Windows Vista

For those in the U.S., Microsoft is cutting prices only on the higher-end versions of Vista, and only for the upgrade version used to move from an earlier copy of Vista. The suggested price for Vista Ultimate drops to $219 from $299, while Home Premium falls to $129, from $159.

Microsoft chops Vista retail prices

A must-have for all Geeks!
TCP/IP Registry Values for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

This white paper describes the registry values for the TCP/IP protocol stack in Microsoft® Windows Vista™ and Windows Server® 2008. The intended audience for this paper is network engineers and support professionals who are already familiar with TCP/IP (both IP version 4 [IPv4] and IP version 6 [IPv6]).

The Vista SP1 benchmarking silliness keeps getting, well, sillier…
MS commissioned a company to run and report on: Responsiveness of Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP on common home / office tasks
Immediately it was picked up by several places as news.

The results are in — XP trumps Vista in benchmark tests
How embarassing — Microsoft commissions tests that compare Vista and XP, with the goal no doubt being to show how much better the new version is. Except that’s not what the test results prove.
Principled Technologies Inc., which performed the tests on the vendor’s behalf, showed Vista SP1 actually lagged XP on about 46 per cent of the business-oriented operations it measured. (The gap was 61 per cent on the consumer-oriented tests, but that’s not primarily what we’re concerned with here.)

Microsoft: Windows XP faster than Vista SP1 in some cases Windows XP is faster than the new Windows Vista Service Pack 1 in completing common consumer and business tasks on PCs coming out of sleep mode, according to tests commissioned by Microsoft Corp.

Report: Vista on par with XP performance; SP1 is fasterIn any event, if you download the above linked reports (the first two are new while the next two are from last year), you’ll discover, surprise surprise, that “overall, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP performed comparably on most test operations [but] Windows Vista SP1 was notably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP on several common home operations.” This was true for both common home and business tasks.
Gentlemen, start your complaining.

First you’ll notice the articles seem to have completely different spins on the same info. (XP faster, XP a little faster, XP not faster)
Second, this study was PAYED FOR BY MICROSOFT.

🙄

Comments anyone???

AnandTech has a great review of Vista SP1. A few interesting Quotes:
[Read more…] about A Second Shot: Windows Vista SP1

I picked up this story from Neowin. It claims Vista SP1 adds a whole 6 minutes of battery life to a laptop. Meanwhile this is what it does to one of my desktops (from the error log):
[Read more…] about Power efficiency enhancements in Vista SP1

Windows Vista SP1’s rocky ride to market has no doubt turned the stomachs of many advanced users.

A recap of this weeks SP1 Charlie Foxtrot. Article

Today, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC. For general availability, we are still planning to make SP1 broadly available in the mid-March timeframe.

Article
Man, the Vista SP1 release has turned into one giant Charlie Foxtrot.

Users in [H]ardOCP’s forums are reporting that SOME of them are getting Vista SP1 via Windows Update.
Anyone else seeing it?

Paul Thurrott looks at Vista SP1.