Tomorrow Microsoft officially releases Vista, the new upgrade of Windows.
Gregg Seelhoff has been blogging about the problems he encountered with Vista. In Microsoft Plumbs the Depth of Bloatware, he details how hard it is to use Microsoft's tool that determines whether a system can run Vista. But there is good news:
If you want to use this utility to let Microsoft sell you a new operating system, you have to download 40-60M of files, install three software packages, but only if you already have the latest operating systems. If you want to run this on Windows 2000 (as was previously on my test system), you have to first upgrade to Windows XP (SP2), to find out if you can then pay money to upgrade to Windows Vista, but be sure not to upgrade to a 64-bit version of XP, because that will not work, either. At least we can all rest peacefully knowing that we can easily test for Vista compatibility if Vista is already installed.
He eventually got Vista installed, only to discover more annoying problems with activation.
Meanwhile, it appears that Vista is causing lots of problems for game developers everywhere. Tonight, one major casual game portal even released a press release about it: Microsoft Vista Failing 70 million Online Gamers and Developers:
As Microsoft's Windows Vista launches, the new operating system is breaking online games and disrupting gameplay, not only its own games on MSN but also at RealArcade, Yahoo Games, and AOL Games. ... Vista's incompatibility with most downloadable casual games, including those on Microsoft's own gaming portal demonstrates the enormous challenges facing many small game developers with getting their games to work with the new OS.
We've been pretty lucky, in that Vista didn't break any of our games. This is largely because we made sure that the games worked under Windows XP limited accounts, which are much expanded in Vista. Still, we had to make a number of changes to get the games to work better. Mainly, we needed to create new icons for Vista and solve some issues with the new advanced Aero graphics interface.
Last week we released a new Vista-ized version of Pretty Good Solitaire, and over the weeks to come we will be updating our other games as well.
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