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"The video does a good job of showing just how different the new system will be. Optimized for touch-screens, but still purported to be friendly to mouse and keyboard users, Windows 8 appears to abandon many of the legacy interface ideas that have been around for years."

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Starting May 22, students who buy a new PC for $699 or more will receive a free Xbox 360 4GB console, the software giant said in a blog post today. The offer is available to online shoppers who buy a PC from Dell.com, HP.com, or Microsoft's online store. Those who want to head to a retail outlet can find the deal at Best Buy or Microsoft's stores.

In order for students to get the free Xbox 360, they will need to have .edu e-mail address at the time of purchase. If they don't have a .edu e-mail address, they can go to a retail store and present their student IDs.

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Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, showed a fake copy of its Office 2007 software found for sale on the streets of Mexico and “brazenly” stamped with the rectangular “FMM” logo of the Familia drug cartel to demonstrate the link between counterfeiting and organized crime.

“This is the real side, the scary side of counterfeiting and it plagues the world,” David Finn, Microsoft’s associate general counsel for antipiracy, said today at the Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy in Paris.]

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Bloomberg, which broke the news this afternoon, reported that sources familiar with Microsoft's plans said this version of Windows will continue to work on x86 processors, but that it should improve battery performance on devices like tablets and other devices that use ARM processors.

Additional confirmation of Microsoft's plans came from The Wall Street Journal, which added that this new version will not be available for another two years. CNET heard similar reports from a source who added that Microsoft plans to detail this version of Windows at an invite-only press event several hours ahead of its CES keynote.

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Today’s an exciting day! We are announcing that more than 240 million licenses of Windows 7 have been sold. Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history. As of September, Windows 7 was running on 93% of new consumer PCs and has over 17% global OS market share (according to Net Applications as of October 1st). There is an amazing array of great PCs out on the market today. Six months after launch, 100% (over 18,000) of our OEM partners were selling Windows 7 PCs versus 70% for Windows Vista PCs at a comparable time period. And there is an incredible ecosystem of products – software and hardware – that work great with Windows 7 too. You can check out and discover many of those products at Windows Product Scout which was announced yesterday.

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The KDE port for Windows is still a work in progress and some aspects are still highly experimental, but it shows an enormous amount of potential and it has improved significantly over the past year. The port impressively demonstrates the growing platform-neutrality of the KDE desktop environment. As we have seen in the past, bringing open source software to alternate platforms can attract new contributors, accelerate development, and spread the use of open source development frameworks.

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Intel is offering a "dashboard" for Windows that allows the user to choose and control which applications or files are loaded into the Intel Turbo Memory cache (based on flash memory chips) for performance acceleration. Intel calls this "User pinning." Custom pinning profiles can be created to pin applications or files that match the user's activity, according to Intel. Data intensive programs, gaming, digital media editing and productivity software are examples of applications that will see the most benefit, according to Intel. Intel is trying to address a longstanding shortcoming of Windows: its inability to take full advantage of flash storage devices. "There are issues related to taking full advantage of the speed of a (flash drive)," said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, in an interview at the Flash Memory Summit.

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In the letter sent to "Windows Customers" and titled "An Update on the Windows Roadmap," Veghte said "our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista." Veghte wrote, "You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule" and he said that was the impetus for setting the 2010 the ship date. Vista has been slowly gaining steam, but is still drawing fire from critics who say it has not lived up to promises.

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Overview of Windows XP Service Pack 3.pdf 428 KB
Overview of Windows XP Service Pack 3.xps 634 KB

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Even some consumers and small businesses have been opting for the downgrade path. Dell and other PC makers brought back XP on consumer and small-business machines early in the year, while more recently, some PC makers have made it easier for those buying Vista machines to return to XP. Ballmer said that while there may be a few PCs still on the market that have XP, it's Vista that consumers are buying. "Yes, there's one or two models you can find someplace in the world of PCs that don't run Windows Vista," Ballmer said. "But the machines that sell all run Windows Vista." Still, Microsoft recently bowed to concerns from large PC makers and said they wouldn't have to stop selling XP machines in January, giving them instead until the end of June to sell the operating system.

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We here offer an alternative to this update dilemma, starting immediately: version 3 of our script collection Offline Update requires only a few steps to reel in a current service pack at any time, combining all released Windows updates at the time of download. The download script acquires the complete update library for selected operating systems from Microsoft's servers and uses them to created ISO images for CDs or DVDs as desired. These in turn can be used to update as many PCs as you wish.

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Five years, three months and five days after Windows XP made its debut, Microsoft will usher its next-generation OS onto the stage.
APC has been advised by a very well placed source that January 30, 2007 is about to be announced as the official release date for Vista. In addition, in a move that mirrors previous side-by-side launches of Microsoft's OS and Office suite (in the 95 and XP waves), Office 2007 will also touch down on that day. However, as previously planned, Vista and Office 2007 will first step out for a 'business launch' on November 30 (alongside Exchange 2007). From that date, the programs will be available to corporate customers who hold an enterprise licence or software assurance deal with Microsoft.

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Underlining the significance of Windows CE to Microsoft's overall business plans, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie (pictured above) delivered the keynote address at the CE 6.0 launch event, which was streamed over the web from Microsoft's website and attended by some 60 media representatives. Microsoft characterizes Windows CE -- released at version 1.0 ten years ago this month -- as an embedded, real-time operating system aimed at a wide variety of application-specific systems and devices, including consumer electronics, industrial automation, and medical and scientific equipment.

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The code, which was posted on the Internet early Sunday morning, could be used to disable the Windows Firewall on a fully patched Windows XP PC that was running Windows' Internet Connection Service (ICS). This service allows Windows users to essentially turn their PC into a router and share their Internet connection with other computers on the local area network (LAN.) It is typically used by home and small-business users. The attacker could send a malicious data packet to another PC using ICS that would cause the service to terminate. Because this service is connected to the Windows firewall, this packet would also cause the firewall to stop working, said Tyler Reguly, a research engineer at nCircle Network Security Inc., who has blogged about the issue.

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There's going to be a kybosh on naughty developers mucking about with the 64-bit kernel; patching will be banned. McAfee and others seem to have already learned of the new deal at Microsoft. Speaking at the RSA Europe conference in Nice, Microsoft security technology unit corporate VP Ben Fathi said the 64-bit kernel will be a "black box". He compared developers insisting on the ability to patch the code to a Sony Walkman user invalidating their warranty by opening up the device. He said: "It's just not the way the box was designed...we're putting a stop to that." Fathi conceeded for 32-bit systems the firm will never have the amount of control over security. He said: "That train has left the station."

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The technology applies only to 64-bit versions of Windows and debuted last year in Windows XP x64 Edition. However, while that Windows version was never broadly adopted, PatchGuard is set to become used more widely, when Vista hits store shelves in January and people are expected to buy PCs with 64-bit processors and 64-bit versions of the operating system. "Kernel patch protection is not a silver bullet. We're not saying no one will ever crack it," Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's Security Technology Unit, wrote on his blog last week. "The point is that the situation as it exists now� attackers don't need to do any work to access the kernel at the highest level. At least with kernel patch protection, we're trying to prevent that."

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The move to drop support for SP1 is in line with Microsoft's stated strategy for support. According to its guidelines, Microsoft guarantees to provide "mainstream support" for a full product for five years, but will only guarantee to support a service pack for 12 months after the launch of the next version of that pack. SP1 shipped in September 2002. SP2 was released in September 2004. There's little reason for anyone to still be running SP1; SP2 contained a range of improvements to XP's security. People can check which version they are running by right-clicking on the My Computer desktop icon and then selecting properties.

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Microsoft worked with the Department of Homeland Security on the alert, a company representative said. "Microsoft...encourages customers to deploy this update on their systems as soon as possible, given that we are aware of targeted exploitation of the vulnerability," the representative said. Microsoft deems the vulnerability critical for all versions of Windows. However, users of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 should be protected by the Windows Firewall if they do not use file sharing and printer sharing, Christopher Budd, a security program manager at Microsoft, said in an interview Tuesday.