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Windows Longhorn imaginatively named Windows Server 2008

In 100 days after its January launch, nearly 40 million Windows Vista licenses have been sold, announced Bill Gates at the 16th annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). The milestone has Microsoft claiming that Windows Vista is the fastest-selling operating system in history.

“As of last week, we've (sold) nearly 40 million copies,” Gates said. “That's twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release we had.”

Of the near 40 million copies of Windows Vista, 78 percent are premium editions that feature advanced features and the Aero user interface.

Gates also revealed that the formerly code-named Windows Server “Longhorn” will be called Windows Server 2008.

Acknowledging that the blandness of name choice for Microsoft’s next server product, Gates joked, “We've been working hard thinking about it. We played around with a couple different ideas, but what we are going to go with is...Windows Server 2008. We know it's a surprise for us to pick something so straightforward.”

Despite Gates’ apparent happiness with having the fastest selling OS yet, things weren’t always rosy at Microsoft when it came to Windows Vista. In February, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that piracy was to blame for the slow initial sales of the new operating system. Then in March, the software company announced that the sale of Windows Vista licenses more than doubled those of Windows XP during its first month of availability.

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Forced
By XToneX on 5/16/07, Rating: 0
RE: Forced
By jrb531 on 5/16/2007 9:14:51 AM , Rating: 3
Then there are some people who have had Vista since launch and have had very little issues... most certainly less than at the same time of the XP launch.

The only issue I had was with the horrid Nvidia drivers. A quick switch to ATI fixed that.

While Vista is not perfect the people who proclaim that XP is the end-all-be-all OS forget how rotten it was at launch. In time they too will be proclaiming that Vista is great why do we need (insert next OS).

Many people hate change. No matter what Micorsoft did they were damned. Leave XP as is and people say it's nothing more than a 5+ year old OS that has so many patches on top of patches that it could never be secure. Come out with a brand new OS and the same people say it was not needed.

How can XP be full of security holes yadda yadda and a POS a few months ago and not it's a sign of the second coming now that Vista is out?

Go figure. Vista is not perfect... no OS is but a few months after release it's prob the best OS I have ever used. Any flaws are mostly from vendors who has plenty of time to come up with working and stable drivers but dragger their feet - Read: Nvidia, Creative Labs, HP and others!

-JB


RE: Forced
By darkpaw on 5/16/2007 9:42:37 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Any flaws are mostly from vendors who has plenty of time to come up with working and stable drivers but dragger their feet - Read: Nvidia, Creative Labs, HP and others!


I completely agree here. Vendors had plenty of time to come up with working drivers and didn't bother. I run Vista on my media center machine and its been flawless for everything except 3rd party drivers. While the driver model in general is new, companies had nearly two years of Vista beta to get working drivers going. Most of them did not even start on their drivers in ernest until after Vista launched.


RE: Forced
By SquidianLoveGod on 5/16/2007 9:48:23 AM , Rating: 1
I had no issues at all, In-fact the only issue was the fact I had to use official ATI drivers instead of the Omega's.
It even picked up and installed ALL of my hardware, Sound, Networking, Wireless, Blue tooth, even my monitor got a new max resolution of 1280x800 where-as with windows xp I was always limited to 1280x1024.
Still, It looks pretty, but for me at least it isn't my operating system of choice, I loose almost half of my battery life, Thus the switch back to XP, And also I had Issues with Popcap and Gamehouse games.


RE: Forced
By ATC on 5/16/2007 11:54:31 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
even my monitor got a new max resolution of 1280x800 where-as with windows xp I was always limited to 1280x1024


Do you have the res numbers backwards or am I on glue?


RE: Forced
By PrinceGaz on 5/17/2007 5:19:00 AM , Rating: 3
If he was limited to 1280x800 with XP, he should have tried installing the monitor's .inf file.


RE: Forced
By dgingeri on 5/16/07, Rating: -1
RE: Forced
By darkpaw on 5/16/2007 12:40:18 PM , Rating: 2
And XP reports back its activation status every 60 days or so. For a bit it was doing it weekly will some security researchers called MS on it. The only good thing is you might be able to manage avoiding installing WGA in XP, but even that is difficult without manually blacklisting it every time it is updated.

WGA blows, but its not like MS can use it to just turn off every copy of XP or like you said every copy of Vista in 5 years. When it was first launched it did have a very high false positive rate, but that has been mostly fixed. If MS just turned off everyone's old OS to force upgrades, they'd get their asses handed to them in court.


RE: Forced
By TomZ on 5/16/07, Rating: 0
RE: Forced
By mars777 on 5/17/2007 1:06:09 AM , Rating: 2
quote:

quote:
Appearance should never, ever, ever, go ahead of stability and operational fitness with computer programs.

With this statement, you are showing that you know absolutely nothing about Vista. Vista is not simply a re-skin of XP.


Excuse for the language but you are talking SHIT.
Vista is an XP (NT kernel) with user-lan drivers(ton of problems but had to be done for DRM), DRM infected(even in drivers) and new UI(Avalon - Aero).

The most beautiful features were left off (fileystem, shell) to implement DRM in every aspect of the OS.

And before you ask:

Had it. Had problem with 7800GT, had problems with SATA RAID, had problems with Audigy ZS.
Deinstalled it. It is simply shit.... For at least half a year Vista will be simply SHIT.


RE: Forced
By mars777 on 5/17/2007 1:09:49 AM , Rating: 2
user-lan should read user-land.

And again excuse me for the language.
I'm and excellent programmer ranging from assembly to .Net, that tried every windows up to date but...
when I remember the pain with Vista, i got to burst...


RE: Forced
By TomZ on 5/17/2007 1:23:32 AM , Rating: 1
While I'm sure you feel your 1 hour of experience with Vista made you an "expert," you still don't seem to have a clue about Vista. So I compiled the following list of new Vista features for you. You already know about Aero, so I'll leave that off.

- improved shell
- instant search
- Windows photo gallery
- Windows DVD maker
- SideShow
- Shadow copy
- integrated Windows Update
- speech recognition
- Bitlocker
- Readyboost
- Readydrive
- Superfetch
- WDDM
- new audio driver model (not sure the name)
- IPV6
- kernel transaction manager
- user-mode USB drivers
- kernel patch protection
- WIM image format
- multilingual user interface (dynamic)
- UAC (some would say a bug, not a feature)
- WPF
- WCF
- WWF (workflow, not wrestling!)
- CardSpace
- transactional NTFS

I'm sure there are more, but I'm tired now. Check out Wikipedia if you want a more comprehensive list.

Again I say, Vista is not a re-skin of XP. Anyway, enjoy your XP!


RE: Forced
By codeThug on 5/17/2007 1:31:29 AM , Rating: 2
Most of which could have been added to XP as an upgrade for a nominal price.

But now you get to buy it all over again plus an additional 1 gig of ram to make the pig fly.

what a deal...


RE: Forced
By TomZ on 5/17/2007 1:36:05 AM , Rating: 1
Funny, I'm typing this message on an old 850Mhz, 512MB laptop running Vista. You must be one of those Vista "experts" that I was referring to in my previous message. This machine was originally "designed for" Windows 2000.


RE: Forced
By codeThug on 5/17/2007 1:46:29 PM , Rating: 2
Sure it will work, if your willing to wait long enough for it to boot. And what else did you have running on this "Hot" little box you speak of? Nothing I'll bet. If you like Vista, then stick with it. I'd rather get some work done.

You must be one of those MicroTologists, brain washed by L. Ron Ballmer.

Vista is like sugar. It tastes sweet, but it rots your teeth.


RE: Forced
By peternelson on 5/17/2007 8:51:47 AM , Rating: 2
Whilst most of those are irrelevant to me,

I DO like the fact Vista supports DirectX10 for next gen gaming and graphics apps on the latest cards. I DO like the fact I can run true 64 bit (without lack of drivers from 3rd parties as was the problem for XP Pro 64 bit edition).

I DON'T like the fact I can't run my own drivers (or ones I want to) on 64 bit mode without them being signed first. I'd rather have the ability to authorise what I want to run, thankyou, particularly if I wrote it myself to run on my own hardware.


RE: Forced
By MaK2000 on 5/17/2007 11:17:54 PM , Rating: 2
I have not had any issues with Vista and was not forced nor was anyone else. I don't praise Vista by any means and openly warn people not to run it if their computer is even two years old and maybe not even if it is one year old. If you are building a new machine than it will run outstanding. I am running Ultimate x64 and it is faster and more stable than XP. I am yet to have a single BSOD in 3 months of use. It is a huge step up from RC2.

I am glad to see the first DX10 game demos coming out now since that is the reason I switched over and dropped so much money for a video card. People complain most about the UAC which is easily turned off, and on mine it is, and the x64 driver signing, which is also turned off on mine so that I can run Rivatuner, Vista can be made to run almost anything you want and enforce, ask, or openly let you do whatever you want. It is the fastest OS to date and the x64 versions rival the security of other x64 based OSes. It is Windows and will be attacked more than Mac or Linux and already is so it will never be as secure as the other two but it is a step in the right direction for MS and hopefully they will drop a lot of the old baggage with their next OS to make it only x64 and without all of the old code to let hardware manufacturers drop their baggage i.e. Intel's/AMD's support for all of the old code that lets it run the old OSes and some of the code buried in XP and even to a much smaller extent Vista. IMO GJ MS


RE: Forced
By FITCamaro on 5/16/2007 1:03:49 PM , Rating: 2
I've used XP since before launch and no problems.

Didn't have any problems with Vista when beta testing either.


RE: Forced
By Domicinator on 5/16/2007 7:56:16 PM , Rating: 2
Yep, I'm right with you on this. People will say XP is the be all end all until something comes out to replace Vista. Then everyone will be jumping up saying that Vista was so great and should never have been replaced. This happens EVERY time a new Windows comes out. People forget so quickly.

I for one have been using Vista since 2 weeks after launch, and I've had no trouble with it. And about a month ago, Nvidia and HP finally got their act together with good solid drivers for Vista, so now I'm especially happy.

I don't have any trouble with any of my games or hardware, and I don't have any performance issues. Yes, I have a pretty hefty gaming rig, but these days some of the new computers that Joe Schmoe can get at Best Buy have gaming caliber processors AND video cards in them, so anyone with a semi decent PC should be able to run Vista.

I'm not saying people don't have their problems with Vista, but I don't think it's as many as some of you haters like to think. Also keep in mind that a lot of people that bash Vista have never tried it or they are just angry because they're not quite ready to let go of XP.