Gates: Vista Key to New Era of Multimedia Computing
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Microsoft execs take the stage in glitzy New York launch, say Vista ushers in the next generation of technology.
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While software-geek society greeted the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft's much-hyped new PC software, with mostly bored skepticism (CNET called it "warmed-over Windows XP"), the new souped-up operating system could have major implications for the digital media business.
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special coverage Aiming to re-create the excitement of Windows 95, Microsoft is trying to turn Vista into its next big win.
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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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Portable Media Center -- a new, Microsoft-conceived handheld device that presents video, photos and music -- would be a decent idea if there weren't such things as lampposts. Or street signs. Or trees. Or other cars. -Rob Pegoraro
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(InfoWorld) - By now, everyone has heard how Microsoft plans to release the next Windows client OS, Windows 7, in 2010. But what the company is not making clear is what new features the OS will have, a topic thatÂ has become fodder for educated Windows 7 speculation. Analysts said Microsoft probably is keeping tight-lipped about what Windows 7 will look like because at this point, company engineers and executives don't even know. "They don't want to commit because they don't have a good idea what's in it," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner. "We're three years out, so you can't really expect that much detail." Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said that with so many people still in the midst of upgrading to the latest client OS, Windows Vista, he's hesitant to speculate on what might be in the next OS. "We barely know the features of the one we just got," he said with a laugh. That said, Cherry is expecting less "earth-shattering" new features than improvements on some of the new ones found in Windows Vista, such as the Bitlocker encryption feature, which is currently hard for the average PC user to navigate. "You have to partition your hard drive and do a bunch of things, and you can only really today protect one drive, whereas many machines have more than one," he said. Cherry also pointed to a common hardware performance problem many users face because of Vista's "very large footprint." "It's one of the things they might want to address -- hardware utilization and performance," he said. "It's hard to put a big wrapper around that; it just needs to be better." One Microsoft executive gave a slight hint about what might turn up in Windows 7 earlier this year at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division, said in an interview that a "fundamental piece of enabling technology," such as a hypervisor or a drastic change in the user interface, would likely turn up in Windows 7. Fathi also said at RSA in February that Microsoft was in the middle of the planning process for Windows 7's features and would know more over the next few months, which suggests the company now has a good idea what the OS will look like but is declining to disclose that information. While both a hypervisor and a new user interface are possibilities for Windows 7, the former is almost a given, Gartner's Silver said. "It almost has to go" in the OS, he said, describing the technology as "a really thin OS" that manages virtual machines running on the system. It would behoove Microsoft to put a hypervisor in Windows 7 because it would give them more control over the hardware the OS runs on, something the company would prefer to have, Silver said. "The hypervisor really owns the hardware, and Microsoft likes owning the hardware, and they want to be one of the people to standardize [hypervisor technology]," he said. Vista includes such newÂ features as desktop search and a new user interface, which also are two areas that leave room for expansion in Windows 7, analysts said. Microsoft has shown the direction it's going with the latter with itsÂ Surface computer, introduced in late May. That form factor looks like a coffee table with a touchscreen interface that lets users move photos around by hand and synchronize devices by placing them on the table. With products like the Apple iPhone making the touchscreen popular with consumers, a touchscreen UI in Windows 7 is a possibility, Silver said. "They don't want to look bad next to Apple," he said. Desktop search, a new feature built into Vista, also has room for improvement. Microsoft has said it will link desktop search to Windows Server 2008 so desktop users can search not only for local files but also for files on the server. This is a feature that potentially could be built into the desktop OS. Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this article.
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NEW YORK/LONDON  - Microsoft Corp. rolled out  Windows Vista in 70 countries on Tuesday, delivering a PC  operating system able to better manage the explosion of digital  media and enhance Internet security.
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Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates on  Sunday took center stage at the world's largest technology show  for the last time and predicted that his industry was on the  cusp of the next "digital decade."
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Vista expert Jonathan Hassell explains how you can now manage everything from LAN settings to network security modes to wireless capabilities to quality of service through familiar tools.
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OS networking buckles under single media file New data documenting quirky networking characteristics in Vista have surfaced courtesy of Windows architecture guru Mark Russinovich, who confirms that simply by playing media files, users can bring throughput in Microsoft's new and improved operating system to a screeching halt.â¦
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By LEE GOMES The Wall Street Journal  The launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system Tuesday was supposed to put Windows in the limelight.
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Microsoft boss Bill Gates tells the BBC of his plans for the future of digital entertainment in the home
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Along with Vista and Office 2007 announcements, Microsoft recently gave analysts an update on Longhorn - its next generation of server software. As a part of this update, Microsoft announced plans to deliver an enhanced capability in its systems management products.
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Redmond sees Windows Vista as a big step up over XP for photographers, but it's adding more image-management options through Windows Live Photo Gallery.
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The Microsoft chairman discusses where the XO laptop fits on his radar screen (not too high), as well as other efforts to bring low-cost computing to emerging markets.
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If you're putting Vista on a PC yourself, you need to read this.
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Details are scarce at this point, but the next client OS will have a "fundamental piece of enabling technology," a Microsoft executive said this week, such as a hypervisor or new type of interface.