Vista Is Here, Finally

Its really finally here. After an interminable period of development, testing, release candidates, release to manufacturing and an event to release Vista to businesses and OEMs, the rest of the world will be able to get its hands on the newest version of Windows following the Jan. 29 launch party in New York.

Vista, which is being released for consumers along with Office 2007, is chock-full of innovations developed in Microsofts Research division that promise to make the new operating system the most usable and secure Windows ever, reports Senior Editor Peter Galli. But has it been worth the wait? The question actually is irrelevant because few people will be lining up to buy the software off the shelf from Best Buy. I doubt that we will see lines like we did with Sonys PlayStation 3 or Nintendos Wii.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell and other PC makers do hope to see an increase in sales of new machines running Vista, but probably not enough to really affect earnings. Those users who really wanted or needed Vista have it already—including the millions of beta testers and those large customers who are putting Vista through their own tests in order to plan a deployment sometime in, say, 2008.

The best part of the launch is that we can now get on with our lives in the brave new world of Vista—a world, however, that still will be more focused on keeping all the Windows XP machines out there safe from criminals.

Another technology that has left us waiting for a while is 802.11n, but the timetable sped up considerably in mid-January when the IEEE 802.11n working group approved the draft standard Version 1.10, reports Senior Writer Wayne Rash.

When eWEEK Labs Technical Analyst Andrew Garcia took a look last summer at pre-standard-release products from Belkin, Buffalo, Linksys and Netgear, he found that promised speeds of more than 100M bps and interoperability were lacking. However, with the new draft approval, products will start coming out later in the year. Intel and partners announced Jan. 23 that Intels Centrino mobile technology will support the 802.11n draft.

Contact eWEEK Editor Scot Petersen at scot_petersen@ziffdavis.com.

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