Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Outside of the basic functionality issues, there are dozens of minor changes that haven't done anything to improve our productivity. One minor example: for years, we've used a basic HTML page stored on our local hard drive as a home page to provide easy one-click access to bookmarks. This turns out to be hopeless under Vista, since Internet Explorer insists on launching any page in a new window because of a security restriction. As such, Vista has managed to convince us to ditch Internet Explorer after nine years and switch to Firefox, which doesn't indulge in such ridiculous behaviour, and seems to run faster as well.
Vista certification for the machine also seems meaningless. We can accept, begrudgingly, that some of our favourite applications, like SyncBackSE, are going to generate a ridiculous 'Did you mean this?' dialogue every time we run them. But why does Lenovo's built-in security application, which came preinstalled on the machine, produce the same response?
In a burst of curiosity, we decided to run Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor, to see if our machine was actually up to the task. The first thing it told us was that we didn't have enough drive space (apparently, it's not intelligent enough to realise that Vista is already installed). The second thing it told us was that our display and sound card weren't certified for Vista. The third thing it told us was that none of the Lenovo utilities on the machine were Vista-ready. So much for certification.
We could go on -- about the stupid interface in Windows Explorer, the non-existent search functionality, the arbitrary changes to menu names, even the horrible font choices. But the bottom line is that if we had shares in Microsoft, we'd be demanding changes more extensive than those that came between XP and SP2 to give this dog of a product any chance in the marketplace. That said, we're not holding our breath.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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