Running Vista on your Mac? Having problems with the touchpad? Well good news, Apple released an updated driver for the Multi-touch trackpad today. It’s intended to fix the scrolling and tracking problems that the original drivers had.

You can download it directly from Apple by clicking here.

If you don’t want to buy a new Dell PC to get the Windows Vista Ultimate (RED) edition, you can pre-order the standalone operating system over at Amazon for $219.95.  If you’re a lucky college student like me, you can purchase the OS at a discount price of $64.95 at The Ultimate Steal.  The OS is expected to be released on December 15th but it looks like you can download it now at The Ultimate Steal.
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The above is a scan of some Windows Vista promotional material. But, is that an old MacBook Pro this perfect family is using? Now, Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on silver laptops chassis but wouldn’t it have been wiser to have something more distinctly PC?

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The ever-sassy Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is pointing out that Apple is essentially lying like Satan lied to man about the cancer-causing potency of high-fructose corn syrup. In “Bean Counter,” for example, Apple suggests that Microsoft spends more on advertising than on “fixing Vista.” Adrian tells the honest truth:

For each $1 of sales Apple spends:

– 1.9 cents on Advertising
– 3.3 cents on R&D

For each $1 of sales Microsoft spends:

– 2.6 cents on Advertising
– 13.9 cents on R&D

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Read this line and you’ll understand how Joe Wilcox (and pretty much everyone else online) over at eWeek feels about Windows Vista:

Vista is headed to as quick a death as Microsoft can give it. Someday soon, some gun-toting Microsoft executive will lead Vista out back and “Pop!”

Screaming “Vista sucks!” is by no means a novel idea, but Wilcox uses, you know, evidence to support his claim, that Vista is dead to Microsoft. For example, Microsoft didn’t bleat endlessly about Vista licenses sold during last week’s earnings call. Is that because sales are down, or because sales weren’t as impressive at last quarter?

There’s also netbooks, the tiny half-laptops that, for whatever reason, people are snapping up. Needless to say, RAM- and graphics-hungry Vista doesn’t exactly run well on netbooks, which is why so manufacturers offer XP or Linux in lieu of Vista. If Microsoft can’t sell its fancy operating system to manufacturers of netbooks, where is growth going to come from, Mars?

This is why, by the way, Microsoft is so bullish on Windows 7—ignore that whole Vista thing, ’twas but a minor setback.

This Life Takes Vista site is either fanboyism to the extreme or some junior associate at Microsoft’s ad firm playing around. Whatever it turns out to be though, it’s safe to say it ain’t from Redmond as the HTML is loaded with Adobe Dreamweaver tags. Props to whoever made it ’cause some of the center photos are clever – like the one above. Still, WTF is it?

PCs and Macs are always poking and stabbing at each other; Genius Bar this, everyone uses Windows that.  Can’t we all get along? Everyone knows which one is superior. 

Second video after the jump.

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This enormous and allegedly unsolicited blog entry by an “ordinary Joe developer” (is he related to the plumber?) details some of the under-the-hood stuff that’s going on with Windows 7 development. Although Ballmer has described 7 as being “Windows Vista with clean-up in user interface [and] improvements in performance,” this guy seems to think it’s a little more than that. I nursed my hope that 7 would be a completely different experience for a while, but now it seems less and less likely by the day.
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You may have noticed when we looked at the top 10 tech items being sold on Amazon the other day that there were no Vista-based laptops on there. That’s because the Vista laptops are more like top 25 material. After all, the high system requirements have prevented many people with desktops from making the switch; so it’s natural that notebooks would have an even lower pickup rate. Although it’s worth considering that laptops are more often upgraded “whole” (i.e. a new machine with Vista pre-installed) while desktops have a little more inertia in the household. There’s a lot more info out there to collate (pick-up rates at Best Buys and stuff are probably way higher) but Amazon is a valuable metric.

Looking at what’s available there… I don’t see how they can even run Vista on this thing.

Windows 7 might be on its way sometime soon, but Vista should get SP2 before the new OS drops. According to some ZDnet sources, Redmond is aiming to update Vista first so it will be interesting to see if any new Windows 7 features come with it. Details should drop from Microsoft about the upcoming service pack within the coming months but there isn’t any firm release date as of yet.

I sadly missed this story last week but it bears further inspection. Charlie “The Animal” White wrote a piece “fact-checking” the claims that Vista is buggy, slow, and a big hassle. While I cannot agree that Vista is a sub par offering from Microsoft, I can unequivocally state that it’s good enough for the average user and no matter how much we whine and cry we’re all going to ride the Vista train when we pick our next PCs and laptops anyway, so why bitch? Take this bit of knowledge on Vista crashing:

This one is pure propaganda. In our experience, the only crash we’ve experienced happened when we installed the new version 8.0 of iTunes (how ironic!), and even that didn’t result in the dreaded Blue Screen of Death — just a hard lockup that required a cold boot. System Restore blew out the problem, bringing everything back to normal in minutes.

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It reads,”Windows Vista – The Digital Future Starts Here.” Where does it start? There, right there? Gross.