Displaying items by tag: Windows 7

Microsoft is an odd company at times. After writing changes to their operating systems that pretty much force updates on you when you shutdown they have now started on a campaign to deny updates to you unless you apply all of the ones they want you to have. This new patch prerequisite started a couple of months ago when it was announced that Windows 8.1 users would not get any more patches until they had installed a certain platform update.

Former Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo was arrested in Seattle on charges that he is guilty of leaking the various versions of Windows to public before their official publication. During the development of Windows 7 and 8 it was fairly common for screenshots or portions of the source code to leak to the Internet , and often they even appeared as a complete copies of the operating system along with the activation key. One of the culprits for this is the aforementioned Kibkalo.

Back in October of 2011 just before the launch of Windows 8 and RT, Steve Ballmer was working very hard to convince other people that his vision for Windows 8 was an accurate one. Ballmer was convinced that Windows 8 and RT would be in millions of homes and be the most successful OS that Microsoft had released. For many people this was just business as usual simply because a company would never say anything otherwise. Can you imagine a company coming out and saying “yeah, we know this is a crappy bit of software, but we want you to buy it anyway”? Still even with that in mind Microsoft was working on building up some good hype behind Windows 8.

The Well-known U.S. company Puget Systems, which sells "adjusted" PC's for their users, says that their customers that buy new computers more often choose Windows 7 than the latest Windows OS, Windows 8. [This is in keeping with some prelimiary information we have seen on downgrades – Ed]

Microsoft has fallen from the position of the biggest technology company on the block. That title now belongs to Apple. As such, they have had to adjust their market strategy. As the PC market has matured, and aged, new technologies have come to replace the desktop, and even the laptop. Tablets, phablets, and smart phones are all the rage, and are good at what they do. To make a bad situation worse (for Microsoft), Apple now has a 12% share of the PC market, up from 3% 10 years ago.

The new Big Project from Valve that is supposed to bring Steam to the TV and in some ways create competition for today’s consoles has been released today. It will transfer the existing Steam UI to one more practical for a TV screen such as huge icons, oversized text and big menus. This will be similar to the Xbox and Play Station UIs. Now PC users will finally be able to connect their machines to the TV and start playing laid back on their sofa without thinking will they have to push some keyboard buttons or navigate around with mouse, they can do that all with just gamepad.

“They've got the big screen, now give them the big picture.” is a good parable for Valve's new project. The Big Picture is basically Steam for TV and controllers. Users will be able to plug a PC into their TV and enjoy gaming on a big screen instead of pc monitor. You are probably wondering what has stopping you from doing that now, and the answer is nothing really, but dont you hate when you have to use keyboard and mouse to navigate, or when you transfer from a 20-something inch monitor to a bigger TV the icons seems too small? For many the overall experience feels a lot worse than just staying on PC.

So Windows 8 has gone gold and has been shipped to all of Microsoft’s OEM partners so that they all can make the October 26th release date. This is supposed to be a good thing for Microsoft and their partners, but for some reason we just are not hearing the same type of excitement we did with Windows 7 or even Windows Vista. Before the Windows 7 launch we heard from many OEMs and vendors who were excited about the launch of the new OS, it fixed many issues that Vista had and was much faster to boot. This time we are getting responses like “we are not commenting on our Windows 8 plans” or another very generic statement.

Gamers there is great news for you! According to Microsoft your text will now render up to 336% faster than in Windows 7! This means that if you are playing a text based game you are going to get blazing fast performance.  Although not related to gamers the announcement that Windows 8 now renders text faster than Windows 7 due to DirectWrite has been used to create headlines that read Windows 8 Smokes Windows 7. Unfortunately Microsoft is only talking about 2D graphic and the user interface. Microsoft has also done something that is very disingenuous; they used percentages instead of raw numbers.

We have talked (at length) about Microsoft’s new move to the cloud and also their push with the Windows 8 Ecosystem (which is the cloud). We have pointed out many items of concern as well as shown some of the good parts to the OS; such as faster boot times, much better windows explorer interface, significantly improved task manager etc. However, the one massive point that we cannot get past is the choice Microsoft has made in making the Xbox and Windows Phone the center of the connected home. What Microsoft has done with this mode of thinking is what earned me a D- on a science paper in High School; Concluding the Assumption.