Tag Archives | Windows

Just a quick note to make sure that you Windows Vista users out there know that Microsoft has announced it’ll release a preview version of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 on Thursday. (The final version is due in the first half of 2009.) ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has a good writeup (incorporating a list of the service pack’s tweaks from Kevin Tofel). And Ed Bott has an interesting post that shows what the serivice pack cycle for Windows has been like historically (bottom line: the gap between Windows XP SP2 and SP3 was abnormally long and Vista SP2 gets things back on track).

Should you install the preview version of Vista SP2? If you’re sensibly cautious, it’s entirely rational not only to skip the preview but to give the final version a few weeks in the wild before you install it, just so other folks suffer the consequences of any glitches. (Remember, Microsoft was forced to withdraw Vista SP1 after its initial release to fix some unanticipated problems after the fact.)

Me? I’ll probably install the preview right away, but I’m crazy. And my brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad with Vista SP1 just doesn’t work very well; I figure that SP2 can’t make things much worse, and might help. I’ll let you know if I discover anything interesting…

If you compiled a list of Things Microsoft Utterly Botched With the Windows Vista Launch, it would be interminable. The top five would surely include its Windows Vista Capable program, which let manufacturers slap a sticker which seemed to tout Vista compatability on basic PCs which weren’t even capable of running the Aero interface, the upgrade’s signature feature. By doing so, it helped PC companies move some boxes during the months before Vista finally shipped. But it was a Faustian move that guaranteed that a lot of new PC buyers would be disgruntled with Vista from the moment they installed it.

It was also no shocker that Windows Vista Capable spurred a class action lawsuit against Microsoft on behalf of people who bought computers that bore the sticker. I’m instinctively inclined to be skeptical about class action suits, but Microsoft brought this one on itself, as surely as Wile E. Coyote deserves to be crushed by a boulder when he catapults it into the air. And the documents that are being released as a result make for fascinating reading.

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It may lack the brick, mortar and experiential flare of the Apple Store, but Microsoft has opened its own one stop shop on the Web. The Microsoft Store is stocked with Microsoft software and hardware products ranging from games, Visual Studio, and Windows to keyboards; it lacks some business applications that are typically purchased under volume license agreements.

The company is targeting netbook PC owners that lack optical drives for installing software, senior program manager Trevin Chow wrote on his blog. Software may be re-downloaded as long as a product is in the mainstream support stage of its life cycle, and product keys are stored for the customer on the Web.

However, there is no mechanism in place to prevent customers from backing up their purchases on physical media, he noted.

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A week ago, I listed the major version of Windows that Microsoft has released over the past 23 years, summarizing their pros and cons and asking the Technologizer community to vote on the best and worst editions ever. The polls are now closed. And we have a winner–and a loser. And a couple of runners-up.

None of them is exactly a shocker, but it was still a useful reality check. After the jump, a full report.

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I’m not as good about taking public transportation around San Francisco as I should be, but for the past three days I’ve been attending the Web 2.0 Summit conference at the Palace hotel, which is right upstairs from the Montgomery St. subway stop. So I’ve been riding to and fro each day, and spending time in the station. Which, at the moment, has devoted every single bit of its advertising real-estate to ads in Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” series, part of its “Life Without Walls” campaign for Windows.

If you’ll recall the TV component of the campaign, you may remember that the folks in it were a pretty wholesome bunch. Inspiring, even: an astronaut, a South African teacher and her students, a farmer, an underwater explorer, and several brainy geek types (including Bill Gates himself). They made the PC seem like a force for good.

Strangely enough, the “I’m a PC” folk in the subway ads are a distinctly different bunch. Most of them scowl. They threaten. They’re a little too into themselves. I don’t want to spend any time with most of them than I have to. (I apologize if I’m overthinking all this, but I’ve spent a lot of time staring at them while waiting for trains.)

After the jump, a gallery of Microsoft’s mass-transit spokespeople. (My apologies for the quality of the photography–subways aren’t great places to take snapshots, especially when you’re worried that a transit cop might assume you’re a terrorist.)

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Over at CNET News, Ina Fried is reporting that Microsoft is pretty much admitting that it intends to ship Windows 7 in time for it to land on PCs that are available for next year’s holiday season. Even without that new information, simple logic would tend to lead to that conclusion. The OS still needs enough polishing that it’s hard to imagine it shipping that much before the holidays, and Microsoft doesn’t want to repeat the slippage that led to Windows Vista shipping at the worst possible time: right after the holiday PC-buying rush.

(That delay gave Vista bad karma from the get-go: Microsoft rushed the release, and therefore shipped an OS before hardware and software companies were ready with compatible drivers and applications. Which resulted in a crummy experience for many early Vista buyers. Given that Microsoft had missed the holidays anyhow, it surely would have been wiser to delay Vista a few months further in order to get the launch right.)

Of course, almost 25 years of Windows releases proves that the fact that Microsoft intends to ship the OS on a certain schedule doesn’t mean it’ll hit it. But W7 is a relatively simple update from a technical standpoint, and it’s fairly far along already–and new Windows chief Steve Sinofsky has a better record than your average Microsoft exec for getting things done on time. So until there’s evidence that suggests otherwise, I’m assuming that the the first Windows 7 PCs will show up in stores roughly one year from now.