Break Free of Vista for a $50 Ransom. Catch Win7 Upgrade While You Can.
Business, Software June 26th, 2009
Fellow Windows Vista victims, there’s light at the end of the tunnel: we may soon set ourselves free and only have to pay a $50 ransom. I just did.
The $50 ransom is not a bad deal. Forget the myriad of Win7 SKU’s and whopping prices all the way to $319.99. I’m calling BS: the real standalone Win7 price is $50 or $100. Period.
Tags: microsoft, operating system, os, vista, vista final, vistasucks, win7, Windows, windows 7, windows upgrade, windows xp, winxp, xref
My Miracle PC
Personal Productivity, Software February 19th, 2009
It does so much, while using zero resources:
Of course that’s not the typical picture, more often than not CPU usage is in the upper 80-90% range, while the Resource Monitor can only account for about 40%. Just another crappy program from Microsoft… but no worries: Windows 7: Cutting corners in the rush to market? How reassuring…
Tags: microsoft, resource monitor, vista, vistasucks, Windows, windows 7
Free Upgrade to Vista Final (Code-named Windows 7) is a Good First Step, but Not Enough
Business, Software January 8th, 2009
Put the last nail in the Vista coffin. Windows 7 is on the fast track.
- good summary of the Windows situation by Signal to Noise. Yes, Win 7 Beta will be available for download starting tomorrow, and it promises to be less of a resource hog than Vista. Microsoft also talks about providing free upgrades to Windows 7 for Vista users – at least those who buy Vista after July 1st.
Good start, but not enough. The upgrade assurance is vital for both Microsoft and more importantly its OEM partners, the computer manufacturers to avoid a slump in computer purchases while waiting for the next OS.
But let’s not forget what Win 7 really is: it’s Vista Final. As it has been widely discussed, Win 7 does not have a new kernel, it’s all about lots of incremental improvements to Vista. In other words, it’s a Vista that works – using the Microsoft lingo perhaps it should 
be called Vista SP3.
Make no mistake, the accelerated move to Windows 7 is a marketing decision, not a technical one. Vista became such a disaster that Microsoft finally realized no amount of marketing can save it: it was better the abandon the shipwreck and start with a clean slate, a “new” Windows product.
But that leaves millions of Vista victims behind, who did not want to by this junk, but had no other choice when they bought their computers. I’ve repeatedly said that Windows 7 should:
- Be released as Vista Final (meaning it works)
- Be provided as a free upgrade to Vista
- Come with a letter of apology to all Vista victims
OK, I know … fat chances for the letter of apology. But I am serious about the upgrade: customers who paid for Vista deserve a working (SP3-level) OS. Abandoning those millions would be akin to a hit-and-run on a mass scale.
Update: Finally, I don’t feel alone anymore: Jason Perlow @ ZDNet agrees: Windows 7 Should be a Fixta Free For All:
…since Windows 7 is essentially a performance and usability fix for a defective product, I’m of the increasing opinion that a Windows 7 upgrade should be free to anyone who was conned into buying Windows Vista.
- Report: Microsoft to do free Windows 7 upgrades
- Vista to Windows 7 upgrade date and details revealed
- Windows 7 beta available tomorrow: Only 2.5 million download slots available
- Microsoft CEO touts ‘best version of Windows’
- First Windows 7 beta puts fresh face on Vista
- Reasons to skip Microsoft’s Windows 7 Beta download
(This post originally appeared on CloudAve. – to stay on top of Cloud Computing news, analysis and just our opinion, grab the CloudAve Feed here.)
Tags: microsoft, operating system, os, vista, vistasucks, Windows, windows 7
Ready for Vista Final? (Code-named Windows 7)
Business, Software October 31st, 2008
For two days in a row TechMeme was overflowing with Microsoft news coming out of PDC: Azure, Windows 7, Web Office (whatever the MS name will be). But on the very day that supposedly all belonged to Microsoft there was a stream of seemingly unrelated items on TechMeme all pointing in the same direction, none too good for Microsoft.
Joe Wilcox @ Microsoft Watch declared that Windows Vista No Longer Matters :
Contrary to ridiculous assertions recently made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows Vista is a flop. If businesses aren’t buying Vista, after waiting six (now seven) years, it’s no success. Yet, during the last day of the Gartner 2008 expo 10 days ago, Steve asserted that Vista “has been extremely successful.”
Success in terms of revenue does not mean actual product acceptance. The fact is, most of the Vista revenue comes from consumers, not the corporate Market. Consumers don’t intentionally buy Vista, they buy computers: good luck trying to buy a system without Vista on it – unless it’s a Mac or the refreshingly new category of Netbooks. And if you cough up the extra $50-$99 most OEM’s charge you to “downgrade” to XP, it is still booked as a Vista sale! Like I’ve said before, don’t be blinded by Vista sales numbers. No wonder MS omitted the Vista licence count during last week’s earnings announcement.
PDC has shown that Microsoft is now eager to forget about Vista, a bad dream, fully focusing on Windows 7. They must have realized that no multi-million-dollar marketing campaign can fix Vista’s badly tarnished reputation.
Where public opinion is more divided is whether this was just a perception issue, or actual product problems. Count me in the latter camp – no Mojave Experiment can convince me otherwise. The problem with Vista has never been appearance, or features as originally designed: it’s the zillions of inconsistencies, little things that fail every day turning us Vista-users into Vista-sufferers.
The stream of messages coming out of PDC appear to confirm this: it’s clear that Windows 7 does not mean major architectural, infrastructural changes – that’s what Vista did. Win7 is all about the user experience – in other words, putting the finishing touches on Vista. I said over a year ago: we don’t need another desktop OS. But I guess I am OK with Windows 7, provided Microsoft:
- Releases it as Vista Final (meaning it works)
- Provides it as a free update to Vista
- Attaches a letter of apology to all Vista victims (yeah, fat chances…)
Whether it’s Vista or Windows 7, almost doesn’t matter – it will likely be the last major desktop OS MS releases, and as such it represents the end of an era. Obviously Microsoft themselves recognizes it (finally!), this years PDC is all about moving to the Cloud, be it the Azure initiative, or the announcement of moving Office to the Web. (To be precise it’s the announcement of a future product announcement).
This trend will only be accelerated by the shift in what devices we use for our (cloud-based) computing needs. Time to Leave the Laptop Behind – says The Wall Street Journal, joined by Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood who declares: The Web Browser is the New Laptop. Every day another Netbook is announced, at lower and lower prices, and they change how we access information forever. I’ll be devoting the next post to this subject, in the meantime leaving you with another post from Henry Blodget: Microsoft Windows: The Beginning of the End.
(Originally posted @ CloudAve)
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Tags: Azure, Desktop OS, microsoft, Mojave Experiement, netbooks, notebooks, operating system, os, PDC, vista, web office, Windows, windows 7
Why Vista S**ks
Personal Productivity September 25th, 2008
Vista isn’t really that crappy – says Gizmodo this morning. Well, I won’t tell you what I think ( I’ve done my fair share), I’ll just let you decide. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words… well, then how about a video?
Yes, all I was trying to delete empty folder structures from my own computer, using an account with full Admin rights. Makes me wonder whose permission I need.. Bill Gates? Steve Ballmer?
Tags: vista, vistasucks, Windows
The Shortest Windows 7 Wish-list
Software August 19th, 2008
Ed Bott compiled a detailed wish-list for Windows 7. Mine is shorter:
- Call it Vista Final (meaning it works)
- Provide it free of charge to all Vista victims
- Attach a letter of apology from Microsoft
Tags: microsoft, vista, vistasucks, Windows, windows 7, windows vista
Blinded by Vista Sales Numbers
Business, Technology August 18th, 2008
This is one of those rare occasions when I can pull up an old post, dust it off, and voila! – I’m done. Yes, I am lazy – but hey, I can’t help, this is one of those “I’ve told you” moments. Here’s what I wrote last year:
Time for a reality check. Product quality, customer satisfaction and market success have very little to do with each other when you have a monopoly.
The Vista problems are real, they are not fantasies created by bloggers. But how exactly are consumers supposed to revolt? They still need computers, and despite Apple’s respectable growth, they still represent a fraction of the consumer PC market. Try to buy a PC today, it’s hard to NOT end up with Vista (even I got one)
Customer demand for Vista? No, it’s customer demand for computers, in a market with no choice. I’m not “making this up”, Donna. It’s all in Microsoft’s 10-Q:
…Client revenue growth correlates with the growth of purchases of PCs from OEMs that pre-install versions of Windows operating systems because the OEM channel accounts for approximately 80% of total Client revenue. The differences between unit growth rates and revenue growth rates from year to year are affected by changes in the mix of OEM Windows operating systems licensed with premium edition operating systems as a percentage of total …
The increased “demand” for premium versions comes from another well-documented fact, i.e. Microsoft’s new segmentation, castrating Vista Home Basic and essentially making Home Premium the equivalent of XP Home – a hidden price increase, by any measure.
A true measure of “demand” for Vista would be corporate licenses and retail sales, and both are behind. But not for long: eventually, after the release of SP1 corporate IT will give in, too – who wants to be “left behind”, after all.
Today InfoWorld burst the Vista Sales Bubble (if you ask me, there never has been a bubble, but that’s another matter): 35 percent of mainly enterprise-class users “downgrade” their Vista systems to XP.
The numbers speak for themselves, let me just add this: next time you look at Vista Sales figures, remember: these customers did not have the choice to buy XP directly, they had to get Vista on their systems, then “downgrade” (upgrade, if you ask me) to XP. But by then their transaction is booked as a Vista purchase!
Vista sales figures are inflated, these transactions were not real purchases, just ransom paid to the monopolist for the privilege to use the OS that actually works- XP.
Tags: microsoft, microsoft monopoly, oem, vista, vistasucks, windows market share, windows vista, windows xp, xp
Apple vs. Windows Pricing: It’s All About TCO
Personal Productivity, Technology August 6th, 2008
The debate du jour: should you pay twice as much for a Mac than you’d have to pay for a Windows PC?
(Data source: NPD)
Just about everyone attributes the price difference to Apple’s marketing, Brand Power. But I think by focusing on out-of-the box prices, they all miss the boat: it’s all about TCO. Total Cost of Ownership.
I started to chronicle the hassle of just running a Vista PC and dealing with random, unexplainable failures, but more or less gave up. Compare this to the anecdotal evidence of my Mac-user friends, who, despite occasional hiccups all agree: it just works.
I don’t know how you value your time (heck, sometimes I wonder about mine), but most computer users probably are not in the minimum wage bracket. Considering the days and nights I spent trying to fix this Vista monster, I’m quite sure I would have been better off paying more upfront for a Mac. My TCO would have been lower. And not even my Virtual Invoices can make up for that.
See today’s debate on: Apple Watch, DailyTech, TechBlog, Mark Evans, Microsoft Watch, Technovia , jkOnTheRun, The Digital Home, Hardware 2.0,
Update: Finally, some sanity – here’s Jake:
Focusing on out-the-door pricing seems too narrow to ask such a broad question. It would be very interesting to see a comparison of expected full costs (not just OOTB) for each of the major O/S.
Tags: Apple, computer prices, desktop, laptop, mac, pc prices, virtualinvoice, vista, Windows
MS Money: Old Financial Data May Not Be Accessible on Vista
Personal Productivity, Software June 30th, 2008
You’d think at least Microsoft’s own products are compatible with Vista. Well, sort of. MS Money users who converted from Quicken may be out of luck.
I have a lot of financial data in Microsoft Money and prior to that in Quicken files. Both applications used to recommend you keep the data files small by archiving earlier years. With today’s faster computers archiving is no longer an issue, but if you’re a long-time user like I am, you probably have a few old archive files.
Every time you “upgrade” Money (hardly any new value, but if you use online services, MS forces you to upgrade every 2-3 years) your current data file is upgraded to the new formats, too. But what happens to the archive files?
I decided to convert all my older Quicken files to Money, just in case… after all, Money supports Quicken conversion. Or not: crash. Crash again.. and again. I tried several data files, even rebooted the system, to no avail: Money consistently crashed at all conversion attempts.
This is where Vista’s Problem Reports and Solutions comes handy, and yes, a few days later it shows “solution found”. Hm… if they found it, they certainly are not sharing it. Here’s the user-friendly stuff I found:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-16″?>
<DATABASE>
<EXE NAME=”MSMoney.EXE” FILTER=”GRABMI_FILTER_PRIVACY”>
<MATCHING_FILE NAME=”adapt.dll” SIZE=”109360″ CHECKSUM=”0×24BD92C0″ BIN_FILE_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ BIN_PRODUCT_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ PRODUCT_VERSION=”16.00.1303″ FILE_DESCRIPTION=”MSN Money Adaptation DLL” COMPANY_NAME=”Microsoft(R) Corporation” PRODUCT_NAME=”Microsoft(R) Money” FILE_VERSION=”16.00.1303″ ORIGINAL_FILENAME=”adapt.dll” INTERNAL_NAME=”adaptation” LEGAL_COPYRIGHT=”Copyright © Microsoft Corp. ” VERDATEHI=”0×0″ VERDATELO=”0×0″ VERFILEOS=”0×4″ VERFILETYPE=”0×2″ MODULE_TYPE=”WIN32″ PE_CHECKSUM=”0×25BFE” LINKER_VERSION=”0×60000″ UPTO_BIN_FILE_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ UPTO_BIN_PRODUCT_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ LINK_DATE=”01/04/2007 07:49:53″ UPTO_LINK_DATE=”01/04/2007 07:49:53″ EXPORT_NAME=”Adapt.DLL” VER_LANGUAGE=”English (United States) [0x409]” />
<MATCHING_FILE NAME=”adaptres.dll” SIZE=”13104″ CHECKSUM=”0xA99DDA54″ BIN_FILE_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ BIN_PRODUCT_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ PRODUCT_VERSION=”16.00.1303″ FILE_DESCRIPTION=”MSN Money Adaptation DLL” COMPANY_NAME=”Microsoft(R) Corporation” PRODUCT_NAME=”Microsoft(R) Money” FILE_VERSION=”16.00.1303″ ORIGINAL_FILENAME=”adapt.dll” INTERNAL_NAME=”adaptation” LEGAL_COPYRIGHT=”Copyright © Microsoft Corp. ” VERDATEHI=”0×0″ VERDATELO=”0×0″ VERFILEOS=”0×4″ VERFILETYPE=”0×2″ MODULE_TYPE=”WIN32″ PE_CHECKSUM=”0×4855″ LINKER_VERSION=”0×60000″ UPTO_BIN_FILE_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ UPTO_BIN_PRODUCT_VERSION=”16.0.0.1303″ LINK_DATE=”01/04/2007 07:00:04″ UPTO_LINK_DATE=”01/04/2007 07:00:04″ VER_LANGUAGE=”English (United States) [0x409]” />
This looks like the problem report sent to Microsoft, not the solution. There’s one hint though: the filename is AppCompat.txt. Perhaps it’s a Vista compatibility issue? Luckily I still have an XP laptop around, the data files are there thanks to Foldershare sync (more on synchronization in the next post), all I have to do is install MS Money on the XP machine and try conversion there.
Voila! Half an hour later I have the Quicken files converted to Money on the XP computer. Money’s import/conversion routine is incompatible with Vista! The whole exercise, including search on the Money Group took me about 2 hours, so dear Microsoft, here’s my invoice for lost productivity:
Oh, wait, we’re in the US, perhaps I should have presented a properly Americanized version. 
My poor experience was with MS Money 2007, but with Money Plus, the 2008 version of the product line Microsoft shows true ignorance to users’ legacy data needs. Money Plus comes in four editions: Essentials, Deluxe, Premium, and Home & Business.
Microsoft offers a nice comparison chart, which neglects to mention a small detail, available only at the footnotes:
* Important note – Microsoft Money Essentials will not be able to open previous Money or Quicken files. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Money or Quicken, Money Plus Deluxe may be the right solution for you.
Not opening Quicken … well, it’s their decision. But not opening data from their very own previous releases? And this is hidden in the small print?
I rest my case.
Tags: compatibility, data conversion, data portability, intuit, legacy data, microsoft, Microsoft Money, money plus, MS Money, ms money plus, quicken, virtualinvoice, vista, vistasucks, Windows, xp, zoho invoice
Zoli Erdos
