Windows Archive

According to at least one blogger, Microsoft should abandon Vista before it's too late. It would appear he's not alone in this opinion, as Microsoft has begun allowing users to downgrade back to XP. Amongst the reasons? Poor sales figures and shoddy Vista "Extras".

Critics who blasted Microsoft three months ago for failing to deliver Windows Vista add-ons have again called the company on the carpet, this time for missing its self-imposed deadline to provide promised extras. In late June, bloggers and users were already panning Vista Ultimate Extras as a bust. Extras, available only to customers running the top-end Vista edition, was one of the features cited by Microsoft to distinguish the USD 399 operating system from its USD 239 cousin, Home Premium. Microsoft's online marketing, for instance, touted Extras as 'cutting-edge programs, innovative services, and unique publications' that would be regularly offered to Ultimate users.

"Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market." This is the conclusion of the Globalisation Instute, a think tank located in Brussels. Please note this is not a(n) (official) statement from the European Commission.

Microsoft on Sept. 21 denied claims by hard drive industry executives and analysts that the world's largest software company isn't providing optimized drivers for the new hybrid drives about to come into the market. "Microsoft certainly does provide drivers for hybrid hard drives in Vista," Matt Ayers, program manager in the Windows Client Performance group for Microsoft told eWEEK. "They've been in there all along, and they work with any hard drive. I don't quite understand the issue here. And about 'optimized' drivers - we never send out any drivers that aren't optimized," Ayers said. In addition, Microsoft has started a 'downgrade-to-XP' program for its OEM partners.

Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users' knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates. Many companies require testing of patches before they are widely installed, and businesses in this situation are objecting to the stealth patching. "Normal behaviour," according to Microsoft.

Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report. Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product's first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent.

"The first service pack for Windows Vista is slated for release to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008. The announcement was made via Microsoft’s Windows Window Vista Blog by Nick White, a product manager at Microsoft. We got a chance to sit down with White to talk about SP1."

Microsoft is finally talking about the much-anticipated first service pack for Windows Vista and will release the first beta to a select group of about 15,000 customer and partner testers within the next few weeks. The software maker will release the beta for Windows XP Service Pack 3 at the same time. Microsoft acknowledged Aug. 29 that it has already shared beta previews of Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 with small group of testers, a fact it refused to admit until recently despite numerous leaks on the Internet.

Robert Love, a famous Linux kernel hacker, has written a blog entry with his thoughs on the recently posted Vista's network slowdown issue and the explanation given by Mark Russinovich: "Unlike DPCs, however, the Linux parallel does not consume nearly half of your CPU. There is no excusable reason why processing IP packets should so damagingly affect the system. Thus, this absolutely abysmal networking performance should be an issue in and of itself, but the Windows developers decided to focus on a secondary effect."

A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization 'feature' of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.

"Details about the first OEM systems equipped with Windows Home Server are leaking out on to the 'net, and it looks like HP is going to get the ball rolling with its MediaSmart Home Server. Prices for the units were accidentally posted on several sites, such as PC Mall and onSale.com, and it looks like the server will have a US list price of USD 596 for the 500GB version and USD 745 for the 1TB version."

"With Bill Gates' announcement earlier this year that Windows Home Server would be available as a 'system builder' product (that means 'OEM' to most hardware geeks), enthusiasts and system builders alike have been looking forward to its release. With several different rumors being floated last week regarding when Windows Home Server would hit store shelves, we checked in with Microsoft to get the full and somewhat-confusing story. The short version is: it's already out in the wild, but catching a copy from your favorite reseller may prove tricky for at least two more weeks."

"As we saw in part 1 of this series, large applications and games under Windows are getting incredibly close to hitting the 2GB barrier, the amount of virtual address space a traditional Win32 (32-bit) application can access. Once applications begin to hit these barriers, many of them will start acting up and/or crashing in unpredictable ways which makes resolving the problem even harder. Furthermore, as we saw in part 2, games are consuming greater amounts of address space under Windows Vista than Windows XP. This makes Vista less suitable for use with games when at the same time it will be the version of Windows that will see the computing industry through the transition to 64-bit operating systems becoming the new standard. Microsoft knew about the problem, but up until now we were unable to get further details on what was going on and why. As of today that has changed."

Microsoft has had to create a new build of Windows XP Professional for computer makers because the six-year-old operating system's continued popularity has nearly exhausted the supply of product activation keys. The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to OEMs and system builders next month, said Microsoft.