Gartner has warned enterprises that sticking to Windows XP until the release of Windows 7 may not be the best idea given Microsoft’s “poor” track record of shipping new products on time.

Microsoft has had few successes in pushing Vista on the masses.  Most people running older systems and hardware saw no reason to upgrade because that would require almost completely new hardware and peripherals or finding Vista drivers for existing equipment.  The average consumer is not going to jump through those loops and neither are businesses.

The security defenses put in place by Microsoft to protect its Windows Vista kernel from non-digitally-signed code can now be easily circumvented with the release of a free utility tool, according to researchers at Symantec.

After denying that any major Vista updates would be released before Service Pack 1 ships, Microsoft released “Vista fix packs” to testers yesterday.

Recently we became interested in a problem, one of our writers lacked a scanner but needed to get text out of a document (known as “OCR” or Optical Character Recognition).  There weren’t very many good freeware options, a few paid ones but they were fairly lacking.  All he needed to do was get access to a computer running Vista which had Office 2007 installed which is not hard in our parts.

The BBC is determined to make me eat my own words.  After I said that the iPlayer was compatible with any modern Microsoft Operating System like XP or Vista, it turns out the beta will not support Vista or Macs, I’m just guessing that Linux isn’t supported either.  Currently, the BBC iPlayer only works with Windows XP.

Ever since it came out, Vista has been reviewed over and over again by almost every site and the one thing that is common for laptops is reduced battery life when compared to laptops running XP.  Vista’s Aero glass interface along with several other features eat up battery life.  A new tool has been released to help cope with this problem.

Now that Microsoft has finally set a date for Windows 7 in 2010, and since Windows XP is proving to be more stable than Vista, it seems to make more sense to avoid Vista altogether, keep Windows XP, and just wait until Windows 7.

Microsoft has the ability to spin the numbers any way they want and while I doubt very much that there are actually 60 million installations of Vista out there, the company claims to have sold 60 million copies of Vista.  This includes copies shipped to OEMs, copies sitting on machines that have not yet been sold and copies that consumers have actually bought and installed (which is very few, for now).

After rumors that Vista SP1 would be “imminently” available, rumors are now floating around that Vista SP1 will not ship in final form until 2009.  Remember, the US Department of Justice is still making Microsoft provide a beta version of the service pack earlier than the final version.  But now the final versions may have been delayed for two whole years.

Those of you with Palm based handhelds can breathe a sigh of relief, if you are running Vista that is.  Palm has released Palm Desktop Beta for its handhelds, once again enabling you to exchange files and synch it with your computer but this has come at the loss of some functionality.

Microsoft’s newest operating system, Vista is approaching OSX in terms of market share.  This should come as no surprise since there are millions on millions more PCs than there are Macs but still, Vista is now installed on at least 5% of PCs meaning it is only 1% away from topping OSX and only 1.1% away from passing it.

Microsoft has adjusted its 2008 fiscal year sales forecast for its operating systems by increasing XP by nearly 50% and decreasing Vista by about 8 percent. The adjustment came after the release of Microsoft’s fourth quarter earnings.

Ever since Vista came out, owners of ATi and nVidia graphic cards have been complaining about the lack of WHQL certified drivers which has now been rectified, at least on the nVidia side but one of the problems with the drivers still existed, no multi-GPU support.  Microsoft has released a fix for that problem.

While Microsoft is still trying to pawn Vista off on the masses, Vista’s successor has already been tentatively named.  Previously known as “Vienna,” the next version of Windows is now called “Windows 7.”