Microsoft

I've heard a lot of people complain about having issues with Vista. I've even heard some things I can only assume are made up as I had no issue at all with it: that you had to buy an addition to Vista to be able to play games. That was not the case for me or anyone I know.

People from various places have asked me about upgrading to Vista. Most know I have been and still am running a Beta version.

There are things I really like about Vista. It's been very stable, especially for a Beta version. I love the new Windows Mail: It has a built in SPAM filter and seems to do a more than passable job of catching most SPAM even before setting rules.

I would be the last person with qualified advice in the IE7 vs IE6 choices. I don't (in fact, can't) run IE7 with my workstation. I can (and do) run IE6 with a proper WINE configuration; I do run IE6 because many devices that I install require Internet Explorer to access their web interfaces.

I complain that IE (any version) is not fully compliant with the W3C DTD. This is a bit unfair, since I've yet to find any browser that is 100% compliant. However, Microsoft does push the envelope too hard.

Recently, one of my customers complained of problems when closing Microsoft's latest browser release.

Sure enough, without prejudice of closing procedure, a warning issued: "Internet Explorer 7 has crashed".

It's been several days since the initial install. I've upgraded to the 5728 build from the 5600. They fixed a few of the issues I was seeing. The problems with the resource intensivness of the OS seems to have been worked on a bit. I still have problems playing Mah Jong and using the Media Player at the same time. The music sounds slowed down a bit and gets crackly and the game gets 'stuck' for a few seconds at a time. I can't run anything else when I'm using the two programs together.