• Leopard will open the Mac OS X floodgates (and embarrass Microsoft)
  The writer believes OS X will outsell Vista by a staggering margin. The current OS X installed base is less than 25 million, with Vista having so far sold around 88 million copies. That’s a heck of a lot of upgrades and new sales Apple will need!
  (tags: Humor Sales Apple OSX )
• The balance sheet on Windows Vista
  Windows Vista has certainly had its fair share of naysayers, but the operating system is clearly finding its way onto lots and lots of PCs.
  (tags: PR Sales )

Application compatibility remains one of the most annoying issues for Windows Vista users. The ability to upgrade the software to a new Vista compatible version is not always an option. The company that developed the application may no longer be around or the cost to upgrade is too high. In my case, I have a lot of classic PC games that will not run at all under Windows Vista no matter how I configure the compatibility options. In order to play my old games I need to install Windows XP. However, I am not exactly ready to give up all of the advances in Windows Vista just so that I can play my old games once in a while. The answer is to dual boot Windows Vista and XP.

Dual booting Windows XP and Vista on the same computer will allow you to select from a boot menu what operating sytem you want to run. This menu is shown right after you power on your computer. Setting up both Windows XP and Vista on one computer can be a little ticky depending what operating system you have installed first. The next two sections will help you configure

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Re-installing Windows can be a traumatic business, it’s bad enough having to backup all of your data and re-install your programs but the worst bit is tracking down all of the drivers for your hardware and peripherals. Here’s a simple way to avoid the hassle, a freeware program called DriverMax. It finds and exports all of the drivers on your PC to a nominated folder or compressed Zip file, so there’s no need to waste time hunting down discs and downloads. When you have reinstalled Windows simply run DriverMax, import your saved drivers and you’ll be up and running again in no time flat. The program comes as a 30-day trial but you can apply for a free registration code and it’s your to keep. (more…)

bad enough, drivermax, Drivers, freeware program, free registration code, hassle, installing windows, peripherals, Software, Windows, windows xp

The following post comes from my colleague Steve Ball, Senior Program Manager for Audio in Windows Vista, and continues his team’s on-going series on how Windows Vista treats various forms of audio. —– Part I: Why does my Windows sound sometimes “glitch?” Read More……(read more)

The following post comes from my colleague Steve Ball, Senior Program Manager for Sound in Windows Vista, and continues his team’s on-going series on how Windows Vista treats various forms of audio.

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Part I: Why does my Windows sound sometimes “glitch?”

Windows is a rich and complex OS designed for multi-tasking users whose tasks must share access to scarce system hardware and resources.  Unfortunately, despite multiple decades of incredible advances in PC and CPU architectures, there are non-trivial, complex interactions between applications, processes, and devices in even the most advanced personal computers that make a supposedly “easy” task — like playing back music without occasional glitches — much more difficult than it may seem at first glance.

Another way of thinking about this:  it seems odd that a modern >$2000 PC may sometimes have trouble seamlessly playing back music when $20 CD players can effortlessly playback music without glitches. 

So why do many $2000 PCs occasionally glitch while playing back music?  The quick answer is this:  Windows is not a single-function device like a CD player.

A slightly longer answer goes like this:  even an average Windows machine today is commonly used simultaneously as a media player, word

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