Windows Archive

Last week, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista went gold, and was released to manufacturing. The release has been long coming (five years of work) and was surrounded by controversies, rumours of rewrites, and legal threats by Microsoft's competitors. We got our hands on the RTM build (Microsoft Windows 6.0 (Build 6000)), so read on for the first superficial look at Windows Vista Ultimate.

Michael Wallent, General Manager for Windows Client, was interviewed by the Windows Vista Blog about the user experience in Vista. "We sat down with Michael to learn more about what's changed for the better from a quality perspective. In the video below, Michael speaks in particular to changes made in building in hardware driver support and adds that updates will continue to be made available via download via Windows Update. This advance in driver distribution avoids the 'step-function' improvement that users had experienced in the past; now, via network-available updates, the experience of using Windows Vista continually improves over time."

Outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin posted a blog entry Friday apologizing for the confusion surrounding comments he made to reporters Wednesday about being so confident in Windows Vista's security that his seven-year-old son's PC had no antivirus software installed. Allchin acknowledged Friday that he wasn't as clear as he intended to be, saying he never meant to imply that Windows Vista does not need antivirus software, despite citing the example of his son's PC. "It's important for me that our customers are using the appropriate security solutions for the right situations, whether that's security functionality integrated in the operating systems, or add-on products," he said.

During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed. Elsewhere, bigg boss Bill Gates says that antitrust authorities did not make Microsoft remove any features from Vista, but he expressed anger with competitors who embarked on noisy public campaigns to 'castrate' the operating system.

After 5 years of development, Windows Vista is finally finished. Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division has put together a video about the announcement where he announces the General Availability date of 30 January 2007 for Vista.

Each day, members of the Windows team gather inside the 'shiproom' to go over the bugs that remain, and to debate which of these can still be fixed in the days left until Vista is declared finished, a milestone that is expected any time now. The intense 'end game', as these final weeks are known, is a well-worn tradition inside the shiproom, which is on the third floor of the Windows development building. The small room, with its dated, dark wood conference table has been the war room for every Windows release since Windows 2000. In the meantime, Ars takes a look at running Vista on older hardware.

"Just as extensions make Firefox better, so do plug-ins add extra goodness to Windows XP Media Center Edition. For the uninitiated, MCE provides DVR and other multimedia features wrapped in an attractive 10-foot interface. Armed with a couch and a remote, you can record TV shows, pause live TV, view photo slideshows, listen to your music collection, tune in FM radio stations, and so on. I am unabashedly in love with MCE. It's the one Microsoft product I consider just about perfect, which is why it's the heart of my home entertainment system. With these eight plugs-ins, most of which are free, you can trick out your MCE PC like never before."

Windows Vista will offer varying levels of functionality depending on what kind of video card you have. When you upgrade, will your PC be up to the challenge?

Microsoft has set November 30 as the release date for Vista (and Office 2007) to business customers and January 30, 2007 as the date for the official launch to consumers and The World At Large. ApproachingZero, are you still here? If this were a blog, I'd put a smiley here.

"Today, I'd like to share with you a hidden gem inside of Windows Vista's search capabilities. It's a neat little feature that lets you build one saved search on top of another, and we call it Query Composition. Think composition in the mathematical sense, not in the context of writing an English paper. To explain this feature, I'd like to start by talking a bit about Libraries."

"The next version of Windows is just around the corner, so the next time we discuss software licensing in my course, the EULA for Vista will be front and center. You can read the Microsoft Vista EULA yourself by going to the official Software License page from Microsoft page and searching for Vista. I know many of you have never bothered to read the EULA - who really wants to, after all? - but take a few minutes and get yourself a copy and read it. I'll wait. Back? It's bad, ain't it? Real bad. I mean, previous EULAs weren't anything great - but the Vista EULA is horrendous."

Microsoft last week said that it is pushing back the next major service pack for Windows XP until the first half of 2008. The news came just ahead of reports that Vista’s RTM is being pushed back once again, from late October to early November, complicating matters for PC makers. The latest delay has some wondering whether the upgrade will ever see the light of day. "The fear is Service Pack 3 will just get killed off," said Jeff Centimano, an IT consultant at Levi, Ray & Shoup.

"Leading PC manufacturer Acer has accused Microsoft of ratcheting up the cost of Windows by effectively forcing consumers to opt for the Premium version of Vista. Acer claims that the Vista Home Basic - the new entry-level Windows - is so poorly featured that consumers will simply reject it. "The new experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," said Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president at Acer. "There's no graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."

Microsoft is about to release the Windows Vista operating system, its biggest software upgrade in years. The commercial versions will be out in November and the consumer version will be ready in January. Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, sat down to talk with Mercury News Staff Writer Dean Takahashi about the Vista launch.