Vista Gets Official Release Dates

SlinkySausage writes "Five years, three months and five days after Windows XP made its debut, Microsoft will usher its next-generation OS onto the stage. Microsoft has set November 30 as the release date for Vista (and Office 2007) to business customers and January 30, 2007 as the date for the official launch to consumers and The World At Large."

Re:aka Corporate version

[Overly Critical Guy]

The reason for this is that Microsoft wants to pretend it's shipping Vista in 2006, but no enterprise customers are going to install a brand new OS without months of testing. Microsoft knows this, so they're releasing to those customers, celebrating the faux RTM, then spending the next couple of months actually bugfixing and polishing Vista and "really" releasing next year on January 30.

Don't let them fool you--Vista is being released on January 30th, 2007.

Re:535?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 5x^2 + 3x + 5 = 666, so x = 11.201739 or x = -11.801739

Because it is a big deal, IMHO.

[ichigo 2.0]

I'm looking forward to DX10, lower CPU usage (because the UI is run on the GPU), the ability to prioritize I/O (no more 10 fps in games if you move big files around on your computer at the same time), SMB 2.0 (transfers should survive now if the network is disconnected for a moment), virtualized registry (programs run in their own little world = less fudging around with regedit to clean up broken stuff), improved windows APIs (this is mostly for us programmers), improved audio system (ability to mute/adjust sound per application instead), multitasking of GPUs, general bugfixes and improved stability. This was just off the top of my head.

A better question would be why some people (excluding mac & linux users :) are not looking forward to Vista? Aside from the DRM (which will be promptly cracked), that is.

Not That Simple.

[Jaruzel]

Actually, it's not that simple.

The days of snagging your works (or a friends works) Volume Licence Key are over.

Vista corporate licencing now has the OS pinging a Corporate Licence server which in turn keeps track of how many clients are out there, it then pings MS which greenlights whether that org is still within licencing terms or not. The actual system is a bit more in depth than that, but essentially that's how it works. If the client can't ping the licence server within 90 days, then the client goes into 'reduced functionality mode'.

So even though I would never condone actually hacking the OS, the only option to the pirates is to patch the OS to bypass the Licence Server ping. But I'm sure MS have forseen that and have all manner of checksum systems in place.

-Jar.

Re:Why the wait?

[iainl]

Would you consider buying a new PC with XP installed after Vista hits the shelves?

Of course not. ISVs etc. get Vista a couple of months early so they can get their inventory built up and tested to go on the shelf the same day as the boxed CD. Enterprise customers get downloads from MSDN without having to wait for loads of discs to be pressed and shipped to them, or full-colour pretty boxes with manuals. Also, if you think Dell have some work to do to ensure their hardware all works with the final release, think about the testing all the software vendors have; just because it was all working with RC2 doesn't mean it still does.

So yes, there are plenty of things that both Microsoft and 3rd parties have to do between putting an ISO up on MSDN and the consumer release date.

Re:Hardware...

[Gernok]

Geforce 8800 GTX's are set to release on the 8th [i4u.com]... There were a few places where breifly they were available early... Details on the g80 gpu [xbitlabs.com]

Re:Switch to Linux?

[Lisandro]

In most areas. What's lacking is a DirectX equivalent to woo over the game developers.

Something like SDL [libsdl.org]? SDL is today a mature and stable library, already used by a lot of games, both commercial (notably the Unreal series) and OSS.

In my experience, games suported both on Windows and Linux run awfully smoother on Linux, for some reason. Load times are also reduced by half.