Hard to believe it, but Windows Vista is now a year old!

Microsoft’s latest operating system was released to business users on 30 November 2006, and its first year of availability has seen what could politely be described as a mixed reaction.

Eighty-eight million copies of the operating system have been sold to to businesses and consumers so far: the consumer versions of Vista have been available since the end of January this year. Yet analysts at Gartner say “the uptake of Windows Vista in the PC installed base is taking longer than previously expected, with Vista becoming the dominant operating system only in 2009?.

A survey released last week suggests only 13 percent of businesses are planning to move all their desktops to Vista. For businesses, the problem seems to be twofold.

Firstly, Vista does not seem to offer many immediate benefits over its predecessor, XP. In fact, testing of upcoming service packs for both operating systems has given XP a marked edge in performance over Vista.

Secondly, there are currently few applications that run on Vista only. Until that happens, analysts suggest, most businesses may find it hard to see why they should invest in new PC’s to support the hardware demands of Vista.

Source: ZDNet

The cost of an iPhone is proving to be a sticking point for UK consumers, according to a survey.

The Apple handset’s not-so-dinky £269 price tag is putting off swathes of potential buyers, according to a poll by market research company GfK NOP, which surveyed 500 people across the UK.

Almost half (46 percent) of consumers polled said they would never buy an iPhone at that price, while a further 26 percent said that, although they like the look of the phone, it’s simply too expensive.

Just two percent said they are considering adding it to their Christmas list.

UK consumers willing to shell out for the hardware must sign up to an 18-month contract with O2, Apple’s UK iPhone partner. In Germany, mobile operator Vodafone recently won a court injunction forcing Apple and its partner there, T-Mobile, to sell an unlocked version of the phone. In France, Apple is obliged by law to offer unlocked iPhones after six months.

Source: ZDNet

New tests have revealed that XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

Vista’s first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system’s performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Devil Mountain Software the improvement was not overwhelming – leaving the latest Windows iteration out shined by its predecessor.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed over two times slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.

Vista’s performance with the service pack increased less than two percent compared to performance without SP1 – much lower than XP’s SP3 improvement of 10 percent.

The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

Source: ZDNet

Have you ever come across a program that refuses to register properly and therefore does not get added to the ‘Open With’ dialog in Windows XP. So when you right click a file and choose ‘Open With’ the program you want to use is not listed! Normally, you can add a program to the ‘Open With’ dialog using the Browse option. The trouble is that when you browse and locate the .exe file of the program you want to use it does not get added to the ‘Open With’ dialog – no matter how many times you try.

For example we have just purchased Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and Fireworks CS3 cannot be made the default program to open .jpg files. Double click on any .jpg and Windows Picture Viewer will open it up.

A search using Google quickly found a great little program called ‘OpenWithAdd’. This was created by a Microsoft professional just to solve this nagging problem. The download was quick as it is only a very small program. You unzip it and double click the ‘OpenWithAdd’ program. This opens a small dialog box where you can
select the application to be added to the Open With dialog. You then just click a button to fix the association.

All you have to do then is open a folder e.g. My Documents and click the Tools menu and Folder Options and the File Types Tab. Scroll down to the file extension you want to re-associate with your program and click the change button. This opens the ‘Open With’ dialog so you can now select the program you have just re-registered to always open that file type.

This little gem of a program should be in everyone’s PC repair kit. It’s a quick and easy way to register or re-register any program, not just Fireworks CS3.

Download this great repair tool from this site – http://windowsxp.mvps.org/openwithadd.htm.

Apple has confirmed that it has plenty more upgrades to come for the Apple iPhone.

“All the complaints and feature requests we’ve had can be fixed and added by software upgrades,” a spokesman for the company told Pocket-lint.

The news will come as a relief to new customers who bought the company’s mobile phone over the weekend and may have been disappointed by some of its limitations.

Since its launch in the US in June, Apple has been criticised for leaving out some key functionality, like the ability to record video via the included digital camera and greater Bluetooth support beyond voice functionality.

However some commentators believe that not including all the software features from day one will allow the company to entice new customers over the next couple of months. They [Apple] aren’t stupid. They won’t want to give you everything at once. You wait, there will an exciting partnership with YouTube that adds video functionality and then lets you upload to the site in no time,” an industry insider told Pocket-lint.