It seems all the negative press on Microsoft Vista is making MS to sit up and take notice. They ought to. The flag bearer product of a company can not be allowed to be a bug in itself.
In my previous post, i recommended that users who are using microsoft vista,
must stick with Vista rather than downgrade to Windows XP. Now there are plans afoot to make the experience ( Damn, i used eXPerience) of Vista much more fruitful. First up, the larger known issues. People have complained about various things, chief among them are
- computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode
- Long time taken to copy large files, especially from USB devices. This one really makes me laugh. They designed "Ready Boost" to boost performance through USB drives, but bugged it enough to make the file transfer slow.
- Lesser compatibility in case upgrading from Windows XP.
- Driver issues with nVidia; in fact with most video drivers.
- Activation tweaks
Not a very long list, but very basic things that can put a user off. So to address all these issues, Microsoft, in a muted and downplayed manner, is doing what it does best. Bring out a service pack. Two substantial collections of Windows Vista hotfixes have been leaked to the Internet. I say leaked, because they were initially offered to Windows Server 2008 beta testers. This led to lot of speculation amongst users that the pair are actually the foundation of the future Service Pack 1 (SP1) release for the operating system, although Microsoft has entirely downplayed the whole issue.
Labeled "Vista Performance and Reliability Pack" and "Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack," the two updates feature a long list of non-security-related bug fixes. The AeroXperience site even posted results of early testing of the packs' performance. According to a write-up here, systems updated with the Vista Performance and Reliability Pack copied large-sized folders in less than half the time as compared with unpatched machines. That is good news I suppose. But it is always better to wait with crossed fingers when it is related to Microsoft.
It is still under wraps. The hush hush release of Windows 7 M1 to the trusted family of testers. I do not really know if these are the trusted partners. The screenshots of Microsoft Windows 7 are available and by all accounts these look like nothing new fr
om Windows Vista. Well, if they are just doctored screen captures of Vista, then I do not know how to classify them. By the available accounts, there seems to be wider support for hardware and the release bouquet remains the same like Vista, that means you will have Home Basic, Ultimate and business editions available when the OS is finally released. The estimated date is somewhere in end 2009.
