Vista: fit for purpose...
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Slip of the tongue - or the brain Comment The UK Developer launch of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System was pretty impressive, as such things usually are.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Thursday was finally windows Vista launch day. But though banners were flying in downtown Manhattan on the big day, celebrating the launch of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear that the company is anxious to move on, while business customers pegged for Vista adoption wondered whether there was really much to celebrate. âThereâs a bunch of work we still need to do,â Ballmer said of the next Windows client OS. Supporting the shift from single-core to multicore chips and improvements in network infrastructure are priorities. Microsoft also wants to add more features to meet the needs of IT administrators, software developers and end-users. âHow we do software plus service within Windows is going to continue to be a big theme,â Ballmer said. Enterprise customers were wary. âSure itâs a big day for Microsoft, but what are we really getting?â asks Paul Lindo, an independent New York IT consultant. âWith all the delays and features being dropped, this looks to me like it might just be Windows XP with a prettier face.â Vista suffered several features âadjustmentsâ as well as a lengthier-than-expected road to shrink, including the infamous 2004 dumping of WinFS and a ground-up re-programming effort. But now that the day is finally here, Microsoft is well pleased with its new OS offering. âIt may have been a long road, but watching how our early adopters are responding to the platform, we know weâve got a winner,â said Brad Goldberg, Microsoftâs general manager of client product management. Responding to views such as Lindoâs, Goldberg said he remained assured. âVista was designed specifically to give business users recognizable benefits over the last generation platform,â he said. âThat includes productivity, security, networking and noticeably less reliance on IT.â Those last two items especially represent significant development efforts, covering the new UAC authentication model, updated internal diagnostics (including error messages that actually speak English), a completely revamped networking client and new IT tools such as the Reliability Monitor -- a quick dashboard of system reliability. These features were built specifically so users would spend less time talking to the help desk, thus decreasing overall IT spending. Windows is far better prepared for initial deployment than its predecessors, Goldberg said, citing more than a year of overall QA effort, by far the longest QA period in Microsoftâs history. Despite the enterprise focus of some features, it will still be consumers who lead the charge on Vista adoption. According to a report released by IDC last week, Vista will account for 90 percent of new Windows client deployments in 2007 by home users, compared with just 35 percent of new Windows client deployments by businesses.
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Microsoft has launched the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment public beta.
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Trust us Microsoft has offered little satisfaction to Windows Vista Ultimate users frustrated by the dearth of goodies used to justify the operating system's premium price.â¦
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By Tamara Chuang, The Orange County Register, Calif.  Jan. 30--The anticipation is over. Windows Vista is finally here.
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December's Patch Tuesday finds Vista in bad guys' sights. Plus: Get Office 2007 SP1, get your fix for Flash, and avoid an HP laptop disaster.
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Get a sneak peak at many of the key aspects of Vista, as it looks today. Though not vastly changed, there are several new looks in Release Candidate 1.
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Installing Vista is simpler than past versions of Windows; here's a peek at some key installation screens and a few tools to make your upgrade easier.
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Resistance to Vista was expected among the large companies that have leverage with large PC vendors, but even in the consumer and SMB ranks, the clamor for XP is significant. The beneficiaries? Possibly, "white-box" system builders and direct-sales channels.
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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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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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Ease of Access Centre gets thumbs up Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system has just been released for corporate consumption.â¦
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Blog: Support for Acrobat and Reader has arrived for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.
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The impending launch of Microsoft's new operating system isn't generating the excitement it once might have. Maybe that's because it, well, gets the job done
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DecemberÃ¢ÂÂs Patch Tuesday finds Vista in the bad guysÃ¢ÂÂ sights. Plus: Get Office 2007 SP1, get your fix for Flash, and avoid an HP laptop disaster.
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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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(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.