E-Dribble

The house parties have fizzled out and the paid advertisements in the form of reviews has come and gone. That’s right, Windows 7 has been released.  So what does everyone think? Well, if you’re looking for a calm and unbiased response, don’t ask these guys.

A growing number of people are getting locked into an endless reboot loop during upgrade, destroying their Vista installs and leaving them with no OS.

Woops.

Microsoft must be working day and night to try to resolve this issue, right? From TFA:

According to Microsoft’s head of support, however, the endless reboot problem isn’t on the company’s top list of concerns. “It’s very early in the process,” said Ben Bennett, the director of Microsoft’s Windows consumer global support group, in an interview Monday afternoon. “In terms of the top issues of customers who choose to upgrade, the XP-to-Windows 7 [upgrade] is up there on the list for lots of reasons. The netbook upgrade scenario — how do I upgrade my netbook to Windows 7 — is also a big one. And another is, ‘Where are my applications?’ after people have upgraded. They wonder what happened to e-mail and photo editing, for example. Those are the top issues so far.”

So, they’re more concerned with those upgrading from XP to 7.  Well, that makes sense.  I’m sure that was their plan all along.

At least I got to keep the paper hats and confetti.

The release date of Windows 7 was leaked; Oct 23, 2009 is the date they begin telling you that it’s the best selling operating system they’ve ever designed, regardless of whether it actually is or not.  If pressed, they’ll be able to give you numbers to show this. That’s because they’ll threaten to ruin any hardware vendor that dares to ship a box with anything but 7 on it.  Regardless of whether that serial number is used or not, it is a sale and thus counts towards their impressive sales numbers.

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Kevin Turner, the COO of Microsoft stated in a address at the MidMarket CIO Summit:

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today. Everything that we’ve learned in Vista will be leveraged in Windows 7, but certainly when we broke a lot of the compatibility issues to lock down user account controls, to lock down the ability to manipulate states and all the things, that was a very painful process for us to grow through, but we had to do it. And the reason that Windows 7 will be successful is because of the pain we took on Vista. Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it works on Vista, it will work on Windows 7. If it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.

The

Safest

On

The

Planet?

I got nothing.

A while back, Steve Ballmer began telling everyone, most notably his corporate clients, that you will rue the day that you didn’t install Vista if you want Windows 7.  It’s just like the “rinse and repeat” portion of the instructions on your shampoo bottle.  They know that Vista was a stillborn, but still can’t help themselves from trying to sell some licenses.

Let’s move on though.  They have been assuring consumers that they needn’t worry about the hardware requirements for 7.  If your computer can run Vista, then you can run 7.

Umm, yeah.  About that.

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In spite of Microsoft’s insistence that they’ve created the ultimate OS with Vista, it seems that most reports still have XP outselling it.

This is of course, in spite of the fact that XP is no longer officially sold. Need a copy of XP? Head on over to NewEgg, where a loophole gets exploited to sell legitimate OEM copies of XP Pro.

Oh and that whole deal where Ballmer insisted that Vista was the most secure OS ever?  Yeah, he was just kidding.

they might have considered reversing the roles concerning which OS is not allowed to be installed on the drive.

Microsoft has announced that Vista’s SP1 will fail on install if you’re dual-booting, thanks to “Trusted Computing”‘s chain of trust being broken.

If you scoff at TC, I can vouch that the system works well.  For instance, Microsoft broke my “chain of trust” a few years ago causing me to not allow it to install on my computer. No problems since.