Windows Vista: how Microsoft will make you buy a product you don't need
You don't need Windows Vista and despite the fact that the product was released only within the past week, it is already almost impossible to buy a laptop which is not either "Vista Ready" or has Vista preinstalled. But it's how MS pushes users of its previous versions to buy their latest product that is really scandalous.
If you have an older computer, then you can't run the latest software. That's a clearly understood fact of life. But a lesser known fact of life is that, for the vast majority of users, they don't need the latest software and an older computer will do all they need.
In fact, the computer industry is like the fashion industry: it's driven not by needs, but by wants.
Or what the software industry provides.
Microsoft's operating systems are prime examples of this. If you bought a car and it broke down, you could go to the aftermarket and get it fixed, but Microsoft threatens legal action against people who "reverse engineer" its code to fix its problems. That leaves users entirely at Microsoft's whim for things such as security.
For the millions of users of Windows 95 and 98, Microsoft has abandoned them with inherently insecure systems - unless they "upgrade" to the latest version, even though to do so would mean that those users need to buy new computers to run the latest version.
It's like saying "we know that criminals have the keys to your car but we are not going to provide new locks - nor are we going to let anyone else know how to build a lock that would keep your car secure."
For users of Windows 2000 - a very significant number of users - who have been left out of most development of MS operating systems for more than three years since the release of Service Pack 4, although security updates are released, utility updates are not. So whereas XP (a system that many simply declined to adopt for a variety of reasons) has a much more effective degragmentation program, that was denied to Win2000 users. The PC upon which this is written simply refuses to defrag properly despite, so far, eight attempts each one a little less unsuccessful than the last.
So how long is it until Windows 2000 users are told that they will not be getting security update support?
When they do, they have a choice: switch to Vista (at a price of some USD300) or turn their back on the whole Microsoft bandwagon.
The PC this is written on is becoming a rarity in our offices. All of our sales team use exclusively Suse Linux as their OS and OpenOffice.Org as their office suite. So do our researchers and most of our writers. Some of our design team use Windows but increasingly, they have been switching to Linux, some even from choice.
And the great thing? Not only do those programs not cost us hundreds of dollars for each workstation, they work. Proplerly. All day, every day. This PC? It's already scheduled for its first major upgrade: to Linux.
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(From MS Windows website 24 January 2007)
SUMMARY
MORE INFORMATION
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It can defragment only local volumes. |
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It can defragment only one volume at a time. |
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It cannot defragment one volume while scanning another. |
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It cannot be scheduled. |
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It can run only one Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in at a time. |
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It cannot defragment NTFS volumes with cluster sizes larger then 4 kilobytes (KB) in Windows 2000.This limitation has been removed for Disk Defragmenter in Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. |
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Fine-grained movement of uncompressed NTFS file data is not possible in Windows 2000. Moving a single file cluster also moves the 4-KB part of the file that contains the cluster. This limitation has been removed for Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP and later. |
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In Windows 2000, it does not defragment NTFS metadata files, such as the Master File Table (MFT), or the metadata that describes a directory's contents. This limitation has been removed in Windows XP and later. It cannot defragment encrypted files in Windows 2000. This limitation has been removed in Windows XP and later. |
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