating system went on sale Tuesday to consumers nationwide.
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Despite underwhelming consumers and being snubbed by enterprises, Windows Vista's numbers keep growing.
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Microsoft announced today that it will soon release -- to a limited number of testers -- a beta version of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. Here's what we know so far.
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A fresh version of a program designed to circumvent Microsoft's Windows Media DRM was released on Friday, but the company's saying they're not concerned.
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While Gates closes up on Â£ for $ pricing Two controversial aspects of Microsoft's Vista were conspicuous by their absence at yesterday's launch event - neither digital rights management nor the way Microsoft will shut down or reduce the functionality of software it considers to be an illegal copy were mentioned.â¦
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By Cater, Nick  For the non-techies among us, one word is all you need to know for the next few weeks: Vista.
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Microsoft unveiled its much-delayed Windows Vista with company chief Bill Gates leading a global marketing assault for the the operating system that he promised will revolutionize the use of computers.
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While Microsoft trumpeted Vista worldwide on Tuesday, the Internet abounded with postings from people unimpressed or downright disappointed with the new operating system.
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Microsoftâs description of the new Windows Vista operating system is âClear, Confident, Connected.â But a more truthful motto would be âLooks, Locks, Lacks.â
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It isn't the features you can see in Vista, or the lack thereof -- it's the priority shift at Microsoft's core.
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The quiet debut for Microsoftâs latest version of the Windows operating system reflects how the companyâs influence has faded as the nature of computer software has changed.