Daisuke Papipupipu’s Technology Guide

When introduced, Windows Vista faced many criticisms about the intense system requirements. These were intense as it only supported computers with at least 1.0 GHz CPU clock speed, 512 megabytes of memory, and 40GB of hard drive space. On the other hand, Windows XP Professional only required 300 MHz of CPU speed, 128 MB of memory, and a 1.5 GB hard drive. Even with the required configurations, customers have complained that the OS requires too much graphic power and causes the computer to run extremely slow. It appears that computers certified as Windows Vista capable cannot even run some of the preinstalled Windows programs such as Windows Moviemaker. Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president, bought a 2000 dollar system with windows Vista, but later he complained, “I personally got burned. I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine.” For these reasons, many XP users have not upgraded to the newer Vista operating system since they didn’t want to risk their computers. Many have heard unsatisfactory comments about Vista and the fact that the price is higher than usual affected many. This, in result, impacted Microsoft’s gains, causing the company to rank down. By considering this, Microsoft officials sped up and decided to develop a new operating system codenamed as Windows 7.

Currently, there are not many features revealed from Microsoft, but some officials commented on the product. Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill gates emphasized to the press that the new version will be more “user-centric” and commented, “That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you’ve got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you’re interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else’s PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that’s kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won’t need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We’ll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we’ve got a pretty good outline.” Bill Gates also revealed to the press that performance will improve drastically by lowering the RAM usage, and decreasing the power usage. He also commented that this new OS would allow users to have more connection with the mobile phone; therefore allowing the connection between two PC’s and the Internet. This is a significant feature of the upcoming OS and could turn out to be a key selling point since the stress caused by transporting files would be reduced.

In early January 2008, Microsoft revealed a build of Windows 7 named Milestone 1 (m1) with a version number of 6.1.6519.1. According to TG Daily, there are many improvements in this build such as a new Windows Media Center, “support for systems using multiple heterogeneous graphics cards”, new gadgets for Windows Explorer and Windows Media Center, an improved calculator, and a new feature that allows users to store personal Internet Explorer settings in Windows Live accounts. The Health Center of the OS was also modified allowing the users to view all the security concerns of the computer in one place. Other than this, there were no other major updates in this build.

Windows Vista had failed on many consumer’s eyes; therefore Microsoft bumped into the idea of releasing a new operating system. Since many officers are worried, it is projected that Microsoft is going to break the 3 year custom by releasing the OS in late 2009. This may turn out to be a success that leads to many upgrades of current XP users.

Information from: www.wikipedia.org

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