Summary: Months before the release of Vista 7 and Windows Mobile 6.5 there are troubling signs

PARTICIPANTS of this Web site occasionally offer a story about their experiences with Vista 7, which is all about marketing. There is an example from April and also from earlier this month. Another short review comes from a reader whose experiences are reproduced verbatim below:

I installed Vistas 7 RC1 on my Acer Aspire 7220, with these isues:

- 1400x900 flatscreen was recognized as a 800x600 CRT; - Nvidia Geoforce 7000M GPU was recognized as a standard VGA adapter; - Nvidia nForce Ethetnet adapter was not recognized at all; - Atheros PCI WLAN adapter was not recognized at all.

I downloaded the Vista drivers from the Acer website on my Fedora 10 machine (Pleunix) and copied them to a USB thumbdrive. Installed them on Vista 7. However I was still unable to make any connection (neither wired nor wireless) to "the Internet".

Vista 7 didn't understood that my Sitecom (Linux) wireless router/firewall/switch/nat only serves as a access point and switch behind another router. That is obviously too complicated for Vista 7.

After 12 hours I gave up and re-installed Ubuntu 9.04 on that machine.

My final conclusion: Vista 7 is even worst that Vista if it's not preinstalled.

I am wondering if people are stupid enough to pay for that piece of junkware.

The point about poor hardware support is also emphasised in this brand new blog post which starts as follows:

5 Things Microsoft does not want you to know about Windows.

Truth no 1 You are paying way more than you are getting. This is a simple truth that most users of Windows do not seem to appreciate. Why do you have to pay as much as $100 to get a license to use an OS which is bare to the bones? An installation of Windows is just the first in a series of long processes to make your computer useful. Your computer can in virtually all cases not be used to do anything meaningful after a Windows installation until you have installed numerous third party drivers and other utilities most of which you would have to pay for separately. That is very much being short changed to me.

Truth no 2 You are never safe with Windows. The recent DDOS attacks on Twitter and Facebook makes it very clear that if anything at all, Windows is a very big threat to the future of the internet and computing in general.

This second point was also addressed here before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

It is interesting to note that the "mobile" version of Windows seems to be on its death throes and this is even covered by a news Web site right now.

Did Microsoft Just Throw WinMo Under A Bus?

[...]

Just don't act surprised when the next version of Windows Mobile turns out to be the last.

Microsoft bought Danger for a large sum of money and some say that Microsoft was pressured to buy RIM (for BlackBerry). There are still many writeups about Microsoft's prospects with Palm, but that would be Linux based. Either way, Windows Mobile has been a great financial failure for Microsoft and there is no sign of this trend reversing. Microsoft is now trying to get Symbian (Nokia) to help out. One reader, Patrick McFarland, argues that both Windows and Windows Mobile will be replaced by Microsoft, but we cannot confirm such a claim. ⬆