30/11/2007 by swordfish.

One year after Microsoft officially launched its Vista operating system to businesses, it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been a smooth ride for the software giant.

Announced with the usual marketing razzmatazz that accompanies a new addition to the Windows family, there were high hopes that Microsoft could prove its detractors wrong with a product release which showed that innovation and risk taking were back on the agenda for a company that appeared to be stuck in a rut.

That didn’t happen. While Vista can be seen as an evolution from Windows XP, not even Microsoft can claim it’s a giant step forward. Some critics argue that Vista was hamstrung before it even hit the streets, after Microsoft decided to pull some of its most innovative features, such as the beefed-up filing system known as “WinFS”, to get the product out the door.

The improvements over XP that were included appeared to some users to be mostly cosmetic - like the Aero user interface, with its 3D approach to sorting through windows. It’s flashy but not really a killer reason to upgrade and something that Mac fans have argued was standard in OS X for years.

Performance has also been a factor, with Vista branded by some industry researchers as the most processor-hungry operating system to ever come out of Redmond - something that jars with the current industry drive towards energy efficiency and green IT.

Source: ZDNet

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30/11/2007 by swordfish.

Hard to believe it, but Windows Vista is now a year old!

Microsoft’s latest operating system was released to business users on 30 November 2006, and its first year of availability has seen what could politely be described as a mixed reaction.

Eighty-eight million copies of the operating system have been sold to to businesses and consumers so far: the consumer versions of Vista have been available since the end of January this year. Yet analysts at Gartner say “the uptake of Windows Vista in the PC installed base is taking longer than previously expected, with Vista becoming the dominant operating system only in 2009″.

A survey released last week suggests only 13 percent of businesses are planning to move all their desktops to Vista. For businesses, the problem seems to be twofold.

Firstly, Vista does not seem to offer many immediate benefits over its predecessor, XP. In fact, testing of upcoming service packs for both operating systems has given XP a marked edge in performance over Vista.

Secondly, there are currently few applications that run on Vista only. Until that happens, analysts suggest, most businesses may find it hard to see why they should invest in new PCs to support the hardware demands of Vista.

Source: ZDNet

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29/11/2007 by swordfish.

A huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted. The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as “Christmas gifts” and “hospice”. Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered.

The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information.

The booby-trapped websites were thought to be in operation for about 24 hours before Google began stripping them out of its search index. Some of the trapped websites are believed to be still turning up in searches carried out on Yahoo and MSN Live.

Source: BBC News

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28/11/2007 by swordfish.

The cost of an iPhone is proving to be a sticking point for UK consumers, according to a survey.

The Apple handset’s not-so-dinky £269 price tag is putting off swathes of potential buyers, according to a poll by market research company GfK NOP, which surveyed 500 people across the UK.

Almost half (46 percent) of consumers polled said they would never buy an iPhone at that price, while a further 26 percent said that, although they like the look of the phone, it’s simply too expensive.

Just two percent said they are considering adding it to their Christmas list.

UK consumers willing to shell out for the hardware must sign up to an 18-month contract with O2, Apple’s UK iPhone partner. In Germany, mobile operator Vodafone recently won a court injunction forcing Apple and its partner there, T-Mobile, to sell an unlocked version of the phone. In France, Apple is obliged by law to offer unlocked iPhones after six months.

Source: ZDNet

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27/11/2007 by swordfish.

New tests have revealed that XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

Vista’s first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system’s performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Devil Mountain Software the improvement was not overwhelming — leaving the latest Windows iteration out shined by its predecessor.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed over two times slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.

Vista’s performance with the service pack increased less than two percent compared to performance without SP1 — much lower than XP’s SP3 improvement of 10 percent.

The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

Source: ZDNet

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26/11/2007 by swordfish.

Eidos Interactive has made the popular Lara Croft adventure, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, available for download via Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace.

The game is available in four episodes. The first two weigh in at 1.5GB each and cost around 1,200 Microsoft Points, or about £10 each. Episodes three and four will follow later.

Eidos reckons this is the first time that the serialisation of a full retail game will be available for purchase through Xbox Live Marketplace.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original Tomb Raider at a basic level, but has been given a complete makeover and a lot more extras.

“We have created this version of Anniversary specifically for digital distribution as episodic content,” said Jane Cavanagh, chief executive at Eidos.

“This is part of our strategy to grow our presence in on-line and digital distribution as we believe there are huge opportunities in this format and we intend to capitalise on the increasing demand for digitally downloaded content. “Lara has always been at the forefront of technology and this world first with Microsoft highlights that fact. Ultimately we also intend to make the title available at retail so that it reaches the maximum possible audience.”

Source: Yahoo News

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