Microsoft: It's Time To Wrestle Longhorn

KingFish

With a long-awaited security update to Windows XP now complete, Microsoft is preparing a holiday season push for the 3-year-old operating system--and is set to revisit ambitious plans for the next major revision.

That revision, code-named Longhorn, one of the most difficult and complicated in the company's history, has fallen further behind this year, as Microsoft shifted developers from the project and onto Windows XP Service Pack 2, which took longer than expected. Now the company faces the task of getting Longhorn under control and making XP seem fresh during a longer-than-usual wait between operating system updates. "SP2 was a major milestone for the Windows development team," the company said in a statement Wednesday to CNET News.com. "Now that it has been released, it is a natural time to revisit Longhorn priorities." With SP2 shipped and Longhorn still in development, Microsoft faces three major challenges: how to market XP this holiday season, what to do in the years before the next major operating system release, and what changes to make to Longhorn, if any, to ensure a timely update.

Source: ZDNet

entropy

Ugh, one word - FINALLY. There've been, what, 2 updates since I last *cough*tested it. That was 4 or 5 months ago. They haven't even completed Aero, ffs. Granted, it's semi-there in 4074, but you need to trick it. WinFS ... waste. They're betting on super machines for this. They need to refine code, and do a damn good job of it. Before I tweaked the nuts off it, explorer was using ~200 megs of ram ... IDLING. I also find the sidebar, while incredibly useful, more than slightly distracting, but I'm sure that's a matter of time (and no, I don't want to minimize it). I'll be waiting ... but not prepared to fully move to LH if it's so resource-intensive.

-Ben

WinFS had a major memory leak in the 4074 version :|

I had the version for a while with the cool little alt-tab "thing"

If you wanna check out more of longhorn check out msdn.microsoft.com and have a poke around.

Thrax

I believe IE also had a major memory leak in 4074. Thus the 200mb crap.

entropy

There's a tweak guide that can take care of most of it. WinFS wasn't the major cause (though it does use a lot of memory - it isn't a leak per say, at least i don't think so), it was that damned sidebar in the early versions. It's better now, but yeah it's still there.