Tag Archives | Microsoft. Windows

Two Monitors? Heck, Make It Three!

Posted by Steve Bass on September 20, 2010 at 12:06 pm

Listen to this concession: “Okay, yes, once you’ve used a two-monitor setup, going back to a single monitor sucks.”

That from my wife who last year resisted using a second monitor. It’s so darn quaint when she admits she’s wrong.

Judy found that out when I brought home a friend’s PC for repair, needed a monitor, and borrowed hers. (First rule of computing: Use someone else’s equipment whenever possible.)

The repair was taking longer than I expected — funny how computers do that to you — and, my pobrecita was feeling deprived.

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Windows 7 Family Pack: It's Baaaaaaack! And That's Annoying

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 1, 2010 at 7:44 pm

Good news! Microsoft is celebrating the first anniversary of Windows 7’s release by bringing back the Windows 7 Family Pack which it briefly offered when the OS shipped. The Family Pack offers three Windows 7 Home Premium upgrades for $149.99, and is an excellent deal considering that one upgrade license sells for $119.99. It goes on sale October 3rd in the US, and as before, it’s available “while supplies last.”

I don’t mean to be churlish about an attractive offer, but I simply still don’t understand why the Family Pack is a once-in-a-while special offer rather than a basic fact of life for Windows users.

With Apple’s OS X, the Family Pack is a version, not a sale. Multiple-user pricing is quite common elsewhere, too (random example: Buying Trend Micro’s Internet Security entitles you to install it on three PCs). Offhand, I don’t know of any other software company that offers family pricing, then takes it away, then brings it back…and warns you that it’ll go away again at some unspecified point.

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I'll Celebrate When Windows 98 SE Turns Fifteen

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 24, 2010 at 2:02 pm

A post by Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle reminded me of a fact I would have had memorized if I were a serious tech historian: Windows 95 shipped fifteen years ago today. I certainly have memories of the launch–including running the beta for months beforehand and working on PC World‘s Windows 95 issue.  (That magazine remains the single best selling issue of PCW ever sold; I don’t think there’s a topic in tech today that would capture the imagination of such a high percentage of computer users all at once.)

Oddly enough, thinking back doesn’t leave me all that nostalgic. It’s not that I’m incapable of being fascinated by mid-1990s Microsoftian history–just a few months ago, I wrote a gazillion words about the fifteenth birthday of Bob. But Windows 95 didn’t capture my imagination in 1995, and it doesn’t do so today.

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Microsoft's Latest PC-Mac Comparison is…Almost Reasonable

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 10, 2010 at 10:01 am

For years, Microsoft’s marketing efforts for Windows ignored the fact that Macs existed. That changed last year. In the wake of rising sales for Apple’s computers, Microsoft went on the offensive. But the case it made for Windows PCs and against the Mac was touchy and evasive. It ran PC ads that knocked Macs as overpriced but couldn’t find anything nice to say about Windows. It got pointlessly insulting about Mac users. And it commissioned a white paper on the “Apple tax” that was rife with fuzzy math and bizarre errors.

All that stuff happened in the late, not-at-all-lamented Windows Vista era. Back then, you could understand why Microsoft would be crabby about the whole subject of Windows vs. Mac–especially since Apple was repeatedly sucker-punching Vista in the face, via the meanest ads ever in its long-running “Get a Mac” campaign.

Today, however, is a new day. Vista has been replaced by the vastly superior Windows 7. Apple seems to have ditched the “Get a Mac” campaign in favor of a much lower-key, lower-profile Mac/PC comparison section on its site. And now Microsoft has responded in kind with a “Deciding Between a PC and a Mac” section on the Windows 7 site.

As with much of Microsoft’s consumer marketing for Windows, this new comparison is aimed at teeming masses of folks who don’t know a whole lot about computers, not geeks and enthusiasts. It clearly strives to come off as calm and reasoned, not snarky and emotional. There’s as much boosting of Windows as there is knocking of the Mac, and the whole thing is free of name-calling.

Let’s look at Microsoft’s claims, section by section. I understand that Microsoft isn’t going to make a balanced comparison of pros and cons here; you won’t hear about the hassle of dealing with Windows security, or the fact that few PCs come standard with creativity software to rival the iLife suite that’s bundled with every Mac. But checking out Microsoft’s case for Windows in the age of Windows 7 is a worthwhile exercise. And it’s reasonable to expect that even marketing copy should contain no gross mischaracterizations or factual errors, right?

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Microsoft Releases Windows 7 SP1 Beta, Gives Windows XP a Reprieve (Yup, Another One)

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 12, 2010 at 6:45 pm

[CORRECTION: A Microsoft representative contacted me to say that the 2020 end to Windows XP downgrade rights mentioned below is inaccurate. As of now, the plan is for the downgrade option to go away when Windows 7 is no longer for sale–still a long reprieve, but not that long.]

Microsoft is holding its Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC. It chose the event to announce the release of a beta version of Windows 7 SP1. The beta is aimed at developers and tech pros, consists of fixes rather than new features, and isn’t a huge deal–especially if you’ve been installing Windows Update’s updates all along. Unlike Windows Vista, Windows 7 was polished enough even in its initial incarnation that it doesn’t cry out for immediate radical surgery.

Here’s some news that will please some folks, though: The company has given Windows XP yet another reprieve. (I’ve lost track of how many times it’s announced a final deadline for the OS’s availability and then extended it, but it long ago began to feel like Groundhog Day.)

Microsoft has been allowing PC manufacturers to let purchases of Windows 7 “downgrade” their new machines to XP, but this privilege was due to expire soon. As Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer explains, however, buyers of computers with Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate will now be able to downgrade to XP until January of 2020.

That’s more than eighteen years after XP shipped, and should be enough of a stay of execution for almost everybody. In fact, 2020 is so far into the future that anyone who thinks that he or she has a firm grasp on what computing will be like by then is either a whole lot smarter than I am or a whole lot dumber.

Seems like a smart move on Microsoft’s part. For companies that don’t want to part with XP just yet, an end to downgrade privileges would have been a compelling reason to avoid Windows 7. Now it’s a non-issue–and tech journalists like me get to stop writing stories about XP’s fate for almost a decade. Cool!

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Windows 8: What Should Be, if You Ask Me

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 6, 2010 at 3:17 pm

Last week, a passel of leaked PowerPoint slides appeared to give a sneak peek of Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8. (I should call them “alleged Microsoft PowerPoint slides” or something, but Mary Jo Foley and Ina Fried are accepting them as the real deal–and that’s good enough for me.)

Among the features mentioned: A new technology for superfast startups (a perennial boast of new versions of Windows dating at least back to Windows 98), multiuser login via face recognition, an improved help system, and a tool for restoring Windows to its original settings without munging your data. The company would apparently like to help PC makers build machines that have some of the “it just works” reliability associated with Macs. (It turns out that consumers are willing to pay for a better experience–apparently, the price premium that Apple commands is about more than unicorn tears.)

It would be a mistake to take the leaked slides as a definitive guide to the upcoming OS: Windows 8 is still early in the development process, and the details in the deck were prepared to address early questions from hardware types, not to serve as an overarching prospectus. And Microsoft’s early pitches for forthcoming versions of Windows usually haven’t been a terribly reliable predictor of the products it’s actually shipped–just ask anyone who took the initial scuttlebutt about Vista very seriously.

But thinking about Windows 8 left me mulling over what I’d like to see when the the OS (which may well be called something other than Windows 8) arrives. Here’s my quick wish list–I’m assuming that Win 8 will still be recognizably Windowsesque rather than an utter reimagining for the Web era…

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