Hasta La Gadget!

Just because Windows 7 is right around the corner doesn’t mean Microsoft intends to immediately sweep Vista under the rug and forget about it. After some confusion around the ‘nets today, a company spokesperson confirmed with PC World that its policy is to back an OS for at least four years from launch, meaning January 2011 here, but also said it plans to cut ties and drop mainstream support for the three consumer models within three years, before April 2012. Despite the minimum, most Windows variants have seen longer lifecycles — XP, for example, had mainstream support for eight years after launch. Business and Enterprise users will still receive security updates until April 2017. Sure, it’s good to see people will still have the option for Vista further down the road, but we don’t expect a lot of OEMs or consumers will be opting for it once 7 goes gold.

Read – Vista’s fading support
Read – XP’s support lifecycle

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Microsoft to distribute Vista until at least January 2011, ending mainstream support by April 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 May 2009 01:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been rumored, it’s been confirmed, and now it’s here. Windows 7 Release Candidate, valid for a year. [Windows 7]

Whether or not Windows 7 does launch in October as previously suggested, those who have (or plan to get) Release Candidate will be happy to hear that Microsoft won’t be pulling the plug until June 1, 2010, well over a year from now and 11 months after its initial expiration date. After that, you’re gonna have to fork over the Benjamins for one of the retail SKUs if you wanna keep 7 alive. As for those still living in Redmond’s past, the company’s also extended the life of XP, at least for OEMs. Companies using the older OS will still be able to install it on netbooks for up to one year after 7’s official shape date. Seeing as the new system’s likely to have a more expensive licensing fee, it’s probably the best move if the company plans on keeping that 96% grip on the netbook OS market.

[Via gadgetmix]

Read – Windows 7 RC extension
Read – Windows XP extension

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7 RC and XP given extensions on life well into 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 May 2009 00:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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About a month ago, after multiple laptop disasters that in all likelihood were my fault, I decided to switch to a Mac after a lifetime of PC use. How’s it been?

It’s been pretty good. Here’s a quick rundown of some of my experiences.

• Expose and Spaces are great for someone who usually has over a dozen windows and programs open at once. Having Photoshop isolated to its own space to reduce clutter is great, and being able to swipe down and see everything at once is also really nice. One issue I’ve run into, however, is that spaces makes dragging and dropping across programs harder. Sure, you can drag down to the icon, but if I want to drag album artwork from Firefox into the proper section of iTunes rather than importing the image, I can’t do it across spaces. Not a huge deal, however.

• I really like the multitouch trackpad…most of the time. It’s great for using expose and for right-clicking with two fingers, but it also often misfires, especially in programs like Photoshop. Photoshop thinks I want to rotate the image every damned time I put more than one finger on the trackpad. This gets very annoying.

• Some functions and options are just buried way too deep. For example, whenever I plug my iPhone in, iPhoto opens. I in no way want this to happen. In order to turn this off, I had to Google it and get instructions from a message board. It involved fiddling with the Image Capture app, which is not really that intuitive. How would a non-expert figure this out?

• One of my favorite programs is Connect 360, which serves media to my Xbox 360 from my MBP. It’s actually amazingly ironic that this works so much better on a Mac, seeing that Microsoft makes the Xbox 360. But I tried multiple times to do this on my PC, and it always involved downloading new versions of Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player, getting codes from my Xbox and putting them into my computer and multiple restarts. Even then, it never worked. For $20 I bought Connect 360 and it was working in 3 minutes. Microsoft, what the hell are you doing that this is the case?

• Growl is a nice little notification service that lets programs deliver pop-up messages in a way that’s unified across the system. It’s great for stuff like the Gmail notifier, but a lot of apps abuse this thing. No, Last.fm, I don’t want a pop-up notification every time a new song starts. Annoyingly enough, you can’t control these notifications inside the preferences of the apps that use it. Instead, you need to go to System Preferences and go to Growl’s pane. Not a huge annoyance, but I had to search around through all of Last.fm’s menus before trying a different approach. Not too intuitive.

• Every single Mac app costs money. Where’s the freeware on Macs? On the PC, I used Texter to create macros for things I type a lot, which is free. On the Mac, there’s TextExpander, and it’s $30. There are loads of free FTP clients for the PC. On Mac, you use Transmit, and it’s $30. Tweetie is a nice enough Twitter client, but it sure isn’t $15 worth of nice. TextMate is a great, robust text editor, but no text editor is worth $54.

Paying $30 for one app that provides a great value is fine, but paying $30 each for 10 basic apps that aren’t all that important on their own adds up pretty fast.

Overall, the learning curve on the switch was really gentle. I feel like I’ve figured out most of the important stuff, and I’ve been enjoying my experience for the most part. But the fact remains that this was a damned expensive computer. MacBook Pros start at a solid $2,000. Is it worth it in this recession?

I’d say that if you are happy with your PC and don’t have any serious issues, no. There’s no real reason to justify the switch and the difference in price. But if you’re sick of your PC, are curious or just feel like switching things up, I haven’t run across any dealbreakers that would make a former Windows user run for the hills. It’s a slick machine that’s very stable and has lots of nice perks, but switching isn’t going to change anybody’s life all that much.

Microsoft tickled our meta-OS fancies last week by talking up the virtualized version of Windows XP included with Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate Edition. However, the company has now revealed that ponying up for one of the top tiers of the OS will not be the only requirement. 2GB of RAM will be needed, which isn’t such a big deal, but more troubling is the requirement of a CPU that sports chip-level virtualization support. Both AMD and Intel have been quick to add features to support enterprises turning to virtualized hosting environments, but rather annoyingly neither of those companies make it particularly easy to tell which of their chips provide such support. On the AMD side it looks like the tech was introduced with the Athlon 64 and has continued in most newer chips, while Intel’s waters are a little muddier, with all Core i7 processors being suitably endowed, but only some of its Pentium, Core 2, and Atom chips made the grade. How to know if you’re included? We’d expect an upgrade advisor from Microsoft to hit the internets any time now.

Update: Christopher commented to let us know of a little app that’ll tell you right now whether you’re in our out of the faux-OS party. That’s great, because we hate hasty last-minute upgrades.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7’s virtual XP has intangible system requirements originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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