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Embarrassing 'Vista capable' emails mirror earlier Microsoft deception
The New York Times today prints extracts from some of those embarrassing emails cited in the Vista-capable class action Microsoft is trying to stop – and shows that some things have not changed at Microsoft since I first joined PCW.
One of the first events I covered was a Microsoft preview of Windows 95, then codenamed Chicago. One of the issues, then as with the Vista release, was whether existing machines would be capable of running it.
Microsoftee after Microsoftee stood up and assured us that Windows 95 would run in 4Mbytes of Ram, which was then standard on home and office desktops. They were not lying: they were repeating what they had been told by their employer. But it was, to put it mildly, being economical with the truth.
Windows 95 ran in 4MB of Ram like a 96-year-old runs up Snowdon. Existing machines needed a costly upgrade to 16MB.
The NYT says Microsoft marketers used the term Vista Capable to avoid the implication (or persuade themselves that they were avoiding the implication) that the machine would necessarily run all versions of Vista. And that Microsoft set a low threshold on Vista Capable specs to avoid blighting sales of entry-level XP PCs.
The decision, says the NYT, met considerable internal protest. "Even a piece of junk will qualify," said Microsoft program manager Anantha Kancherla said in an email.
And after the Vista release Mike Nash, vice-president of Windows preoduct management, wrote that his laptop had been reduced to a '$2100 e-mail machine' that would run only a hobbled version of Vista, and could not cope with his favourite video-editing program.
The cache of emails unsealed by the judge hearing the case also contain complaints by Microsoft high-ups about a lack of Vista drivers shortly after the release of the OS. Microsoft says the number of Vista drivers has doubled since then.
Punch-drunk Microsoft cuts Vista prices - but not in Britain
Microsoft must be feeling punch drunk this month after a poor reception to its $40b bid for Yahoo, a tricky end-game in its battle to get its Open XML formats adopted as an ISO standard, scepticism over its claim to be launching an new era of openness over its programming interfaces, and a £608million fine by EU regulators overshadowing what had been billed as the company's biggest enterprise launch in history – the release of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008.
Microsoft releases Vista anti-hacker patch
An 'Important Update' arrived last night via Windows Update on my Vista PC. I'm running the RC1 of Vista Service Pack 1, and since installing that I've not received any other 'Important' updates so I investigated further. The update is described in the MS Knowledge Base article 940510 and is an update that's intended to weed out illegal or cracked installations of Vista.
If the updates detects exploits that indicate you have a counterfeit or hacked copy of Vista, it will warn you and point you to a Microsoft website that will enable you to remove the exploits. If you don't want to do this
Windows may disable the exploits and then ask you to use a valid product key to activate Windows.
According to a discussion on the MS forums, the update is actually a one-time check for two of the most common Vista hacks, the 'OEM drive activation' and 'grace timer activation' exploits, which are described in another KB article.
Presumably this is all part of the preparations for the public release of Vista SP1 during March. But given that most serious miscreants are hardly likely to have automatic updates turned on, it seems to be a bit of a shotgun approach.
320Gb portable hard drive
Buffalo Technology claims it is the first company to launch a 320GB portable external hard drive. The 5400rpm HD-PS320U2 MiniStation TurboUSB, available from December, packs TurboUSB technology which is said to speed up file transfers. It has the highest capacity of a range starting at 80GB capacity, and priced from £80 to £155.
Vista upgrade programme screws up again
We've had over 500 outraged comments on our blog about being scammed out of cash for their free Vista Express upgrade, or even being charged four times over by Moduslink for a single product.
Long delays and almost none-existent communication from Moduslink has made Vista a mirage for many, but the icing on this mud-cake has just been set:
We've now received numerous reports that Moduslink is sending out 64-bit copies of Vista to customers who ordered 32-bit variants and vice versa.
One reader received this email, two months after he initially received his upgrade CD:
"Dear customer,
It has been brought to our attention that one of our customers received an incorrect DVD (64 bit DVD instead of a 32 bit).
Since your package was shipped in the same serie, it may have happened that we have sent the incorrect DVD to you as well. To ensure that you can have a flawless installation of the software, we have decided to ship you a replacement 32bit version as a precaution. This DVD will be shipped shortly to you.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
With kind regards,
The Upgrade Redemption Support Centre
Toll-Free phone : 00800 666 44 666
Email address: MSTUPVISTAEMEA@moduslink.com
Toll paid Phone : +31 880016102
Technical Upgrade Program Vista
P.O. Box 252
7300 AG Apeldoorn
The Netherlands"
We asked Microsoft for a comment and are still waiting for a response.
See also:
Vista express upgrade on hold
Moduslink responds to Vista criticism
Vista's old-school crashes
I had my first full Vista crash this weekend. It happened when I was playing with the Windows Classic interface that sends any Vista desktop back in time to when I were a lad [sic].
My whole system froze, without any other programs open, while I was adding toolbars to the taskbar. There was no way back other than to kill the power. The 2000 look is one of the best in my opinion, but I suspect Microsoft spent less time working on it than Aero and as a result it's less stable.
Microsoft's decision to replace the 'Start' writing with a Windows flag in Vista confuses a lot of novice users when they try to get on with their work, so the classic look is definitely in demand.
It was a stupid decision for MS to have to select Start to shutdown in the first place, but it has become ingrained in many minds who couldn't care less.
Microsoft starts Vista Media Center 'Fiji' beta testing
Microsoft has posted an invitation for beta testers via the The Green Button blog, indicating the start of the beta program for the next version of Vista's Media Center application. This project is generally thought to be codenamed 'Fiji', although it's not clear whether the planned Media Center update is just a part of a major reworking that also affects other built-in Vista apps.
What new funtionality is going to be introduced is unknown, although for us Europeans satellite TV support (including Freesat) would be a good start, followed by support for more than two tuners.
A single Microsoft decision responsible for more carbon dioxide than Kingdom of Tonga
In response to Microsoft's recent announcement that Vista is greener than XP, I believe it's actually a lot worse.
This is mainly because a lot of XP PCs will get chucked out; I was once told by a green campaigner that it takes as much energy (and therefore carbon emissions) to create a PC as a car, due to the intensive process that happens in high tech fabs.
There is another issue though, Microsoft's decision to make the main start menu power button a 'low-power state' button in Vista is wasteful.
I believe vast swathes of users will believe this the off button. It's actually a sleep mode, like XP's, except that there's no risk of losing your documents in the event of a black out.
Using the PCW power meter, I found my Vista sleep mode consumes 4Watts. The hybrid sleep mode consumes 3Watts. When Vista is shut down, the intricacies of the ATX standard mean my PC consumes 2Watts - so Microsoft is adding 1Watt per PC.
For 40million Vista PCs, Microsoft adds 142,496 tones of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year – that's more than Kingdom of Tonga is responsible for!
There are 1bn PCs worldwide and Microsoft holds a 90 per cent share of those PCs, so things can only get much worse.
Vista driver support is sporadic
Over the last couple of months we, the press, have had dozens of emails from tech companies saying 'we support Vista'. Well, I recently got an email that should have been entitled 'Vista supports us'.
It turns out Vista comes preloaded with drivers for 100 NXP TV Tuners. For the confused NXP was, up until September 2006, a Philips owned division. NXP makes the chips that power some ASUStek, Avermedia and Pinnacle TV tuner cards.
I find this thoroughly bizarre since Hauppauge, who sells more TV cards than any other manufacturer, didn't get a single driver into Vista.
Top marks to NXP for getting them into Vista, especially when some companies are so lax about driver support. My Geforce 5600 was a perfectly capable card for my uses under XP - Nvidia has castrated it under Vista, even with Aero turned off.
My Vista efforts were dashed again when I struggled to get my 18 month old Trust BT446 graphics tablet working.
When I asked Trust if a Vista driver would soon appear I was given this semi-literate response: "Regarding your doubt, we regret to inform that the drivers for Vista compatible for this device won't be released because this product it is already discontinued."
I asked Microsoft about driver support and they told me Vista supports 1.5million products out of the box with 14,000 drivers on the disc and 16,000 more through Windows update. Perhaps I'm just unfortunate with my choice of products.
New Office formats could tie granny(and your office) in knots
Feels a little like spotting the first swallow of Spring... we have just had our first file conflict with Microsoft's new Office formats. I'm running Vista and Office 2007 side by side with an XP machine running Office 2003. Our copy-input system is built round the old file formats.
Old Office versions do not even see the new formats, which have an 'x' on the extension (ie name.docx), unless you choose the All Files option in the Open File dialogue box. If you click a docx file within XP and follow the prompts you are led to a site where you can download a filter - all 27Mbytes of it - that allows the old Office to read the new formats.
Even so you can get very confused dealing with both formats. I mistakenly put a .docx file into our system, which read it as gobbledygook. It was a small matter to replace the file, but imagine this happening in offices and homes all over the world: grannies who can't read letters sent by their grandchildren; people stuck without a web link with a document they can't read....
The new formats are a Good Thing, in my humble, leave or take the argument about whether Microsoft should have taken more seriously calls for an openly-agreed open standard for basic functionality. As they say: no pain, no gain.
