~TECH-BYTES~

So now that the “Vista Capable” lawsuit is a full-blown class action, the judge has unsealed all 158 pages of emails between Microsoft execs trying to sort out what went wrong with the sticker program. While bits and pieces have been blacked out, what remains is still fairly incredible — although Intel’s 915 chipset was initially rejected as incompatible with Vista, MS execs flatly admit that “In the end, we lowered the requirements to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded” and “We are caving to Intel. We worked the last 18 months to drive the UI experience and we are giving this up.” On top of that, it seems that the company was getting direct feedback from retailers that the stickers were confusing, with Wal-Mart appealing directly to HP to pull Vista Capable stickers from low end machines, and an MS exec saying that “I was in Best Buy listening to people and can tell you this did not come clear to customers. We set ourselves up.” That’s pretty damning, if you ask us — and the complete emails, linked below, are full of similar bombshells. Looks like this case may have some serious legs after all.

It might be a bit early for us to be talking Windows 7 feature cuts, but that said, isn’t it a bit early for Microsoft to be talking Windows 7 feature cuts? If The Inquirer’s “reliable sources” are to be believed, Microsoft is giving DirectX 11 the boot from its next version of Windows to keep hardware requirements down — apparently the DirectX 10 requirements of Vista were enough of that sort of trouble for one decade. Obviously there’s no official word on Microsoft at the moment, so we’ll reserve judgment for the time being — and hey, maybe no DirectX 11 wouldn’t ruin our year — but with the endless quantity of features cut from Vista still fresh in our memory, this is certainly not an encouraging sign if true.

ok ppl after a 3hrs wait i downloaded the windows xp sp3 rc (336mb) n very quickly i installed it…
bt after the restart to my surprise my flyakite osx theme ws gone… bt the transformation pack traces were still visible… after some googling i realized dt it ws sp3’s uxtheme.dll that ws responsible.. so i removed osx transformation pack n downloaded the vista transformation pack 8.01 which ac. to users is compatible with xp-sp3 but evrytime i started the installation setup crashed.. ds ws due to intel graphics driver so i uninstalled it n installed a standby dell graphics driver i got from net n then i installed vtp 8.01 bt still same problem transformation done but no vista theme.. problem:-uxtheme.dll not supported on this os… then after some more search i got a soln.. i downloaded the patched uxtheme.dll file for my version of xp-sp3 release candidate n now hw to use it manually.. first rename uxtheme.backup in system32 to _uxtheme.backup dn rename uxtheme.dll to _uxtheme.dll n nowpaste the patched uxtheme.dll in this folder n yehhh… vista visual themes are back….
so now i hv vtp 8.01 on my xp-sp3 rc….