ianhulme.net
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(Cheshire, UK)

Direct-marketing reseller CDW has released results of a survey indicating that many businesses will not be upgrading to Windows Vista as soon as it comes out at the end of the year. Most IT managers indicated their businesses would need to make costly hardware upgrades –presumably new PC purchases–to support Microsoft’s new operating system.

A positive spin was put on this report saying that “86 percent of respondents plan to upgrade to Vista”, but only Twenty percent of survey respondents “would start deployment” within 12 months, said Terry Fink, CDW manager of marketing development.

I will be waiting until some more of the bugs are worked out of the system before i start advising customers to upgrade to Vista, but like the report says, its a costly upgrade depending on how many computers you have.

Improved Speach Recognition is one of the Features coming with Windows Vista, enabling the user to open, close, and use programs; navigate around the screen; explore the Web; and create documents.

A lot of work has been put into Speach Recognition to make it “useable”, Other versions I have used tended to take lots of time to set up, and would still get things wrong, and I would eventually just bang away on the keyboard as usual. Vista has improved the recognition of custom or unusual words making it more accurate. One of the main points is that the user can actually use the computer with Speach Recognition for general operations such as opening programs, even mouse movement, and not just for typing now.

Click here to view a demonstration.

IE 7 has just been released, and has been added to the high priority updates.

Here’s a quick run down of the new features:-

New Look: to maximise the area of the screen which displays the webpage, the interface at the top has been redesigned removing the clutter leaving what you need.

Tab: Open multiple webpages in the one browser window, enabling you to easily click through your pages.

Printing: IE7 automatically adjusts the webpage so that it is printed off right first time.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): You may have seen this on some of the sites you look at, IE7 brings it together so that you can check all your news sites, blogs, etc on the one page, seeing what you haven’t read yet.

Finally Security: The main thing on the web is security, if you don’t have that say goodbye to your computer. IE7 helps protect you against malicious software, and helps to keep your personal data safe from fraudulent websites and online phishing scams making it safer to browse the web.

At around 50 million lines of code, and 5 years in the making, its been a long road for Microsoft.

Microsofts New Operating system will be with businesses by the end of the end of Novemeber, and ready for retail by January 2007.