Tag: windows_xp

Vista

Vista sales numbers don't add up (to much!)

Microsoft are boasting that Vista is selling twice as fast as XP did when it shipped originally.

From the Microsoft release:

Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP. These initial figures reflect the broad interest in the security and usability enhancements in Windows Vista…. Windows Vista license sales after one month of availability have already exceeded the total of Windows XP license sales in the earlier product’s first two months of availability. In January 2002, the company announced sales of Windows XP licenses had exceeded 17 million after two months on the market.

The more than 20 million copies shipped represent Windows Vista licenses sold to PC manufacturers, copies of upgrades and the full packaged product sold to retailers and upgrades ordered through the Windows Vista Express Upgrade program from January 30 to February 28.

It all sounds very impressive until you analyse the numbers as Paul Kedrosky has done – from Paul’s more realistic take on it:

Back in 2002 PCs were shipping at the rate of 10.8m a month into a worldwide installed base of 680m. Today, in early 2007, Vista is shipping into a market where PCs are selling at 21.4m a month, and into a worldwide installed base of more than 1-billion PCs. (All figures from IDC.)

So with more than twice as many PCs selling worldwide now, the Vista sales numbers are struggling to be on a par with XP, as opposed to being twice as good. I’d love to see numbers for how many of these 20m Vista sales were to people who went into stores saying “Can I have a copy of Vista, please?” as opposed to the number who got it because it was the default option on the new Dell they bought online!

Microsoft, Security

Critical vulnerabilities or a clever marketing ploy?

Microsoft released updates for critical vulnerabilities in Windows (2000, XP and 2003). This includes fixes for three vulnerabilities that “criminal hackers are already exploiting” according to Brian Krebs.

The patches fix vulnerabilities which can allow remote code execution (it doesn’t come much worse than that!).

Microsoft critical security updates

Personally, I think they are trying to scare people into upgrading to Vista 😉

Let the conspiracy theories commence…

Mac, Technology

Running Windows on OS X

Actually Sprinting Windows on OS X might be a more accurate post title or Screaming Windows, or…

Parallels is virtualisation software which allows you to run other OS’s on your Mac. I splashed out recently and bought myself a new 15″ MacBook Pro (2.16ghz intel core duo, 2gb ram, 120gb hd).

Now that I have an Intel based Mac, I decided to purchase a copy of Parallels and try out Windows XP on OS X.

Parallels installs easily enough but getting it to install Windows is not trivial (yup, I had to read the Help file to figure it out!).

Having said that, that is the only quibble I had with parallels – once Windows (XP Pro) installed, it ran very smoothly.

Windows XP on Mac

It also works perfectly in full-screen mode (but then the screenshot wouldn’t be as interesting!!!).

I downloaded IE 7 beta and Office 2007 beta to try them on XP on the Mac and they work flawlessly. In the image above you can see IE 7 in the foreground and Word 2007 in the background.

What is most impressive though is the speed of XP on the MacBook.I only assigned it 512mb ram but everything is completely instant. Click on the Word icon and it is open, same with any of the Office apps, or Firefox, or Flock. IE 7 is a little slower but only because I have a multiple tabbed window as my home page. It runs faster than I have seen XP run on any PC.

Between that and the fact that the latest desktop Macs are coming out $500 cheaper than equivalently specced Dells, you now have no reason not to consider a Mac as your next PC!

Mac, Windows

Who wants to run Windows on a Mac?

It looks like Apple have decided to make it easy to install Windows on your Mac with their Beta release of their new Boot Camp product. You can download a public beta today and try it out if you have an Intel based Mac and are running the latest version of OS X (10.4.6). This functionality will be included as standard in the next version of OS X – codenamed Leopard.

Once you’ve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That’s the “alt� key for you longtime Windows users.) After starting up, your Mac runs Windows completely natively. Simply restart to come back to Mac.

I have to question – who really wants this? Seriously, why would you want to run XP on your Mac? I have XP Pro and Virtual PC installed on my Mac and I can’t remember the last time I ran it – and its functionality is waaaay better than the dual boot is going to be because with Virtual PC, you run the two OSes simultaneously, you can share disk, use a shared clipboard and swap between the two OSes as easily as switching between any two running apps – no re-start required.

This probably means Riya will never come out with their loooooong promised Mac uploader now!!!