April 2007

The Illusions of Vista

I was talking to an old friend the other day and he confided that he was once a magician. Wow! And of course, I asked him to share some of the cool secrets of the trade. Although we’ve known each other for over a decade, he was not forthcoming. In fact quite the opposite. Apparently, there is a secret code among magicians that they can only share with each other. That said, we all know that there really is no magic, just slights of hand that make things seem different than they might appear. Which brings us to Microsoft’s latest operating system – Vista.

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PC Pitstop Vista Survey Results

The results of our February and March 2007 Vista Survey are in. Our initial analysis of the survey data is found below.

In summary, the results of our survey are generally not good news for Microsoft. While Microsoft’s ‘The “Wow” starts now’ tag line for Vista marketing focuses attention to its visual and graphic capabilities, the software giant appears to have under-estimated the importance of marketing the more tangible benefits that PC users want or expect. Our survey results indicate a significant amount of uncertainty or confusion by PC users as to the benefits of upgrading to Vista.

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PC Pitstop Storage and Backup Survey Results

The results of our December 2006 Storage and Backup Survey are in. Our initial analysis of the survey data is found below.

An astounding 27.5% of people never backup their hard drive, and 13% do it once a year. Personally, I backup once a month, and I really should do it more often. I am the owner of about 5 PC’s, and due to the law of averages, I experience about 1 hard drive crash a year. If you think of all the important information one stores on their PC’s, pictures, emails, work, videos, it would be a crime to lose all of this due to procrastinating a backup.

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Small Hard Drive Partitions

Some PC vendors are making a practice of creating a small partition on a system’s primary hard drive in which to store the systems’ original restoration information. Generally these partitions are 5 – 12 Gigabytes in size and are preformatted during the manufacturing process. The practice appears to have replaced the inclusion of a restoration CD for some PC vendors. While it may be considered a convenience by some to have the operating system and driver backups loaded on the local hard drive, the practice should not be considered a safe backup practice for these system files.

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