{"id":552214,"date":"2007-05-07T19:54:27","date_gmt":"2007-05-07T19:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/552214-steamed-up-about-windows.html"},"modified":"2007-05-07T19:54:27","modified_gmt":"2007-05-07T19:54:27","slug":"steamed-up-about-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/552214-steamed-up-about-windows.html","title":{"rendered":"Steamed up about Windows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vista was also five years in the making, cost an estimated US$7,5bn (R53bn) to develop and was at least a couple of years late.<\/font><\/p>\n

Research firm Gartner says worldwide PC shipments were 62,7m units in the first quarter of 2007, a healthy 8,9% increase over last year. However, Gartner also says Vista’s official launch in January had a very limited effect on overall worldwide demand. <\/font><\/p>\n

That trend is supported by an April survey by InformationWeek among businesses, where almost a third said that they had no plans to migrate to the new system. <\/font><\/p>\n

After consumer demand, Dell, the world’s second largest PC maker, decided in April to offer new PCs for sale with the old operating system XP – and not Vista – pre-loaded. As many consumers wait to upgrade to the new operating system only when they buy a new PC, that seemed to indicate not just a lukewarm response but also active avoidance of Vista. <\/font><\/p>\n

Then there are the lawsuits. Last month a class-action lawsuit was brought in the US against Microsoft, claiming that it unfairly labelled some PCs "Windows Vista capable" when they could only run the most basic version. Another Vista-related legal challenge is one being brought against graphics hardware manufacturer NVidia, also because the company was said to have falsely claimed its products were compatible with the new operating system. <\/font><\/p>\n

Microsoft’s first post-Vista financial results came out at end-April. The division that houses Vista saw a 67% jump in sales compared with a year earlier, to $5,3bn. <\/font><\/p>\n

It could hardly be different: Windows sits on more than 90% of all PCs and who wouldn’t want a different desktop environment after almost six years of XP? <\/font><\/p>\n

VISTA TEST DRIVE<\/strong> <\/font><\/p>\n

AS SOMEONE who spends most of his working life in front of a computer, I couldn’t wait for the release of Vista for a change in desktop scenery. To make sure that I’d the best possible experience, I worked with a pre-installed copy of Windows Vista Business on a brand new laptop that exceeds all the minimum requirements of the new operating system. <\/font><\/p>\n

I also installed as few as possible third party software applications on the machine. And when I hooked up hardware, I downloaded the latest Vista-compatible drivers to ensure everything went smoothly. <\/font><\/p>\n

One of the first tasks I gave Vista was to hook up the laptop to an external display in the shape of an LCD TV. With Vista’s smart new media centre software and graphical capabilities I thought that would be a cinch. Not so. After a frustrating two hours of tweaking settings, changing resolutions and refresh rates, trying different connecting cables and the obligatory reboots, I still had a black screen on the TV. <\/font><\/p>\n

It was only when I circumvented Vista and adjusted the controls of the graphics card from NVidia that I got it up and running. NVidia is being sued for not making its software Vista compatible (see accompanying report). Perhaps it should be the other way around. <\/font><\/p>\n

After the multimedia meltdown things went downhill. The system began to hang frequently without it being clear what caused the fault. And it wasn’t just incompatible software from other vendors causing problems. Even run-of-the-mill Internet browsing with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 ran into trouble. Resurrecting the machine from sleep mode and the battery power management controls also appeared to be behind many of the more serious system crashes. <\/font><\/p>\n

Vista itself isn’t very user friendly either. A simple task, such as backing up data to DVD and CD, is still a laborious process. And don’t dare select too many files to burn at a time. If you exceed the capacity of the DVD you have to start the process all over again. <\/font><\/p>\n

The biggest difference to the graphical user interface isn’t the rather superfluous 3D rendering of translucent windows, a trick you get tired of quickly, but the built-in search function. The search is great to find music or document files fast, but system controls and the help database don’t seem to form part of the index. <\/font><\/p>\n

Microsoft allows the user to downgrade back to XP on Vista Business but Home Basic and Premium users are stuck with their operating system.<\/font><\/p>\n

Finweek<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n

Comments<\/a><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IT’S NOT EASY to make sense of the success of Vista. Microsoft’s new Windows operating system was launched to consumers at end-January but didn’t create close to the interest and excitement in the world of personal computers that its earlier incarnations did. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}