Dell Documents Reveal Microsoft's Pre-launch Vista Errors

twitter writes "The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.' We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development, second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. 'This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.'

2 minute Vista install

[ed1park]

This user had a particularly clever way handling the driver compatibility issues of his "Vista ready" system.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FVbf9tOGwno [youtube.com]

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[tzot]

Conversely, this should not be used to infer the Duke Nukem Forever will be an awesome game if it is ever released.

Especially since we've recently been given an estimated release date.

I wouldn't call it a release date. The whole issue reminds me of falling towards an event horizon.

Re:But why?

[rice_burners_suck]

Delays of over an hour are no problem for me. I come in to work in the morning, 9:00 AM to be specific. According to my company's rules, I must be on time every day or else risk having my pay cut by a significant amount. So I'm at my desk on time every day, at 9:00 AM, and I push the power button on the computer. It begins to load, and the disk crunches, crunches, crunches, and crunches some more. By about 4:59 PM, it finishes loading and the various spinning wheels and hourglasses stop. Finally, the computer is ready to perform the next operation. At this point, I click "Start," followed by "Shut down" and leave the office. I think it finishes shutting down sometime around 8:55 AM. Vista. Where do you want to avoid going today?