Reader Responses: What Else But Vista?

You love these, and we love these. So let's just jump in. Our good friend, Doug, who has been a big help to both RCP the magazine and RCPU in the past, gets us started:

"When I started my company, I bought a Dell Latitude D820 with a dual core Intel processor, 2GB RAM and a 256MB Nvidia video controller. The laptop only registered a 3.1 on the 'Vista experience' meter and was slow from the start. However, since I need to know Vista in order to support my customers, I kept it and learned to live with it. I considered wiping the system and downgrading to XP Pro from Vista Ultimate (which isn't ultimate but a waste). Recently, I've had some physical issues with the system, and as a result of troubleshooting with Dell, I decided to delete the system partition and install XP Pro.

"Do I still need to support customers using Vista? In a word, no. Out of all the systems I've sold and supported over the last year, I can count the Vista systems on one hand. Heck, I can count the Vista systems on one finger. My two main vertical markets are health care and financial services. The software vendors for both of those markets still either require or highly recommend XP. So, I'm swearing off Vista. My business customers (99 percent of my customers) will continue to buy XP Pro preinstalled from Dell. If Microsoft doesn't extend the end-of-life again next July, then I'll probably buy software assurance licenses for them and manually install XP Pro on new systems until Windows 7 becomes the new standard..."

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Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20082 comments


WGA Makes Friends Worldwide

The Chinese aren't such big fans of Windows Genuine Advantage. We're all for fighting piracy, but is WGA really the best way to do it? Then again, with piracy rates at something like 90 percent in China (according to the article, anyway), it's hard to blame Microsoft for trying to fight fire with fire -- even if everybody ends up getting singed a bit.

Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20080 comments


Office Lives in D.C.

One of the perils of putting together RCPU the way we do is that we rely a fair amount on other people's reporting. Our general approach here is to take the biggest or most interesting news stories of the week and add some commentary and perspective to them -- hopefully with a touch of flair and maybe a few pop-cultural references that the over-30 crowd will understand.

What we don't often do, though, is go and get stories ourselves. That's mainly because your editor's responsibilities -- now more than ever -- range well beyond just writing RCPU three times a week. So, from time to time, you'll see us quote somebody from a first-hand interview, and we're quite specific about the fact that we're doing that when it does happen. But, most of the time, we're trusting that we're using credible sources for our base-level facts, and that the folks who write the stories we link to know what they're doing. And, most of the time, that works just fine.

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Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20083 comments


HP Sharpens Blades, Thin Clients

HP's got a new line of Blade workstations and thin clients out. There are loads of details about the new lineup here .

A major target for HP's Blade business is financial traders -- you know, like the ones who used to work on Wall Street. Ha ha. Actually, though, there are still some traders out there, and according to HP folks they might very well be using Blade workstations in the near future. The financial downturn, HP officials told RCPU in a phone chat this week (see -- original reporting!) has led to an increase in interest in HP's wares.

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Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20080 comments


Microsoft Beats Street, Tempers Expectations

We've been saying for a while now on RCPmag.com that the economic downturn that is wrecking finance, insurance, real estate and a bunch of other industries seems to have only dealt a glancing blow to technology. And with Microsoft announcing earnings today, we got an idea of just how hard tech's getting hit.

It seems as though we've pretty much been right thus far. If Microsoft is any indication -- and we feel safe in saying that it is -- the current economic storm is knocking over a few trees in tech but not ripping roofs off of businesses or tossing cars around. Microsoft's numbers for its first fiscal quarter of 2009 beat Wall Street's expectations and reflected a solid trend upward, generally speaking.

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Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20080 comments


Microsoft Fires Back at Pirates

Pirate-themed humor isn't as funny as it used to be, what with real pirates making news now in fairly gruesome ways.

So, on Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Day -- which was Tuesday, in case it wasn't pre-programmed into your Outlook calendar -- we were already planning to eschew the walk-the-plank, peg-leg-and-eye-patch theme. Then we noticed that somebody -- from your editor's hometown newspaper (well, Web site, anyway), no less -- had done it for us. So, we thank you, The Dallas Morning News, for spicing up RCPU this week. Yarr and all that to you.

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Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20081 comments


VMM Out, VMware Up

Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager is on the street , and VMware might very well have impressed the Street (or what's left of it) with what looks at first glance like a pretty good earnings report

Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20080 comments


Will OCS KO PBX?

OK, somebody at MS (MBD President Stephen Elop, actually) says that OCS 2007 R2 could KO PBX .

Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20080 comments


Ballmer: Vista Success Will Be Hard To Match

No, really . Here's what he said: "We're not going to have products that are much more successful than Vista has been."

A financial success, maybe -- but, really, Steve, give this one up. Just do better with Windows 7, continue to embrace the cloud and let Vista go down as an unfortunate footnote in Microsoft history. Please.

Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20088 comments


Microsoft in the Mix

No longer raging quite so much at open source, Microsoft is now all about "mixed-source" ventures . Here's a long and fairly useful Q&A about the whole thing.

Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20080 comments


Microsoft Gains Ground in Virtualization

Lasting fame is rare in our YouTube culture. Gone are the days when Jaws or Star Wars would dominate at the box office for months. Movies come and go, make millions and then fade off into cultural oblivion.

TV, once the home of massively popular sitcoms that nearly everybody seemed to watch, is now one bad reality show after another. The "characters" quickly fade from memory. Music? Well, we wouldn't know much about that here at RCPU, but it strikes us that today's stars will probably only be famous tomorrow if their lives go completely off the rails.

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Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20082 comments


Google Keeps on Making Money

Its stock price might have tumbled (with everybody else's) during the recent market freak-outs, but the fundamentals of Google's economy are still very sound .

Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20080 comments