Posted on 08/24/2007 3:41:50 PM PDT by Salo
MS admits Vista challenges BY SAMANTHA PERRY , ITWEB FEATURES EDITOR
[ Johannesburg, 24 August 2007 ] - Microsoft SA has conceded there have been difficulties for resellers and end-users around the launch of its Vista operating system. It states there have been problems with its communications to its channel.
Microsoft Windows business group lead Colin Erasmus says these communications were not properly planned. It has three campaigns in the pipeline for this year to rectify the situation, he notes.
Local distributors, OEMs and resellers have been battling with bulk image blasting, the time and expense of downgrading unhappy customers back to Windows XP, and second-line support.
Says Tarsus CEO Pierre Spies: “Vista doesn't support bulk image blasting; it's just not here yet. We believe the product was launched too soon. [Microsoft has] a lot of catching up to do. Corporates are buying new machines with Vista on and downgrading to XP, in anticipation of Vista being ready in the next two to three years. They are buying the licence, but do not plan to use it until the product is ready.”
Spies says the situation is interfering with the company's business model. “We're taking serious flak. We've got people arriving in droves to downgrade.”
He says the company is downgrading roughly 25% of the Vista machines it sells. ”Consumers are not taking a long-term view like the corporates are, they just want it gone.”
Support overload
This, he says, impacts support because the company has to handle calls from customers, as well as the clients that arrive at its offices wanting downgrades. Further, he says, this impacts corporate roll-outs, which are far more time- and resource-consuming without bulk image blasting capabilities.
The cost to downgrade, for which Tarsus charges customers R100, is around R400, says Spies. “In the last two months we have downgraded 4 000 units, and that excludes the big roll-outs.”
Microsoft's Erasmus says OEMs can click here for information on ImageX, a command-line tool that enables OEMs and corporations to capture, modify and apply file-based disk images for rapid deployment. Systems builders using the OTK kit can click here.
As far as downgrades are concerned, Erasmus says: “Downgrade rights exist for OEM Vista Business & Ultimate editions to Windows XP Professional. The customer/system builder can contact the downgrade call centre on 0800 995 637, choose option four, and tell the operator they want to exercise their downgrade rights to obtain their product key for XP Professional.”
Acer SA country manager David Drummond says his company's main concern is that there was some delay in the market, while customers waited for Vista's launch. “We haven't seen compensation for that slowdown in terms of demand.”
Discontinuation of XP
Acer SA took an average of 30 Vista-related calls a day through March and April, regarding patches, drivers, and information on how to downgrade. This has now fallen to around five a day, Drummond says.
Vista machines have been in store since end-January, he notes, but Microsoft's channel launch only took place on 8 May, “and we are still in some discussions as to how to transfer customer calls that need to be escalated. Currently, we call Microsoft and then call the customer back.”
Drummond adds Acer is still getting calls from customers who purchased XP machines with Microsoft's Technology Guarantee, which entitles the customer to a free upgrade to Vista. “The complaints are around the fulfilment centre not responding, or unilaterally cancelling some customer orders. We've had multiple complaints about the centre,” he says, noting that most customer calls, however, were for downgrades not upgrades. “The legalities around that took months.”
“Microsoft is aware of the delay in some CD shipments and is currently diligently working on resolving these delays. We can confirm that if customers did submit the correct documentation timeously, that their CDs will be shipped to them,” says Erasmus.
Also of concern, says Spies, is the scheduled discontinuation of XP.
“At this stage,” says Erasmus, “availability of XP to OEMs will be discontinued at the end of January 2008 and for system builders at the end of January 2009. The decision to extend availability will be a global decision and will be based on feedback from the channel.”
Erasmus says partners or customers needing assistance can contact Microsoft on 0860 22 55 67.
.....included with any computer you purchase that has an OS installed.
I'm generally against additional laws for anything, but part of me wants legislative action on this. If a computer has an OS installed, the computer manufacturer SHOULD ship an OS disk with it.
Of course most cars these days come with a donut instead of a spare tire. I know of one car that doesn't come with a spare at all, but then there's no space in the car to put it anyway.
Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue
Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 2:36 am
For background to this issue read previous posts: Post 1 | Post 2 | Post 3.I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft. Here are some points of interest:
- “We have been looking into this problem and are working on a doc that will go into the technical details of what we have found.”
- “Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design.”
- “The connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious. But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback. Users generally hate this, hence the trade off.”
- “In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight. Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address.”
- “Two other things to note. First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations.”
- “Second, this trade-off scheme only kicks in on the receive side. Transmit is not affected.”
I’ve been doing some more research into this and I’m coming to the conclusion that the issue is related somehow to Multimedia Class Scheduler service (MMCSS). This is a service that makes sure that multimedia applications have prioritized access to CPU resources. I can’t prove my theory because killing MMCSS also disables Windows audio.
As more information is made available, I’ll keep you in the loop.
This is really bad from an architectural standpoint. It looks like it’s not “Oops, code bug,” but “We completely screwed up the design of our scheduling architecture.”
I bought my laptop in December. It came loaded with XP, but came with a coupon for Vista. My machine is entirely Vista compatable.
I received the Vista disks in the mail about three months ago.
I don’t think I want to install them. Yet.
Indeed. Scheduler stuff is rocket science from what I've read of it, and it looks like the Microsofties have been forced by their screwed up DRM to have totally screwed the pooch on this.
Too funny. Vista will never be appropriate for a gaming rig, which is pretty funny, since games are what keep a lot of folks on MS that would otherwise jump ship.
I use a virtual machine app. called virtualbox installed on my Ubuntu Linux machine. In it, I have Windo$eXP installed.
There is nothing I can’t run with this setup. I can network, print, use cd rom, usb drive, etc. It really is turning out to be a great setup.
VirtualBox and Ubuntu are free, btw. :)
My two vista machines came with all sorts of media problems that plague performance with or without network activity --examples are like difficulty in handling large .wmv files-- my guess is that what they mean by "playback" is in fact, proprietary control.
The other four computers on our lan not using vista have no such problems.
Too funny. Vista will never be appropriate for a gaming rig, which is pretty funny, since games are what keep a lot of folks on MS that would otherwise jump ship.
MS jumped the shark with Vista. Windows also seems to be going down the same path as did Word Perfect.
Another thing, don’t expect Windows to get any better with a new release in a couple of years. MS is entirely committed to stopping piracy at the expense of the peril of Windows.
This has opened the door for Linux which is improving rapidly. My prediction is that Linux will be a very strong competitor having maybe 5% of the desktops in 5 years, maybe 15% in 10 years. Maybe more. MS has no one to blame but itself.
Freaking Microsoft can shove vista up it’s collective rearend. This is the biggest POS that this company has ever dreamed up.
Their initial lack of concern is what has created the rest of this fiasco. Someone in that company needs to pull their head out of their arse.
if they can’t get the performance, even Directx 10 isn’t going to help MS.
How well does virtualbox stack up against VMWare?
Click, click, click, etc. Done! I’m serious, too.
It hasn't crashed even once, and drive access, networking, usb, etc was all setup and working for me. Afterwards, I found I could share folders (always a problem for me in VM) from the Linux host, a networked pc, even a usb drive plugged into a networked pc, by simply,,,click, click, click.
Read the online How To Setup Tutorial, and you won’t have any issues. Caveat: My only experience with it is on an Ubuntu host. (Dapper-6.06 LTS)
I just downloaded it and tried to do an installation of Fedora in a virtualbox. It had serious issues with mouse/keyboard focus, however, I’ve got two monitors with two Desktops and multiple workspaces on each, so I’d be willing to cut some slack on that for now. I’ll try it again at home and see if it is better.
So fedora was the “guest”? What is the host?
One thing to look at is Folder sharing. When you enable folder sharing, it also enables some other features, why, i don’t know. One of those is that you no longer need to “grab” focus of the mouse or display. Your mouse is “focused” where it is.
Once you have started the VB, click on the “Devices” tab, and select “Shared Folders” and browse to a folder you’d like to share. That should enable it for you.
Thanks I’ll try it out. WHen I tried it earlier, both the guest and host were Fedora.
I have audio stutter on all DVD playback in Vista.
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