Technology News

What’s all the buzz about Vista?
Vista, Microsoft’s new desktop operating system was announced in July, 2005 and released in January, 2007. Vista includes a new graphical user interface, which many people find hard to get used to.

As with any new operating system, Vista has had issues. Unfortunately, according to the trade press, Vista has had more than a normal share of issues. For instance:

1. Microsoft had originally targeted January 1, 2008 as the date when XP would no longer be available on new machines. However, due to the number of problems that were being experienced, this was moved to June 30, 2008.
   
   Despite criticism from the public, Microsoft has held firm on their June 30, 2008 date as the last date that computer manufacturers will be able to install XP on new computers that they sell. However, Dell, Fujitsu and Panasonic have informed us that, at the customer’s request, they will “downgrade” computers to XP Pro from Vista Business or Ultimate until the end January 2009.
   
   
2. Several large corporations across the country have removed Vista computers from their networks.
   
   
3. Service Pack 1 for Vista was also creating a considerable amount of problems for those users that were bold enough to upgrade. We’ve encountered a number of problems testing our products on computers that were upgraded to Vista. However, machines that are purchased with Vista Service Pack 1 already installed have worked fine in our testing. Therefore, SourceMedical does not recommend that anyone upgrade a computer to Vista, but to wait until you need to purchase a new machine.
   
   
4. These types of concerns are why Source Medical (as do many large corporations) takes the “wait and see” position on first releases of new software. We always wait for the first service pack before we start testing our software with the “latest and greatest”. In the case of Vista, this has saved us untold hours of development time because the changes that Microsoft made in Vista’s service pack 1 would have caused us to redo the work we would have done to make our applications work with the initial release of Vista

As a result of these and other issues, Vista has seen adoption and satisfaction rate lower than Windows XP.

Despite all of this, we have tested TherapySource 4.0, Rehab ToolKit 3.4006 and Rehab ToolKit 4.0 with both Vista Business and Vista Ultimate and are all Vista compatible. Not everything about Vista is negative. For instance, SourceMedical is very interested in a new feature in Vista Ultimate called Bit Locker. This feature will encrypt the disk drive in the computer to make the data on it virtually impossible to use without the proper security. This means that if your computer is ever stolen, the data on it can be well protected.

Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7)
TherapySource 3.52 has been tested with IE7 and many clients are currently using it. Since earlier versions of IE will not run on Vista, with the release of TherapySource 4.0 you will need to upgrade to IE7 because that is the only version we will use to test our software. So, please start upgrading to IE7 now.