microsoft

It hasn't been more than two weeks since Vista shipped, but already Microsoft is talking about its successor. Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division, revealed that the next OS might ... ship in 2009. "You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with," Fathi said at a conference in San Francisco. "That's a good timeframe for refresh." (Source: hardocp.com ) Although Vista was shipped about two and a half years after Service Pack 2 for Windows XP was ... (view more)

The millions of office and home office users that take advantage of Microsoft's Excel should be very careful. Last week, the company warned the public of a "zero-day" attack that acts upon certain weaknesses in the program. As expected, it's based ... on an email attachment threat, although it appears to look legitimate enough to pose a serious threat. While Microsoft's security advisory attempts to calm users by stating that the attack is "very limited", it's still got many businesses worried. According to reports, hackers are sending email packing malicious Excel attachments that are able to ... (view more)

While many stores braced themselves for the anticipated long lines that were to inevitably accompany the release of Windows Vista, retailers were shocked and somewhat disappointed to find that only a select few arrived early to purchase the latest ... Microsoft products. In fact, the lineups weren't even comparable to the swarms of consumers that rushed to retail stores looking to purchase the newly released PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii video game consoles. (Source: usatoday.com ) It is estimated that the average number of consumers that actually arrived early for Vista was roughly a dozen ... (view more)

When Newsweek's Steven Levy sat down with Bill Gates to discuss the Vista debut, it wasn't long before Apple's television ads were brought up. The ads depict a cool, young "Mac" guy and a not-so-cool "PC" middle-ager, played by author John Hodgman. ... A recent ad showed Hodgman having to undergo surgery to update to Vista. Gates' reaction? Well, he wasn't too impressed. (Source: dailytech.com ) "I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are," Gates says. (Source: msnbc.com ... (view more)

In July of 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in an attempt to establish a comprehensive long-range energy policy. President Bush later signed it into law in August of 2005. The new law changes both the start and end dates of ... daylight savings time (DST). DST now starts 3 weeks earlier and ends 1 week later. The time will now change at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and will end at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday in November. The change in DST applies to the U.S. (with the exception of Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa) and Canada ... (view more)

You've heard of pay-as-you-go cell phone plans and pay-per-view movies. It's proven a lucrative market for telecommunications companies and cable television services. And now Microsoft is introducing something very similar with its distribution of ... Office 2003. That's right -- it's the old version -- not the new Word and Excel tools included in the fresh new versions of Vista now sitting on retailer shelves. According to sources (and Microsoft themselves), there is a demand for this kind of program. It may work best in corporate environments where the necessary software is only needed once or ... (view more)

It's a fact: a clean install of Windows is *always* preferable to upgrading a new version over top of a previous Windows installation. Why is this so? The answer is three words: The Windows Registry. For example: when you install and uninstall ... programs to a Windows PC, things get added to the Registry -- the 'heart' of the Windows Operating System. The Registry is a complex database that keeps track of installed programs, program preferences, user data, operating system settings, and the like. However, over time, some programs may not install or uninstall properly, and the Registry becomes ... (view more)

One day after the release of Microsoft's 6 billion dollar operating system, and there are already reports from UK's PC Advisor that the Windows Vista DRM is being cracked by a Canadian kernel developer. On the eve of the Windows Vista launch, ... numerous retailers opened their doors at midnight. However, very few consumers actually showed up for the event. The excitement and hoopla surrounding the launch seems to have disappeared. The Dallas Morning News and numerous other sources are reporting the luke warm response to the official Vista launch. Upgrading To Vista Unless you're running Windows ... (view more)

A lot of the hoopla surrounding the new Windows Vista operating system (OS) is based on it's new multimedia capabilities. However, users purchasing Vista to use the much-hyped and enhanced multimedia capabilities to watch high definition or blu-ray ... DVDs -- or to listen to audio CDs -- may be in for a very upsetting surprise. In a disturbing, albeit, eye-opening white paper detailing a cost analysis of Windows Vista Contect Protection, Peter Gutmann (a Department of Computer Science security engineering researcher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand) details the consequences of ... (view more)

A recent email memo leaked to APC Magazine revealed that Microsoft is already hard at work on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Microsoft sent out emails to customers and partners to test and provide feedback on (SP1) to help prepare for it's ... release in the second half of 2007. In comparison, it took 11 months after the release of Windows XP for Microsoft to rollout the first service pack. Specific details of the changes (codenamed "Fiji") have not been released by Microsoft yet. Microsoft claims that regressions from Windows Vista and Windows XP (specifically: security, deployment blockers ... (view more)