Microsoft Windows Vista Vs Windows Xp

Microsoft: Pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista

Software counterfeiters pass on Windows Vista and instead prefer to pirate Windows XP, a Microsoft Corp. attorney said today, outlining a practice that tracks with the leanings of many of the company's customers.

While explaining the "Global Anti-Piracy Day" educational and enforcement effort Microsoft launched today, Bonnie MacNaughton, a senior attorney with the company, acknowledged that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista.

"Historically, counterfeiters tend to focus on the 'n-1' version of software," MacNaughton said. "Because of the more robust antipiracy and security features in Vista, most sophisticated piracy rings still continue to focus on XP. But that's changing over time."

That pirates have stuck with XP -- which retains the bulk of the Windows operating system's market share -- is "very consistent with what we've seen in counterfeiting in the past," said MacNaughton. "There's usually a lag of between one and two years [before they can] figure out how to replicate those antipiracy and security features."

Counterfeiters currently copy Office 2003 rather than the newer Office 2007 for the same reasons, she said.

MacNaughton also touted the day's announcements of new initiatives and lawsuit filings scheduled to take place in 49 countries, ranging from Argentina to the U.S. "As counterfeiters have gotten more sophisticated, we have realized that this is not a situation that we can address alone," she said. "And we want to stress [today] the collaboration with Microsoft's partners and customers, and governments."

In the U.S., Microsoft filed 20 new lawsuits in federal court against software resellers that, according to the company's allegations, either sold pirated copies of Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Office or installed the counterfeit software on new PCs. Nine of the lawsuits were filed in California; two each were filed in Ohio, Oregon and Texas; and others were filed in Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota and New York.

MacNaughton also said that Microsoft is planning on another antipiracy educational effort early next year to make sure that customers know Windows XP's lifespan is coming to an end. "We're expecting that counterfeiters will attempt to fill the void at XP's end of sales," she said.

Microsoft will halt Windows XP Professional sales to small mom-and-pop computer sellers after Jan. 31, 2009. Larger computer manufacturers, such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., however, will be able to obtain XP media for "downgrades" from Vista Business and Vista Ultimate licenses through the end of July 2009. Microsoft only recently said that it would extend shipments of XP to OEMs; previously, it had said it would stop the practice in January.

source: computerworld.com

 

Is holding out for Windows 7 a gamble worth taking?

With more and more information about Windows 7 coming out almost daily, I’m getting increasing numbers of emails from people wanting my advice on whether they should skip Vista and hold out for Windows 7 or make the plunge now and make plans relating to “7? once the OS is out.

Having discussed this issue with several people I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s far too early to make any plans relating to Windows 7 and your OS migration plans should be based solely on Vista in the here and now and not on what Windows 7 might or might not bring.

The first thing that you need to bear in mind is that there no firm date for the release of Windows 7. The ballpark guess range is between late 2009 or early 2010. Pundits are carpet-bombing that range with guesses as to when we’ll see Windows 7, but remember that they are all guesses right now. And there’s even no guarantee that the 7’s release date won’t fall outside of this range. After all, quality of the release will count more than ever. Peter Bright of Ars Technica put it well:

Though Microsoft’s customers clearly won’t tolerate a kind of Duke Nukem Forever “when it’s finished” approach—the software does need to ship, after all—a first-rate Windows 7 in the first half of 2010 will make customers much happier than another release with Vista-like teething trouble in late 2009.

BINGO! Microsoft can’t afford to botch the release of Windows 7 in the way it did with Vista. If Microsoft doesn’t get plenty of “WOW!” right from the start with Windows 7, the Redmond giant has a big problem on its hands.

But here’s my worry in advising people to skip over Vista and wait for Windows 7. Vista, as it stands now with SP1, is a pretty decent version of Windows. Compatibility issues have largely been fixed (if you hardware of software isn’t supported by now, it’s unlikely to be supported), performance is on-par or marginally better than XP (depending on the benchmark that you choose), and reliability is light-years ahead of what it was when Vista was first released. But these fixes took months. What if Windows 7 is plagued by the same issues and that OS takes a year to fix? Taking the most optimistic release date that we have (mid-2009) that would mean that Windows 7 wouldn’t be “ready” until mid-2010. This has several implications:

* That makes XP awfully old (9 years old).
* It’s likely that hardware/software support will be getting patchy.
* The abandonment of support for XP by your vendor would likely push you into having to come up with a migration plan, rather than come up with one at your own speed.

Jump or be pushed? Which is best? You decide!

source: blogs.zdnet.com

 

You are got Windows 7 questions, I have got answers

It’s impossible to offer a comprehensive evaluation of a product as big and sprawling as Windows 7 with just screenshots and specs.

That’s doubly true when looking at a preliminary release that’s still missing some key features. My first look at the pre-beta PDC release of Windows 7 inspired plenty of great feedback and questions, along with an understandable amount of confusion and apprehension. I’ll address some of the most prevalent questions and comments in this post.

Isn’t the new Windows 7 user interface just a coat of paint slapped over the Vista UI?

Short answer: no. The build I have to work with is very Vista-like, missing the new Start menu, desktop, and taskbar enhancements. The demos I’ve seen here at PDC use more recent builds where those features are available. Those features will reach users in the form of a beta “early next year.”

In the past 48 hours, I’ve had a chance to get a closer look at those new UI features. One thing becomes obvious after only a few minutes of playing with the new interface: The Windows 7 design team has paid an enormous amount of attention to small details and have focused on workflows and end-to-end experiences, not just on dialog boxes and feature sets. The result feels comfortingly familiar to any Windows user, although the overall experience is often significantly different when you break down its small details.

One example that illustrates the point is the difference between Backup programs in Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Windows 7 version, shown below, includes a key feature missing from its Vista predecessor – the ability to include or exclude a folder from a backup set. But that’s not all: the entire workflow of the backup process has been streamlined dramatically. It takes 10-15 clicks to perform an image backup in Windows Vista; on a Windows 7 notebook I tested, the operating system offered to perform a backup when I plugged in an external hard drive. The entire process took three clicks and less than 10 minutes. The customization screen shown here added only two clicks to the entire process.


Is it faster? Really?
Measuring performance is tough enough with released code. For something billed as a “pre-beta” release and offered primarily for developers, it’s inappropriate and frankly foolish to even attempt granular measurements of speeds and startup times. My subjective impression is that this OS feels quick and impressively responsive, but I’m not prepared to break out the stopwatch until I have a more polished build.


Isn’t this just a blatant ripoff of OS X/KDE/etc.?
Tracing the ancestry of UI innovations is tricky. There are, after all, only so many ways to interact with pixels on a screen to make things happen. And it’s foolish not to pay attention to what competitors past and present have done. As I pointed out in my first look, the new taskbar clearly borrows some concepts from the OS X dock, but it retains the Windows DNA and adds some smart behaviors that one-up Apple, most notably Jump Lists and live, clickable previews.

source: blogs.zdnet.com

 

Windows 7 User Interface – The Superbar - Enhanced Taskbar

One of the elements of the Windows graphical user interface that is evolving past what end users have come to traditionally associate with it is the Taskbar.

The GUI evolution delivered by Windows 7 is designed to bring what Microsoft is internally referring to as the Superbar, or the enhanced Taskbar. The new Taskbar was showcased at the professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles at the end of the past month but was disabled in pre-Beta Build 6801 (or Milestone 3) which was served to participants and which subsequently leaked, now being available for download via torrent websites. However, at this point in time, there is a hack which serves to uncover the hidden Superbar even in Windows 7 pre-Beta Build 6801.

“By using the Windows 7 Taskbar, applications can provide more information to the user in more intuitive ways. Each application has a single button on the Taskbar, represented by a 32x32 icon. By default, each application’s running windows are all grouped under this single icon. In addition, the user can pin the application’s shortcut to the Taskbar to serve as an easily accessible application launcher. When the application is running, the button for this running application replaces the pinned launcher, so that the application always has a single, consistent location on the Taskbar,” Microsoft revealed.

The enhanced Windows 7 Taskbar comes complete with a range of application-related information sources for end users to access via such items as: “Destination List, Icon Overlays, Thumbnails for running windows, Thumbnail Toolbars, and Progress bars,” according to Microsoft. At the same time, some classic Taskbar items have been scrapped altogether. One illustrative example in this context is the Quick Launch area. Although the Quick Launch folder is still a part of Windows 7, the actual area on the Superbar is gone.

One new presence on the Windows 7 Superbar is what Microsoft referred to through the development process as Destinations Lists. The Redmond giant indicated that the name might change post Beta, and as it is the case, Microsoft top executives dubbed the feature Jumplists at PDC2008. Jumplists are designed as “shortcuts” enabling users to connect with frequently accessed Internet locations, files or documents faster.

“The Destination List is automatically populated based on frequency and recency of use for file-based applications. Additionally, an application can define custom destinations, enabling it to monitor its own destination usage and their semantics. Applications can also define Tasks (actions within the application that users will find convenient to access directly, for example, composing an e-mail) to appear in their menus,” Microsoft informed.

With the new Progress Bars, users will be able to monitor ongoing tasks and processes performed by their applications without having to keep the programs' window visible. In this regard, progress of functions including file copies, but also CD and DVD burning, downloads and installs will be displayed via the Taskbar buttons, through the Progress Bar.

Other additions to the Windows 7 Taskbar are “Icon Overlays used to convey long-standing status or notifications can be displayed on the bottom right-hand area of the application’s taskbar button. Icons are displayed one at a time, in the order in which they are received,” Microsoft stated.

All applications in Windows 7 will feature Thumbnails. Set up to activate when the user hovers over a certain Taskbar item, the Thumbnails will be large and interactive mini-windows delivering visual guidance and data related to the program. On top of this, “the Thumbnail Toolbar provides a single location for commonly performed key actions related to the window where the user does not need to restore the window, for example, Play/Stop controls for a media application,” Microsoft added.

source: news.softpedia.com

 

Windows 7 Path to RTM: Broad Beta and Public Release Candidate (RC)

There are just three more development milestones left out of the development process of Windows 7, following the first three.

At the end of 2007 Microsoft made available Milestone 1, while M2 and M3 were delivered in 2008, the last of which offered to all attendees at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles the past week. In the opening keynote address at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group revealed the path that Windows 7 would take to reach RTM stage, which you will be able to see via the image included with this article.

Following the three core development milestones, Windows 7 is now in pre-beta stage, Build 6801. In this context, Sinofsky indicated that the next step in the building of Windows 7 was to deliver the fully fledged beta. According to the chief of Windows Engineering, the milestone will be a broad beta, which means that Windows 7 Beta will in fact be made available to an increased pool of testers, but not to the general public.

Sinofsky stressed the fact that the Windows 7 Beta bits that would be made broadly available would deliver the feature-complete version of the operating system. However, no additional details related to the delivery deadline were offered beyond pointing to the early 2009 for availability. Sinofsky's advice was that users keep an eye on the Engineering 7 blog and the Windows page dedicated to Windows 7 on Microsoft.com for additional details about the successor of Windows Vista.

The top dog when it comes down to Windows 7 engineering made no reference whatsoever to other potential Beta releases. In this context it looks like Windows 7 Beta 1 will be followed directly by the Release Candidate build of the operating system. Between Beta and RC, Microsoft plans to integrate all the user feedback on Windows 7 into the development process. At the same time, Sinofsky pointed out that Windows 7 would be released to manufacturing straight out of RC.

source: news.softpedia.com