Ultimate Extras, Where are you?
Indeed. Seven months after Vista’s RTM and more than four months after the January 30 retail kickoff, there are no “cutting-edge programs or innovative services,” only Hold ‘Em, which lets you play poker against imaginary opponents, and DreamScene, which allows you to use a video clip as your desktop background.
That’s it?
Update: Here’s how to see if you have Ultimate Extras installed.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
well, there’s also something where they’ll thoughtfully manage your EFS keys and bitlocker keys for you.
Yup, pretty lame, huh. Overpromised and undelivered..again.
And Dream Scene was only a dumb replacement for Active Desktop where we could use simple HTML to do the same thing. Progress? I find that hard to believe.
And I’d rather they pay attention to Windows Mail rather than forcing Windows Live Mail on the masses (which is another stupid regression of function). I guess it’s just to difficult to write an email/news client without the assistance of Eudora, Agent, Thunderbird or even Entourage (from the Mac Business Group) which are far superior to Windows Mail or Live Mail.
And, Ed, Dreamscene is still only a preview!
This feels like all she wrote.
If you ever bought the Plus package for previous versions of Windows you may/probably were underwhelmed by it. This feels like Plus renamed with a major price hike.
Did anyone honestly buy Ultimate for the promise of ‘Extras’?
Now that we at last have the ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series and Nvidia GeForce 8800 will will see Extras.
But Ed! Everyone’s waiting to upgrade to Service Pack 1 first anyway!
And lets be honest, both of those are pretty lame for being “ultimate”.
Hmm…can we really even count DreamScene, since it’s still in preview mode and they have yet to even release the cool waving wheat field shown during the Vista launch? And what about that other launch promise — the photo software that would take two pictures and make a better one out of it?
My guess is that they’re working on more goodies, but the team got pulled into getting Vista out the door and lost a few months. It sucks, for sure, but since Ultimate has the potential to significantly alter the bottom line, I figure they have some good things in store. But really, couldn’t they even throw us a tips and tricks book or two while we’re waiting?
It may be time for the team to show their hand (poker anyone?), but there’s definitely something to be said for pleasant surprises…as long as though surprises roll out at a more regular clip.
You forgot BitLocker. 😉
I think I remember Jim Allchin saying something about a new Ultimate Extra once every 3 months, which gives them plenty of time to add another one based on the retail launch date. Realizing Jim Allchin is now retired, who knows if that’s still the plan, but it would be nice if they’d give us something.
Let’s see, those were Bitlocker Enhancements, right? Cuz Bitlocker itself was supposed to be a feature of Ultimate.
And as for DreamScene, yes, it’s still in preview. In Control Panel/programs I have a DreamScene Preview (KB929327) and then on April 24 Windows DreamScene (KB931133), which appears to be the Content Pack.
Hmmm, there’s no way to identify the Ultimate Extras in Control Panel. Helluva marketing job, Microsoft.
I smell a class action coming soon. 7 months, and not even a screen saver, thanks so much Redmond.
Where are they? I have this stupid update button that checks for them every time I click it and the best I get are Security Updates (which are necessary due to the poor programming which went into Vista to begin with). Where are the extras. They garbled the packages so Ultimate was the only reasonable home edition and added the enticement of extras. Where the heck are they. Nice to see Billy boy getting rich off of vaporware again.
Here is a conspiracy theory, Maybe microsoft was in bed with all of the hardware manufacturers?
Yeah we paid that extra money for the Vista Ultimate operating system but what about the added cost for the needed hardware to run Ultimate?
Couldn’t agree with this more, the lack of so called Ultimate Extras is appalling!