HCL Infosystems has been selected as a vendor for the Government of Tamil Nadu project of free distribution of laptops to students of government and state aided schools and colleges across the state, the company said in a statement.

This is the first phase of the five-year project and in this phase, HCL will supply two lakh laptops out of a total order volume of nine lakh laptop units, it added.

ELCOT is the nodal agency for procurement of laptops for the project.

“The efforts made by the Tamil Nadu government and ELCOT for encouraging ICT enabled education are truly commendable and we look forward to this continued association. We are confident that such initiatives will boost PC penetration and democratize access to technology by students,” HCL Infosystems Executive Vice President APS Bedi said.

HCL Infosystems has been selected as a vendor for the Government of Tamil Nadu project of free distribution of laptops to students of government and state aided schools and colleges across the state, the company said in a statement.

This is the first phase of the five-year project and in this phase, HCL will supply two lakh laptops out of a total order volume of nine lakh laptop units, it added.

ELCOT is the nodal agency for procurement of laptops for the project.

“The efforts made by the Tamil Nadu government and ELCOT for encouraging ICT enabled education are truly commendable and we look forward to this continued association. We are confident that such initiatives will boost PC penetration and democratize access to technology by students,” HCL Infosystems Executive Vice President APS Bedi said.

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview beta edition just around the corner, now is a good time to examine what we know and don’t know about Microsoft’s forthcoming OS, and what IT should look for when the Consumer Preview hits as expected on Feb. 29.

Windows 8 rates as Microsoft’s latest bet-your-company move, with the computer industry rapidly adopting mobile platforms. For Windows 8 to thrive in the corporate environment, however, it has to not only add important new capabilities to today’s Windows 7 desktop but also morph into a touch-enabled, highly portable, secure OS that IT can tolerate and users will love.

[ See InfoWorld's Windows 8 preview visual tour and go deeper with InfoWorld's Windows 8 Deep Dive and Windows Server 8 special report. | Keep up to speed on the key Microsoft news and insights with InfoWorld's Technology: Microsoft newsletter. Sign up today! ]

Can Windows 8 make it as both a floor wax and a dessert topping? Let’s take a look.

Putting Windows 8 Consumer Preview into perspective No doubt you’ve already banged around the Windows 8 Developer Preview, and your clicking finger is poised to get the Consumer Preview bits as soon as they appear. But it’s worthwhile to step back and take a look at what will, and won’t, be happening at the end of the month.

Microsoft isn’t trying to convince you to upgrade all of your Windows PCs to Windows 8. Quite the contrary — last week, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations, Bill Koefoed, gave a short talk at the Stifel Nicolaus Technology & Telecom Conference (video and transcript), where he said, “One-third of businesses have upgraded to Windows 7. … For the enterprise, the path to Windows 8 is through Windows 7.” Microsoft is far more interested in getting all of your PCs on Windows 7 than they are on pushing your PC users to Windows 8. I have a feeling that’s going to come through loud and clear in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

“Consumer preview” is a bit of a misnomer anyway. This is a reasonably stable, mostly feature-complete build of Windows x86/x64, where the user interface isn’t locked in concrete, and that’s it. Microsoft is way beyond the point where substantive changes can be made. Online comments and extensive eavesdropping — “telemetry” in Microsoft parlance — may lead to some interface changes. But the plumbing is already in and won’t be altered.

The version of Windows 8 that has gotten the most recent buzz, Windows on ARM (WOA) will go out to a very select few; there isn’t even a hint of when we unwashed masses will get to see them. We do know that Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments are working on WOA devices — likely tablets but perhaps touchscreen netbooks as well.

WOA won’t have the Windows 7 “desktop” part of Windows 8, so it won’t run the familiar Windows Explorer or existing (Win32s) Windows apps. It just runs the Metro UI, a touch-oriented operating environment for lightweight applications, and apps designed specifically for Metro — sort of like how Apple’s iOS is the separate-but-related, light counterpart its Mac OS X. Of course, x86-based PCs get both the Windows 7-derived “desktop” and Metro, whereas Macs can run Mac OS X but not iOS.

What to expect from the Windows 8 user interfaceIf you’ve been looking at the Developer Preview, you know all about Windows 8′s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde interface(s).

You’ve seen the touch-oriented Metro interface with tiles in reorganizable groups, where the faces of the tiles change programmatically and you can pinch to zoom out to view all of the tiles at once (“semantic zoom”). In the Consumer Preview, Microsoft promises we’ll be able to create and name new groups, drag groups, change the background color and style, turn big tiles into little tiles, and use the mouse (not just our fingers) for all sorts of navigational actions, including semantic zoom. There are several minor changes in the way you swipe and click, particularly with the charms bar (Search, Share, Start, Devices, Settings) on the right. These changes are largely cosmetic, but if you’re thinking about deploying a Metro app — especially a Metro app that has to live in a mouse-friendly world — they could be crucial.

Also on the Metro side of the fence, the current, reprehensible App Search behavior changes: Instead of Search splatting an alphabetized list of all your applications on the screen, as the Developer Preview does now, the Consumer Preview arranges them by groups. You’ll probably want to work with it a bit, try rearranging and renaming groups, and see if your users can live with the new tools at hand.

On a “legacy” Windows 7-based PC (a loathsome term), more changes are in store. It still appears as if all Windows 7 apps and drivers will just work on Windows 8 PCs — that is, desktops and laptops using Intel or AMD x86 CPUs. That’s certainly the goal, anyway. In the Consumer Preview, we’ll see a few changes: an improved Task Manager with more details and app startup tweaking; the new Windows Explorer ribbon won’t appear by default as it does in the Developer Preview (yes, Explorer will still have the “up one level” button, as well as the Open Command Prompt menu item); a few long-overdue tweaks to the copy and move dialogs. They’re all worth a look, though nothing’s really compelling.

The big change in the “legacy” PC version is the Start button. In the Developer Preview, clicking on the Start flag (it wasn’t really a button) switched you to the Metro interface. Apparently the Consumer Preview does away with the button, but not the behavior. As I explained recently, the overriding problem is that the “legacy” Windows desktop doesn’t have a “legacy” Start menu. A small cottage industry has grown up with registry hacks and lightweight programs to bring back the Start menu in the Developer Preview. Will Microsoft make it easy for admins and users to unlock the menu in the Consumer Preview?

What has changed beneath the Win8 covers When you’re going through the Consumer Preview, be sure you check the new features with your current environment — and sound off if you hit any snags. Here are some potential sticking points.

Virtualized storage — called Storage Spaces in Windows 8 — brings fully redundant backup and easily extensible disk pools to any Windows 8 client system with two or more hard disks. It’s a brilliant concept, popularized in Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender, now adapted for Windows 8 clients. When the Consumer Preview arrives, you should spend time testing it with your corporate data backup routines. Although there shouldn’t be any problems, it’s a very new way of interacting with clients.

Much has been made of Windows 8′s new refresh and reset capabilities — analogous to a wipe command on a tablet or smartphone. Reset completely erases the client computer and reinstalls Windows. Refresh is supposed to keep personal data and settings, retain Metro apps, and reinstall Windows. It isn’t clear at this point precisely which personal data and settings are kept in a refresh — and whether everything is obliterated in a reset. Make sure your apps survive.

All new PCs with the “Made for Windows 8″ sticker must implement Secure Boot, a UEFI option that may bring you grief if you have users who need dual-boot capabilities. Secure Boot enforces electronic signature checking on operating systems before they’re loaded. Windows 8 will pass muster, but other OSes may not. Most — but not necessarily all — x86/x64 “Made for Windows 8″ PCs will have an override capability. WOA devices will be able to boot only into Windows 8 Metro.

The SkyDrive cloud storage service is due for a major makeover in the Consumer Preview, and part of the change involves single sign-on with a Windows Live ID. There are significant security implications as developers can “enable single sign-on and access a user’s data on SkyDrive to make your Metro style app more personal — with the user’s consent, of course,” as Microsoft puts it. Of course.

The Consumer Preview will give us the first glimpse of Microsoft’s Windows Store. There’s a particular twist here for the enterprise IT: The only way consumers can put Metro apps on their PCs and devices is through the Windows Store. (The only way WOA owners can put any apps at all — or drivers — on their devices is through the Windows Store.) At the Build conference last September, Windows president Steve Sinofsky said that businesses would have a private area in the store, which would dish out corporate apps, but only to authorized machines. We haven’t seen any details of exactly how that’s going to work — and it’ll be an important question for all corporate developers.

Microsoft has put us on notice that we’ll see better and faster connections to Wi-Fi and other mobile networks, more adept power conservation, new and much more touch-friendly picture passwords, Windows to Go for running Windows 8 (presumably x86/x64) from a USB drive. Some of those may apply to your shop. Hyper-V will be available on x86/x64 machines, but it isn’t clear whether the Consumer Preview version is in any way different from the Developer Preview version in that regard.

What the Windows 8 Consumer Preview means for IT From an IT point of view, the Consumer Preview should give you a very good idea of where your x86/x64-based applications will evolve in the near future on “legacy” PCs. The Consumer Preview will also show you how Metro’s going to work — or how it won’t work — with WinRT-based apps you’re thinking about developing. (WinRT is a new type of app using the Windows Runtime for portability between x86/x64 and ARM platforms.) Microsoft continues to promise that WinRT apps will be transportable from the x86/x64 version of Windows 8 to WOA, so the strengths and weaknesses you see in Metro in the Consumer Preview edition should carry over to both x86/x64 and ARM platforms.

Sinofsky has stated, definitively, that the only applications allowed to run on the WOA desktop are four Office 15 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote — and a small handful of Microsoft apps, including Internet Explorer 10 and Windows File Manager. That’s it. Per Sinofsky, “WOA does not support running, emulating, or porting existing [Win32s] x86/64 desktop apps.” Period.

If you have hopes of developing an app that will run on cooler, lighter, cheaper, battery-miserly ARM devices, you’ll have to write it Metro-style. Or if you can get it to run under Remote Desktop Services, it may be compatible with Internet Explorer 10 on a WOA device — maybe.

The differences in Internet Explorer 10 between WOA and x86/x64 may drive your Web programmers nuts. IE10 runs on the Metro and desktop interfaces on both x86/x64 and WOA hardware. That’s four different versions of IE10. Plug-ins won’t work on three of the four combinations: They’re banned on everything except the “legacy” version of IE10 running on x86/x64 hardware. If your site requires a plug-in, and a user comes at the site using Metro on an x86/x64 PC, they’ll be notified of the need for the plug-in and given a one-touch option to flip over to the legacy desktop version of IE10. But if the user has a WOA tablet, there’s no option: They’re dead in the water, like most other mobile users.

Which is probably just as well. No more Flash. No more PDF plug-ins. No more ActiveX. I’d be hard-pressed to say which of the three has led to more infected Windows PCs over the past decade.

One final note on testing: You’re going to want a touch-enabled tablet to test Metro, even for the x86/x64-only Consumer Preview. Using touch is very, very different from mousing your way around. Although Windows 8 — both Metro and the legacy environments — will run on any monitor with a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels or higher, your PC must support 1,366-by-768 resolution or higher to get all Metro features to work.

In particular, if you want to use Windows Snap — Microsoft’s facility for helping apps run side by side — to get a Metro window and a second window displayed next to one another, you need 1,366-by-768 resolution or better. Quoting Sinofsky again: “The resolution that supports all the features of Windows 8, including multitasking with Snap is 1,366 by 768. We chose this resolution as it can fit the width of a snapped app, which is 320 pixels (also the width designed for many phone layouts), next to a main app at 1,024-by-768 app (a common size designed for use on the Web).”

Beyond the Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The great unknown Over the past year we’ve gone through layers and layers of rumors, particularly about Windows 8 on ARM. Features come and go. Perhaps the most egregious example is in a video made at the Build conference last September. It shows Roger Gulrajani, from the Windows Hardware Ecosystem group, demonstrating Flash running in IE10, on the desktop, on an ARM device. Now, we’re assured IE10 won’t run Flash on ARM devices. That much has changed in just four months. Or maybe Microsoft itself was confused and got it wrong; there were several such misstatements at Build, and you can expect confusion to continue given the addition of ARM support for just part of the complete Windows 8 experience.

And I haven’t even touched on Office 15. We know very little about it, except Sinofsky has promised, “WOA includes desktop versions of the new Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These new Office applications, code-named ‘Office 15,’ have been significantly architected for both touch and minimized power/resource consumption, while also being fully featured for consumers and providing complete document compatibility.”

Will all WOA devices ship with Office 15? If so, as full versions or ad-supported giveaways? At an extra cost or free? For that matter, will x86/x64 Windows 8 PCs ship with Office 15, or a stunted relative?

You can bet there are plenty of additional surprises that’ll surface before the final version.

Related articles

This story, “What you should expect from Windows 8,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in Microsoft Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Read more about microsoft windows in InfoWorld’s Microsoft Windows Channel.

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview beta edition just around the corner, now is a good time to examine what we know and don’t know about Microsoft’s forthcoming OS, and what IT should look for when the Consumer Preview hits as expected on Feb. 29.

Windows 8 rates as Microsoft’s latest bet-your-company move, with the computer industry rapidly adopting mobile platforms. For Windows 8 to thrive in the corporate environment, however, it has to not only add important new capabilities to today’s Windows 7 desktop but also morph into a touch-enabled, highly portable, secure OS that IT can tolerate and users will love.

[ See InfoWorld's Windows 8 preview visual tour and go deeper with InfoWorld's Windows 8 Deep Dive and Windows Server 8 special report. | Keep up to speed on the key Microsoft news and insights with InfoWorld's Technology: Microsoft newsletter. Sign up today! ]

Can Windows 8 make it as both a floor wax and a dessert topping? Let’s take a look.

Putting Windows 8 Consumer Preview into perspective No doubt you’ve already banged around the Windows 8 Developer Preview, and your clicking finger is poised to get the Consumer Preview bits as soon as they appear. But it’s worthwhile to step back and take a look at what will, and won’t, be happening at the end of the month.

Microsoft isn’t trying to convince you to upgrade all of your Windows PCs to Windows 8. Quite the contrary — last week, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations, Bill Koefoed, gave a short talk at the Stifel Nicolaus Technology & Telecom Conference (video and transcript), where he said, “One-third of businesses have upgraded to Windows 7. … For the enterprise, the path to Windows 8 is through Windows 7.” Microsoft is far more interested in getting all of your PCs on Windows 7 than they are on pushing your PC users to Windows 8. I have a feeling that’s going to come through loud and clear in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

“Consumer preview” is a bit of a misnomer anyway. This is a reasonably stable, mostly feature-complete build of Windows x86/x64, where the user interface isn’t locked in concrete, and that’s it. Microsoft is way beyond the point where substantive changes can be made. Online comments and extensive eavesdropping — “telemetry” in Microsoft parlance — may lead to some interface changes. But the plumbing is already in and won’t be altered.

The version of Windows 8 that has gotten the most recent buzz, Windows on ARM (WOA) will go out to a very select few; there isn’t even a hint of when we unwashed masses will get to see them. We do know that Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments are working on WOA devices — likely tablets but perhaps touchscreen netbooks as well.

WOA won’t have the Windows 7 “desktop” part of Windows 8, so it won’t run the familiar Windows Explorer or existing (Win32s) Windows apps. It just runs the Metro UI, a touch-oriented operating environment for lightweight applications, and apps designed specifically for Metro — sort of like how Apple’s iOS is the separate-but-related, light counterpart its Mac OS X. Of course, x86-based PCs get both the Windows 7-derived “desktop” and Metro, whereas Macs can run Mac OS X but not iOS.

What to expect from the Windows 8 user interfaceIf you’ve been looking at the Developer Preview, you know all about Windows 8′s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde interface(s).

You’ve seen the touch-oriented Metro interface with tiles in reorganizable groups, where the faces of the tiles change programmatically and you can pinch to zoom out to view all of the tiles at once (“semantic zoom”). In the Consumer Preview, Microsoft promises we’ll be able to create and name new groups, drag groups, change the background color and style, turn big tiles into little tiles, and use the mouse (not just our fingers) for all sorts of navigational actions, including semantic zoom. There are several minor changes in the way you swipe and click, particularly with the charms bar (Search, Share, Start, Devices, Settings) on the right. These changes are largely cosmetic, but if you’re thinking about deploying a Metro app — especially a Metro app that has to live in a mouse-friendly world — they could be crucial.

Also on the Metro side of the fence, the current, reprehensible App Search behavior changes: Instead of Search splatting an alphabetized list of all your applications on the screen, as the Developer Preview does now, the Consumer Preview arranges them by groups. You’ll probably want to work with it a bit, try rearranging and renaming groups, and see if your users can live with the new tools at hand.

On a “legacy” Windows 7-based PC (a loathsome term), more changes are in store. It still appears as if all Windows 7 apps and drivers will just work on Windows 8 PCs — that is, desktops and laptops using Intel or AMD x86 CPUs. That’s certainly the goal, anyway. In the Consumer Preview, we’ll see a few changes: an improved Task Manager with more details and app startup tweaking; the new Windows Explorer ribbon won’t appear by default as it does in the Developer Preview (yes, Explorer will still have the “up one level” button, as well as the Open Command Prompt menu item); a few long-overdue tweaks to the copy and move dialogs. They’re all worth a look, though nothing’s really compelling.

The big change in the “legacy” PC version is the Start button. In the Developer Preview, clicking on the Start flag (it wasn’t really a button) switched you to the Metro interface. Apparently the Consumer Preview does away with the button, but not the behavior. As I explained recently, the overriding problem is that the “legacy” Windows desktop doesn’t have a “legacy” Start menu. A small cottage industry has grown up with registry hacks and lightweight programs to bring back the Start menu in the Developer Preview. Will Microsoft make it easy for admins and users to unlock the menu in the Consumer Preview?

What has changed beneath the Win8 covers When you’re going through the Consumer Preview, be sure you check the new features with your current environment — and sound off if you hit any snags. Here are some potential sticking points.

Virtualized storage — called Storage Spaces in Windows 8 — brings fully redundant backup and easily extensible disk pools to any Windows 8 client system with two or more hard disks. It’s a brilliant concept, popularized in Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender, now adapted for Windows 8 clients. When the Consumer Preview arrives, you should spend time testing it with your corporate data backup routines. Although there shouldn’t be any problems, it’s a very new way of interacting with clients.

Much has been made of Windows 8′s new refresh and reset capabilities — analogous to a wipe command on a tablet or smartphone. Reset completely erases the client computer and reinstalls Windows. Refresh is supposed to keep personal data and settings, retain Metro apps, and reinstall Windows. It isn’t clear at this point precisely which personal data and settings are kept in a refresh — and whether everything is obliterated in a reset. Make sure your apps survive.

All new PCs with the “Made for Windows 8″ sticker must implement Secure Boot, a UEFI option that may bring you grief if you have users who need dual-boot capabilities. Secure Boot enforces electronic signature checking on operating systems before they’re loaded. Windows 8 will pass muster, but other OSes may not. Most — but not necessarily all — x86/x64 “Made for Windows 8″ PCs will have an override capability. WOA devices will be able to boot only into Windows 8 Metro.

The SkyDrive cloud storage service is due for a major makeover in the Consumer Preview, and part of the change involves single sign-on with a Windows Live ID. There are significant security implications as developers can “enable single sign-on and access a user’s data on SkyDrive to make your Metro style app more personal — with the user’s consent, of course,” as Microsoft puts it. Of course.

The Consumer Preview will give us the first glimpse of Microsoft’s Windows Store. There’s a particular twist here for the enterprise IT: The only way consumers can put Metro apps on their PCs and devices is through the Windows Store. (The only way WOA owners can put any apps at all — or drivers — on their devices is through the Windows Store.) At the Build conference last September, Windows president Steve Sinofsky said that businesses would have a private area in the store, which would dish out corporate apps, but only to authorized machines. We haven’t seen any details of exactly how that’s going to work — and it’ll be an important question for all corporate developers.

Microsoft has put us on notice that we’ll see better and faster connections to Wi-Fi and other mobile networks, more adept power conservation, new and much more touch-friendly picture passwords, Windows to Go for running Windows 8 (presumably x86/x64) from a USB drive. Some of those may apply to your shop. Hyper-V will be available on x86/x64 machines, but it isn’t clear whether the Consumer Preview version is in any way different from the Developer Preview version in that regard.

What the Windows 8 Consumer Preview means for IT From an IT point of view, the Consumer Preview should give you a very good idea of where your x86/x64-based applications will evolve in the near future on “legacy” PCs. The Consumer Preview will also show you how Metro’s going to work — or how it won’t work — with WinRT-based apps you’re thinking about developing. (WinRT is a new type of app using the Windows Runtime for portability between x86/x64 and ARM platforms.) Microsoft continues to promise that WinRT apps will be transportable from the x86/x64 version of Windows 8 to WOA, so the strengths and weaknesses you see in Metro in the Consumer Preview edition should carry over to both x86/x64 and ARM platforms.

Sinofsky has stated, definitively, that the only applications allowed to run on the WOA desktop are four Office 15 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote — and a small handful of Microsoft apps, including Internet Explorer 10 and Windows File Manager. That’s it. Per Sinofsky, “WOA does not support running, emulating, or porting existing [Win32s] x86/64 desktop apps.” Period.

If you have hopes of developing an app that will run on cooler, lighter, cheaper, battery-miserly ARM devices, you’ll have to write it Metro-style. Or if you can get it to run under Remote Desktop Services, it may be compatible with Internet Explorer 10 on a WOA device — maybe.

The differences in Internet Explorer 10 between WOA and x86/x64 may drive your Web programmers nuts. IE10 runs on the Metro and desktop interfaces on both x86/x64 and WOA hardware. That’s four different versions of IE10. Plug-ins won’t work on three of the four combinations: They’re banned on everything except the “legacy” version of IE10 running on x86/x64 hardware. If your site requires a plug-in, and a user comes at the site using Metro on an x86/x64 PC, they’ll be notified of the need for the plug-in and given a one-touch option to flip over to the legacy desktop version of IE10. But if the user has a WOA tablet, there’s no option: They’re dead in the water, like most other mobile users.

Which is probably just as well. No more Flash. No more PDF plug-ins. No more ActiveX. I’d be hard-pressed to say which of the three has led to more infected Windows PCs over the past decade.

One final note on testing: You’re going to want a touch-enabled tablet to test Metro, even for the x86/x64-only Consumer Preview. Using touch is very, very different from mousing your way around. Although Windows 8 — both Metro and the legacy environments — will run on any monitor with a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels or higher, your PC must support 1,366-by-768 resolution or higher to get all Metro features to work.

In particular, if you want to use Windows Snap — Microsoft’s facility for helping apps run side by side — to get a Metro window and a second window displayed next to one another, you need 1,366-by-768 resolution or better. Quoting Sinofsky again: “The resolution that supports all the features of Windows 8, including multitasking with Snap is 1,366 by 768. We chose this resolution as it can fit the width of a snapped app, which is 320 pixels (also the width designed for many phone layouts), next to a main app at 1,024-by-768 app (a common size designed for use on the Web).”

Beyond the Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The great unknown Over the past year we’ve gone through layers and layers of rumors, particularly about Windows 8 on ARM. Features come and go. Perhaps the most egregious example is in a video made at the Build conference last September. It shows Roger Gulrajani, from the Windows Hardware Ecosystem group, demonstrating Flash running in IE10, on the desktop, on an ARM device. Now, we’re assured IE10 won’t run Flash on ARM devices. That much has changed in just four months. Or maybe Microsoft itself was confused and got it wrong; there were several such misstatements at Build, and you can expect confusion to continue given the addition of ARM support for just part of the complete Windows 8 experience.

And I haven’t even touched on Office 15. We know very little about it, except Sinofsky has promised, “WOA includes desktop versions of the new Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These new Office applications, code-named ‘Office 15,’ have been significantly architected for both touch and minimized power/resource consumption, while also being fully featured for consumers and providing complete document compatibility.”

Will all WOA devices ship with Office 15? If so, as full versions or ad-supported giveaways? At an extra cost or free? For that matter, will x86/x64 Windows 8 PCs ship with Office 15, or a stunted relative?

You can bet there are plenty of additional surprises that’ll surface before the final version.

Related articles

This story, “What you should expect from Windows 8,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in Microsoft Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Read more about microsoft windows in InfoWorld’s Microsoft Windows Channel.

by Benj Edwards, PCWorld  

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from PCWorld.com.

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology—to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?

Wrong!

While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.

If you’ve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway or taken money from certain older ATMs, for instance, your transaction was made possible by IBM’s OS/2, an operating system that debuted 25 years ago and faded out soon after.

A recent federal review found that the U.S. Secret Service uses a mainframe computer system from the 1980s. That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time. Here’s hoping that uptime statistics are better for the ancient minicomputers used by the U.S. Department of Defense for the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system, Navy submarines, fighter jets, and other weapons programs. Those systems, according to the consultants who help keep them going, will likely be used until at least the middle of this century.

Here are a few stories of the computers that time forgot, and the people and institutions that stubbornly hold on to them.

Punch-Card Accounting

Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

Sparkler’s IBM 402 is not a traditional computer, but an automated electromechanical tabulator that can be programmed (or more accurately, wired) to print out certain results based on values encoded into stacks of 80-column Hollerith-type punched cards.

Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That’s exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.

Of course, before the data goes into the 402, it must first be encoded into stacks of cards. A large IBM 029 key-punch machine—which resembles a monstrous typewriter built into a desk—handles that task.

Carl Kracklauer, whose father founded Sparkler Filters in 1927, usually types the data onto the punch cards. The company sticks with the 402 because it’s a known entity: Staffers know how to use it, and they have over 60 years of company accounting records formatted for the device.

The key punch isn’t the only massive accessory in Sparkler’s arsenal. The 402 also links to an IBM 514 Reproducing Punch, which has been broken for three years. When it works properly, the 514 spits out punched “summary cards,” which typically contain the output of the 402’s operation (such as sum totals) for later reuse. Sparkler stores all of its punched data cards—thousands and thousands of them—in stacks of boxes.

The company also possesses dozens of 402 programs in the form of IBM plugboards. Computer programming in the 1940s commonly involved arranging hundreds of individual wires in a way that would likely drive a modern software engineer insane. In the 402’s case, a spaghetti-like pattern of wires attached to hundreds of connectors on each plugboard determines the operation of the machine, and different plugboards can be pulled out and replaced as if they were interchangeable software disks. So you might insert one plugboard for handling, say, accounts receivable, and a different one for inventory management.

Sparkler’s 402 is a such a significant computing relic that the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., sent a delegation to the company last year to try and convince its executives to move to a more modern accounting system and donate the 402 to the museum. That will someday be an appropriate resting place for the 402, but as long as it still does its duty, the Texas company has no problem keeping its digital dinosaur living a little while longer.

Computers That Can’t Fail

When you see reports about the small, remote-controlled drones that the military uses to gather intelligence and target enemies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s easy to assume that all our weaponry is equally modern. Some significant weapons systems that our military depends on today, though, run on technology that dates back, in some instances, to the Vietnam War era.

The U.S. Navy’s ship-based radar systems and Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, which maintains that country’s nuclear warheads, use PDP minicomputers manufactured in the 1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Another user of the PDP is Airbus, the French jetliner manufacturer.

The PDP was among the second wave of mainframes called minicomputers because they were only the size of a couple of refrigerators instead of big enough to fill a room.

The F-15 and F-18 fighters, the Hawk missile systems, parts of the U.S. Navy submarine fleet, and Navy fighter test systems on aircraft carriers use DEC’s VAX minicomputers from the 1980s for various purposes, according to Lynda Jones of The Logical Company in Cottage Grove, Oregon, which helps keep these antiquated systems functioning.

Because of their critical nature, many of these systems will be in continuous service long into the future, perhaps to the middle of this century. For instance, the Minuteman ICBM program, which uses DEC VAX systems for testing, recently received funding that will keep it going until 2030.

“These legacy systems are integrated into multibillion dollar systems as control or test systems,” Jones says. Replacing these old systems with modern machines, she explains, would cost millions of dollars and could potentially disrupt national security.

As it turns out, replacing those systems with modern hardware designed to work like the antiquated components is a decidedly less risky venture. Jones’ company is one of many that create systems to simulate older DEC minicomputers using newer, smaller, and less power-hungry electronic parts. The replacement computers emulate the exact functionality of the original hardware—and run the same vintage software—so it appears to the rest of the system as if nothing has changed.

That’s important because most of Logical’s customers are defense corporations refreshing old weapons technology under contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. “There are thousands of DEC systems in use for military applications around the world,” says Jones, “including PDPs from the 1970s, VAXes from the 1980s, and Alphas from the 1990s.”

The United States developed many fighter jet and missile systems during the Cold War era using DEC hardware for test and control functions, says Jones, because the company’s minicomputers were among the very first general-purpose machines that did not require water cooling and could be used in harsh environments.

The biggest problem with maintaining such ancient computer systems is that the original technicians who knew how to configure and maintain them have long since retired or passed away, so no one is left with the knowledge required to fix them if they break.

Even if someone does know how to fix them, finding replacement parts can be tricky. Stanley Quayle, a computer emulation consultant, has seen contractors desperate to find the parts they need. “I have a prospective customer supporting a U.S. missile defense system that is buying parts on eBay,” says Quayle. “Any parts they do find are as old or older than their system,” meaning they’re sometimes no more reliable than the pieces they replace.

The Apple IIe Warehouse

Lots of people fell in love with the Apple IIe when it was released in 1983. It supported a wide variety of software and hardware, it was reliable, and its seven internal expansion slots made it extremely flexible.

For Kevin Huffman, who owns and operates Huffman Industrial Warehouse in Eden, N.C., that love has never waned. His firm stores and ships out goods for companies that rent his warehouse space, and he regularly uses his vintage Apple IIe to track inventory and keep accounts.

Huffman got started with the Apple II line in college and later bought two identical Apple IIe systems from his brother-in-law in the mid-1980s, one of which he uses today. (He keeps the other unit as an emergency backup.)

Huffman’s Apple IIe setup is nothing fancy, but it is fully stocked. It’s equipped with 128 kilobytes of RAM, the standard 1MHz 6502 CPU, and AppleSoft BASIC in ROM. It contains five expansion cards: a printer card, two disk interface cards, a serial port card, and an 80-column video card. For peripherals, he uses an Apple DuoDisk unit, a 10-inch amber video monitor, and a trusty workhorse of a printer—a Star NP-10 that “is still going strong at 26-plus years old,” he says.

Huffman runs an application suite on the Apple IIe called “The Business Accountant,” first published by Manzanita Software in 1984. Of the six applications in the suite, he uses five: General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, and Payroll. All of his data resides on the once-standard 5.25-inch floppy disks, but he’s not worried about data security: “I back up the floppies with a program called Copy II+.”

Huffman uses a modern PC for word processing, email and Web browsing, but he’s reluctant to move away from his trusty Apple IIe for accounting work.

“I still use the machine because it is so simple to use, I know the software, and I can still update the tax tables manually.” He adds, “The only glitch in the entire system is that it does not recognize the year 2000, so all my printed financial reports say 1912. But on the invoices, checks, and other forms, it prints in the 11/14/12 format.”

He’s even tried emulating the Apple IIe and his favorite software on a modern machine, but to him, the full experience matters. “I thought about changing over to a more modern system, but there is nothing to be gained. As the old saying goes, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”

The Color Computer Programming Assistant

Few vintage computers inspire as much active devotion as the Tandy Color Computer 3, first introduced in 1986. The CoCo 3 (as it is affectionately called by its fans) never sold as many units as home computers from Atari or Commodore, but that engendered an even stronger loyalty in its users.

The CoCo 3 marked the end of a well-received line of Color Computer products from RadioShack, which launched the first model in 1980. The third model in the series turned out to be an impressive swan song, adding support for 512KB of memory and implementing advanced graphics and sound enhancements—all while retaining backward compatibility with pre-CoCo 3 software.

It’s understandable, then, that some folks refuse to let go of their CoCo 3 units for either work or play. One such loyal user, John Kowalski, a former console game developer, still considers his CoCo 3 an indispensable tool.

“I turn it on, type in a quick program to do something I need done, and let it run to get the results,” says Kowalski. “I think of it as my personal assistant—sometimes I program it to do tedious or repetitive tasks like automated document reformatting, and I can continue working while it works beside me.”

Kowalski began his journey in CoCo-land with a Color Computer 2 in 1984. He traded up to the CoCo 3 in 1986 and stuck with the platform through the years, performing various hardware upgrades (upping the system RAM to 2MB and overclocking the 6809 CPU to a blistering 3.5MHz) along the way.

When Kowalski was programming console video games at Crystal Dynamics in the mid-to-late 1990s, his vintage CoCo 3 played a prominent role. “Every game I worked on had at least some data in it created on the CoCo,” he says. Titles like Namco Museum 50th Anniversary and Tron 2.0: Killer App benefited from the vintage machine, which Kowalski used as if it were a powerful programmable scientific calculator.

For an original title like Tron 2.0 for the Xbox, Kowalski used the CoCo 3 to test 3D techniques used in the game. “Many of the data sets used by the 3D engine were generated on the CoCo, like the tables for calculating depth and perspective in the 3D view, and the data for fish-eye reduction of the view,” he says. “The texture map graphics used in the game were also translated into program data by a conversion tool I wrote on the CoCo.”

If speed wasn’t an issue, Kowalski would quickly type up a program in the CoCo’s built-in BASIC interpreter. In the cases that involved large amounts of graphics or sound data, he would turn to assembly language.

The latter technique proved quite handy when working on Namco Museum or Atari Anniversary, which both contained reworkings of classic 1980s arcade games. Kowalski used the CoCo to extract, convert, and edit graphics data from the original arcade ROMs into formats a PlayStation 2 console could use. He also used the CoCo to translate vintage arcade source code and clean up sound samples used in the games.

With such an old machine, you might think it would be hard to export the working data to a more modern PC, but Kowalski has found no such problems. For years, he swapped standard 5.25-inch disks between his CoCo 3 and a Windows PC. Today, he simply connects a serial port between the CoCo and a PC, with the PC acting as a virtual disk drive emulator.

Kowalski says his current job designing electronics hardware doesn’t call for much data generation, so he doesn’t use the CoCo as frequently. But he hasn’t retired the classic machine; Kowalski keeps the 25-year-old PC on his main computer desk, ready to be called back into service at a moment’s notice.

by Benj Edwards, PCWorld  

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from PCWorld.com.

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology—to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?

Wrong!

While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.

If you’ve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway or taken money from certain older ATMs, for instance, your transaction was made possible by IBM’s OS/2, an operating system that debuted 25 years ago and faded out soon after.

A recent federal review found that the U.S. Secret Service uses a mainframe computer system from the 1980s. That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time. Here’s hoping that uptime statistics are better for the ancient minicomputers used by the U.S. Department of Defense for the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system, Navy submarines, fighter jets, and other weapons programs. Those systems, according to the consultants who help keep them going, will likely be used until at least the middle of this century.

Here are a few stories of the computers that time forgot, and the people and institutions that stubbornly hold on to them.

Punch-Card Accounting

Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

Sparkler’s IBM 402 is not a traditional computer, but an automated electromechanical tabulator that can be programmed (or more accurately, wired) to print out certain results based on values encoded into stacks of 80-column Hollerith-type punched cards.

Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That’s exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.

Of course, before the data goes into the 402, it must first be encoded into stacks of cards. A large IBM 029 key-punch machine—which resembles a monstrous typewriter built into a desk—handles that task.

Carl Kracklauer, whose father founded Sparkler Filters in 1927, usually types the data onto the punch cards. The company sticks with the 402 because it’s a known entity: Staffers know how to use it, and they have over 60 years of company accounting records formatted for the device.

The key punch isn’t the only massive accessory in Sparkler’s arsenal. The 402 also links to an IBM 514 Reproducing Punch, which has been broken for three years. When it works properly, the 514 spits out punched “summary cards,” which typically contain the output of the 402’s operation (such as sum totals) for later reuse. Sparkler stores all of its punched data cards—thousands and thousands of them—in stacks of boxes.

The company also possesses dozens of 402 programs in the form of IBM plugboards. Computer programming in the 1940s commonly involved arranging hundreds of individual wires in a way that would likely drive a modern software engineer insane. In the 402’s case, a spaghetti-like pattern of wires attached to hundreds of connectors on each plugboard determines the operation of the machine, and different plugboards can be pulled out and replaced as if they were interchangeable software disks. So you might insert one plugboard for handling, say, accounts receivable, and a different one for inventory management.

Sparkler’s 402 is a such a significant computing relic that the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., sent a delegation to the company last year to try and convince its executives to move to a more modern accounting system and donate the 402 to the museum. That will someday be an appropriate resting place for the 402, but as long as it still does its duty, the Texas company has no problem keeping its digital dinosaur living a little while longer.

Computers That Can’t Fail

When you see reports about the small, remote-controlled drones that the military uses to gather intelligence and target enemies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s easy to assume that all our weaponry is equally modern. Some significant weapons systems that our military depends on today, though, run on technology that dates back, in some instances, to the Vietnam War era.

The U.S. Navy’s ship-based radar systems and Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, which maintains that country’s nuclear warheads, use PDP minicomputers manufactured in the 1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Another user of the PDP is Airbus, the French jetliner manufacturer.

The PDP was among the second wave of mainframes called minicomputers because they were only the size of a couple of refrigerators instead of big enough to fill a room.

The F-15 and F-18 fighters, the Hawk missile systems, parts of the U.S. Navy submarine fleet, and Navy fighter test systems on aircraft carriers use DEC’s VAX minicomputers from the 1980s for various purposes, according to Lynda Jones of The Logical Company in Cottage Grove, Oregon, which helps keep these antiquated systems functioning.

Because of their critical nature, many of these systems will be in continuous service long into the future, perhaps to the middle of this century. For instance, the Minuteman ICBM program, which uses DEC VAX systems for testing, recently received funding that will keep it going until 2030.

“These legacy systems are integrated into multibillion dollar systems as control or test systems,” Jones says. Replacing these old systems with modern machines, she explains, would cost millions of dollars and could potentially disrupt national security.

As it turns out, replacing those systems with modern hardware designed to work like the antiquated components is a decidedly less risky venture. Jones’ company is one of many that create systems to simulate older DEC minicomputers using newer, smaller, and less power-hungry electronic parts. The replacement computers emulate the exact functionality of the original hardware—and run the same vintage software—so it appears to the rest of the system as if nothing has changed.

That’s important because most of Logical’s customers are defense corporations refreshing old weapons technology under contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. “There are thousands of DEC systems in use for military applications around the world,” says Jones, “including PDPs from the 1970s, VAXes from the 1980s, and Alphas from the 1990s.”

The United States developed many fighter jet and missile systems during the Cold War era using DEC hardware for test and control functions, says Jones, because the company’s minicomputers were among the very first general-purpose machines that did not require water cooling and could be used in harsh environments.

The biggest problem with maintaining such ancient computer systems is that the original technicians who knew how to configure and maintain them have long since retired or passed away, so no one is left with the knowledge required to fix them if they break.

Even if someone does know how to fix them, finding replacement parts can be tricky. Stanley Quayle, a computer emulation consultant, has seen contractors desperate to find the parts they need. “I have a prospective customer supporting a U.S. missile defense system that is buying parts on eBay,” says Quayle. “Any parts they do find are as old or older than their system,” meaning they’re sometimes no more reliable than the pieces they replace.

The Apple IIe Warehouse

Lots of people fell in love with the Apple IIe when it was released in 1983. It supported a wide variety of software and hardware, it was reliable, and its seven internal expansion slots made it extremely flexible.

For Kevin Huffman, who owns and operates Huffman Industrial Warehouse in Eden, N.C., that love has never waned. His firm stores and ships out goods for companies that rent his warehouse space, and he regularly uses his vintage Apple IIe to track inventory and keep accounts.

Huffman got started with the Apple II line in college and later bought two identical Apple IIe systems from his brother-in-law in the mid-1980s, one of which he uses today. (He keeps the other unit as an emergency backup.)

Huffman’s Apple IIe setup is nothing fancy, but it is fully stocked. It’s equipped with 128 kilobytes of RAM, the standard 1MHz 6502 CPU, and AppleSoft BASIC in ROM. It contains five expansion cards: a printer card, two disk interface cards, a serial port card, and an 80-column video card. For peripherals, he uses an Apple DuoDisk unit, a 10-inch amber video monitor, and a trusty workhorse of a printer—a Star NP-10 that “is still going strong at 26-plus years old,” he says.

Huffman runs an application suite on the Apple IIe called “The Business Accountant,” first published by Manzanita Software in 1984. Of the six applications in the suite, he uses five: General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, and Payroll. All of his data resides on the once-standard 5.25-inch floppy disks, but he’s not worried about data security: “I back up the floppies with a program called Copy II+.”

Huffman uses a modern PC for word processing, email and Web browsing, but he’s reluctant to move away from his trusty Apple IIe for accounting work.

“I still use the machine because it is so simple to use, I know the software, and I can still update the tax tables manually.” He adds, “The only glitch in the entire system is that it does not recognize the year 2000, so all my printed financial reports say 1912. But on the invoices, checks, and other forms, it prints in the 11/14/12 format.”

He’s even tried emulating the Apple IIe and his favorite software on a modern machine, but to him, the full experience matters. “I thought about changing over to a more modern system, but there is nothing to be gained. As the old saying goes, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”

The Color Computer Programming Assistant

Few vintage computers inspire as much active devotion as the Tandy Color Computer 3, first introduced in 1986. The CoCo 3 (as it is affectionately called by its fans) never sold as many units as home computers from Atari or Commodore, but that engendered an even stronger loyalty in its users.

The CoCo 3 marked the end of a well-received line of Color Computer products from RadioShack, which launched the first model in 1980. The third model in the series turned out to be an impressive swan song, adding support for 512KB of memory and implementing advanced graphics and sound enhancements—all while retaining backward compatibility with pre-CoCo 3 software.

It’s understandable, then, that some folks refuse to let go of their CoCo 3 units for either work or play. One such loyal user, John Kowalski, a former console game developer, still considers his CoCo 3 an indispensable tool.

“I turn it on, type in a quick program to do something I need done, and let it run to get the results,” says Kowalski. “I think of it as my personal assistant—sometimes I program it to do tedious or repetitive tasks like automated document reformatting, and I can continue working while it works beside me.”

Kowalski began his journey in CoCo-land with a Color Computer 2 in 1984. He traded up to the CoCo 3 in 1986 and stuck with the platform through the years, performing various hardware upgrades (upping the system RAM to 2MB and overclocking the 6809 CPU to a blistering 3.5MHz) along the way.

When Kowalski was programming console video games at Crystal Dynamics in the mid-to-late 1990s, his vintage CoCo 3 played a prominent role. “Every game I worked on had at least some data in it created on the CoCo,” he says. Titles like Namco Museum 50th Anniversary and Tron 2.0: Killer App benefited from the vintage machine, which Kowalski used as if it were a powerful programmable scientific calculator.

For an original title like Tron 2.0 for the Xbox, Kowalski used the CoCo 3 to test 3D techniques used in the game. “Many of the data sets used by the 3D engine were generated on the CoCo, like the tables for calculating depth and perspective in the 3D view, and the data for fish-eye reduction of the view,” he says. “The texture map graphics used in the game were also translated into program data by a conversion tool I wrote on the CoCo.”

If speed wasn’t an issue, Kowalski would quickly type up a program in the CoCo’s built-in BASIC interpreter. In the cases that involved large amounts of graphics or sound data, he would turn to assembly language.

The latter technique proved quite handy when working on Namco Museum or Atari Anniversary, which both contained reworkings of classic 1980s arcade games. Kowalski used the CoCo to extract, convert, and edit graphics data from the original arcade ROMs into formats a PlayStation 2 console could use. He also used the CoCo to translate vintage arcade source code and clean up sound samples used in the games.

With such an old machine, you might think it would be hard to export the working data to a more modern PC, but Kowalski has found no such problems. For years, he swapped standard 5.25-inch disks between his CoCo 3 and a Windows PC. Today, he simply connects a serial port between the CoCo and a PC, with the PC acting as a virtual disk drive emulator.

Kowalski says his current job designing electronics hardware doesn’t call for much data generation, so he doesn’t use the CoCo as frequently. But he hasn’t retired the classic machine; Kowalski keeps the 25-year-old PC on his main computer desk, ready to be called back into service at a moment’s notice.

World’s largest notebook computer manufacturer chooses RADVISION’s BEEHD video client for embedded tablet and desktop video conferencing

TAIPEI, Taiwan & FAIR LAWN, N.J. & TEL AVIV, Israel–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–RADVISION (Nasdaq: RVSN), a leading technology and end-to-end solution provider for unified visual communications, announced today that Quanta Computer, the world’s largest original design manufacturer (ODM) for notebook computers, has selected RADVISION as the technology provider for its video communications product line. Quanta, which manufactures devices for the world’s leading brands, will integrate unified communications (UC) applications into its mobile devices including its notebooks and tablets.

“With this UC solution, Quanta is able to extend its offerings beyond hardware, enabling Quanta’s customers to take advantage of LiveHD to empower their users to participate in effective lifelike video meetings regardless of their location and at a truly affordable price point.”

Quanta chose the RADVISION BEEHD video client framework for its out-of-the box video client functionality as well as its framework-level customization flexibility. This enabled Quanta developers to quickly and efficiently embed the RADVISION technology into the Quanta devices. The Quanta UC application, called LiveHD™, runs on desktop and laptop PCs and features a high quality HD 720p/30fps video call experience as well as desktop-sharing and other advanced collaboration features. The LiveHD client turns any PC into a HD UC endpoint.

“We evaluated a number of technologies before deciding to standardize on the RADVISION solution,” said Sagin Hsu, associate vice president, Quanta Innovation Center, Business Group of Cloud, Quanta Computer. “BEEHD offers a unique combination of innovation and simplicity from a development standpoint. Additionally, RADVISION’s H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and NetSense bandwidth adaptation technology enable our video client to sustain a high quality experience regardless of network conditions.”

Hsu added, “With this UC solution, Quanta is able to extend its offerings beyond hardware, enabling Quanta’s customers to take advantage of LiveHD to empower their users to participate in effective lifelike video meetings regardless of their location and at a truly affordable price point.”

Using Quanta’s embedded hardware encoder camera for H.264 video encoding, desktop, laptop, and ultrabook users can experience HD video call quality while freeing CPU power for other application needs. Quanta also extends LiveHD technology to tablet platforms, enabling on-the-go workers to benefit from meaningful and effective communications. The new video capabilities will allow Quanta’s enterprise customers to communicate efficiently between remote branches and with customers, maintaining a face-to-face communications experience. The solution is also optimized for business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) communications, extending the market opportunity for service providers offering cloud-based video communications.

“We are honored to team with Quanta to deliver its LiveHD video capabilities to market,” said Amir Zmora, RADVISION vice president of marketing and products for RADVISION’s Technology Business Unit. “Quanta has developed an innovative approach to HD video-enable any laptop or mobile client helping millions of people use video collaboration as their preferred method of communication – easily and intuitively regardless of network, carrier, protocol, application, or device they use.

Key features and functionality of the LiveHD video client include interoperability with all standards-based H.323 and SIP video systems. Additionally, the client fully supports H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technologies, enabling UC systems to interoperate with traditional video technologies. The LiveHD client will reside on Quanta-manufactured notebooks and tablets.

The LiveHD client will come in two variations – one for PCs and one for tablets:

• LiveHD for PCs. LiveHD for PCs leverages a unique and cost-effective processing capability that offloads H.264 video encoding from the computer CPU and uses the Quanta embedded camera equipped with an internal H.264 encoder. This capability dedicates resources as needed without compromising video quality.
• LiveHD for Tablets. LiveHD is optimized on the OMAP™ 4 mobile processing platform from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI). The OMAP 4 processor’s smart multicore architecture offloads video encoding and decoding from the main CPUs, freeing them to support performance-intensive collaboration applications without sacrificing Quanta’s HD mobile video teleconferencing quality of 720p/30fps or higher.

“Market adoption of video conferencing depends on the deployment of high-quality multitasking use case applications intended to improve the way we communicate and collaborate. Quanta and RADVISION leverage the OMAP platform’s smart multicore architecture to make such use cases possible with the best quality of service,” said Fred Cohen, director, OMAP User Experience Team at TI.

About Quanta Computer

Quanta Computer is a Fortune Global 500 Company that is regarded as the world’s largest manufacturer for notebook computers and other PC related products. Quanta provides innovative products with leading technology that range from information, communication, networking, consumer electronics, and car electronics to storage. Founded in 1988, Quanta Computer is headquartered in Taiwan with major operation facilities set up in Asia, Canada, North America, South America, and Europe. Quanta Group currently employs over 65,000 employees worldwide with consolidated revenues topped US$36 billion for fiscal year 2011. For further information, please visit Quanta Computer’s Website at www.quantatw.com/ .

About RADVISION

Founded in 1992, RADVISION (Nasdaq: RVSN) is a leading provider of video conferencing and telepresence technologies over IP and wireless networks. RADVISION teams with its channel and service provider partners to offer end-to-end visual communications that help businesses collaborate more efficiently. RADVISION propels the unified communications evolution forward with unique technologies that harness the power of video, voice, and data over any network. Visit www.radvision.com, our blog, and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to general business conditions in the industry, changes in demand for products, the timing and amount or cancellation of orders and other risks detailed from time to time in RADVISION’s filings with the Securities Exchange Commission, including RADVISION’s Form 20-F Annual Report. These documents contain and identify other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. Stockholders and other readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statement.

RADVISION and SCOPIA are registered trademarks of RADVISION, Ltd. All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners. All rights reserved © 2012 RADVISION, Ltd.

World’s largest notebook computer manufacturer chooses RADVISION’s BEEHD video client for embedded tablet and desktop video conferencing

TAIPEI, Taiwan & FAIR LAWN, N.J. & TEL AVIV, Israel–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–RADVISION (Nasdaq: RVSN), a leading technology and end-to-end solution provider for unified visual communications, announced today that Quanta Computer, the world’s largest original design manufacturer (ODM) for notebook computers, has selected RADVISION as the technology provider for its video communications product line. Quanta, which manufactures devices for the world’s leading brands, will integrate unified communications (UC) applications into its mobile devices including its notebooks and tablets.

“BEEHD offers a unique combination of innovation and simplicity from a development standpoint. Additionally, RADVISION’s H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and NetSense bandwidth adaptation technology enable our video client to sustain a high quality experience regardless of network conditions.”

Quanta chose the RADVISION BEEHD video client framework for its out-of-the box video client functionality as well as its framework-level customization flexibility. This enabled Quanta developers to quickly and efficiently embed the RADVISION technology into the Quanta devices. The Quanta UC application, called LiveHD™, runs on desktop and laptop PCs and features a high quality HD 720p/30fps video call experience as well as desktop-sharing and other advanced collaboration features. The LiveHD client turns any PC into a HD UC endpoint.

“We evaluated a number of technologies before deciding to standardize on the RADVISION solution,” said Sagin Hsu, associate vice president, Quanta Innovation Center, Business Group of Cloud, Quanta Computer. “BEEHD offers a unique combination of innovation and simplicity from a development standpoint. Additionally, RADVISION’s H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and NetSense bandwidth adaptation technology enable our video client to sustain a high quality experience regardless of network conditions.”

Hsu added, “With this UC solution, Quanta is able to extend its offerings beyond hardware, enabling Quanta’s customers to take advantage of LiveHD to empower their users to participate in effective lifelike video meetings regardless of their location and at a truly affordable price point.”

Using Quanta’s embedded hardware encoder camera for H.264 video encoding, desktop, laptop, and ultrabook users can experience HD video call quality while freeing CPU power for other application needs. Quanta also extends LiveHD technology to tablet platforms, enabling on-the-go workers to benefit from meaningful and effective communications. The new video capabilities will allow Quanta’s enterprise customers to communicate efficiently between remote branches and with customers, maintaining a face-to-face communications experience. The solution is also optimized for business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) communications, extending the market opportunity for service providers offering cloud-based video communications.

“We are honored to team with Quanta to deliver its LiveHD video capabilities to market,” said Amir Zmora, RADVISION vice president of marketing and products for RADVISION’s Technology Business Unit. “Quanta has developed an innovative approach to HD video-enable any laptop or mobile client helping millions of people use video collaboration as their preferred method of communication – easily and intuitively regardless of network, carrier, protocol, application, or device they use.

Key features and functionality of the LiveHD video client include interoperability with all standards-based H.323 and SIP video systems. Additionally, the client fully supports H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technologies, enabling UC systems to interoperate with traditional video technologies. The LiveHD client will reside on Quanta-manufactured notebooks and tablets.

The LiveHD client will come in two variations – one for PCs and one for tablets:

• LiveHD for PCs. LiveHD for PCs leverages a unique and cost-effective processing capability that offloads H.264 video encoding from the computer CPU and uses the Quanta embedded camera equipped with an internal H.264 encoder. This capability dedicates resources as needed without compromising video quality.
• LiveHD for Tablets. LiveHD is optimized on the OMAP™ 4 mobile processing platform from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI). The OMAP 4 processor’s smart multicore architecture offloads video encoding and decoding from the main CPUs, freeing them to support performance-intensive collaboration applications without sacrificing Quanta’s HD mobile video teleconferencing quality of 720p/30fps or higher.

“Market adoption of video conferencing depends on the deployment of high-quality multitasking use case applications intended to improve the way we communicate and collaborate. Quanta and RADVISION leverage the OMAP platform’s smart multicore architecture to make such use cases possible with the best quality of service,” said Fred Cohen, director, OMAP User Experience Team at TI.

About Quanta Computer

Quanta Computer is a Fortune Global 500 Company that is regarded as the world’s largest manufacturer for notebook computers and other PC related products. Quanta provides innovative products with leading technology that range from information, communication, networking, consumer electronics, and car electronics to storage. Founded in 1988, Quanta Computer is headquartered in Taiwan with major operation facilities set up in Asia, Canada, North America, South America, and Europe. Quanta Group currently employs over 65,000 employees worldwide with consolidated revenues topped US$36 billion for fiscal year 2011. For further information, please visit Quanta Computer’s Website at www.quantatw.com/ .

About RADVISION

Founded in 1992, RADVISION (Nasdaq: RVSN) is a leading provider of video conferencing and telepresence technologies over IP and wireless networks. RADVISION teams with its channel and service provider partners to offer end-to-end visual communications that help businesses collaborate more efficiently. RADVISION propels the unified communications evolution forward with unique technologies that harness the power of video, voice, and data over any network. Visit www.radvision.com, our blog, and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to general business conditions in the industry, changes in demand for products, the timing and amount or cancellation of orders and other risks detailed from time to time in RADVISION’s filings with the Securities Exchange Commission, including RADVISION’s Form 20-F Annual Report. These documents contain and identify other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. Stockholders and other readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statement.

RADVISION and SCOPIA are registered trademarks of RADVISION, Ltd. All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners. All rights reserved © 2012 RADVISION, Ltd.