Microsoft announced that Bungie Studio, the studio which developed the highly successful Halo Franchise is going Independent. The developers wants to go back to their roots and work for themselves rather than for a corporate owner.

A big downfall for Microsoft. Everyone knows, the popularity of Microsoft’s Xbox consoles was dependent on the highly popular Halo Franchise. In other words, Xbox woudn’t have been Xbox without Halo.

Bungie’s Halo games have been of singular significance to Microsoft in the development of its video game machine business.

Halo has been available exclusively on Microsoft’s Xbox video game consoles. That has meant the game’s popularity has helped drive consumers to the Xbox consoles rather than to competing systems made by Nintendo and Sony.

Now that the studio is going Independent, I woudn’t be surprised to see their games on Sony and Nintendo consoles in the future. I hope Microsoft knows what it’s doing.

Popularity: 22% [?]

For those still running IE6, you can now dowload Internet Explorer 7 without going through the Windows Genuine Advantage’s annoying validation checker.

The news was recently announced by Microsoft. Great! Obviously, they made this move because IE7 is losing a lot of the market share from Mozilla Firefox.

I would highly recommend this to all the people still using Internet Explorer 6. IE7 has a lot of features added including the popular Tabbed Browsing not found in IE6.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Windows vista is a joke. But not a funny one. Since getting a taste of it, I switched back to windows xp in a snap.

Design is awesome

I have to admit, the interface looks good. It has nice looking widgets installed in the desktop that has many uses from calendar to calculators. The windows explorer also has enhanced design since it has transparent borders. A lot of people say they copied the design from Mac, I won’t go into that for obvious reasons.

Speed sucks

In an era where speed matters, this is a big let down for me. I had to wait for 3 to 4 minutes just for my computer to boot. Not good. Windows vista was pre installed in my Core 2 duo Laptop but I coudn’t feel the improvement in speed. In fact I think my Core 2 duo laptop running Vista runs slower than my Pentium 4 PC running Windows Xp.

Where the hell is that (feature)

The biggest downfall for me is that the rearrangement of buttons, features and what not in the Operating System. It might be a good thing to change for the better but, spending 1 to 2 minutes to find a feature everytime? No thanks!

One of the thing I noticed and that really pisses me off is the shutdown button. You would think that the programmers at Microsoft would have thought that maybe the users would want to click shutdown right away. Well, I do but to my surprise, when I click the button encircled red, it’s for Hibernation. Sorry! The shutdown button is hiding on that arrow on the right side.

What do you think? Do you like the new windows Vista? I’d prefer xp or mac any time.

Popularity: 24% [?]