Now that Windows 7 is more or less finalised on the feature side of things, with the release candidate around the corner, I thought it would be interesting to look back upon what we thought Windows 7 would be - and what we actually hoped Windows 7 would be. So, I dove into our article and comment archive to see how many of our hopes, dreams, and predictions came true.

Whenever the Conficker worm comes up here on OSNews (or any other site for that matter) there are always a number of people who point their fingers towards Redmond, stating that it's their fault Conifcker got out. While Microsoft has had some pretty lax responses to security threats in the past, it handled the whole Conficker thing perfectly, releasing a patch even before Conficker existed, and pushing it through Windows Update. In any case, this made me wonder about Linux distributions and security. What if a big security hole pops up in a Linux distribution - who will the Redmond-finger-pointing people hold responsible?

"Microsoft retired mainstream support for Windows XP and Office 2003 today - but that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone should be in a hurry to upgrade to Vista yet. The firm will continue to offer extended support packages on both products through to 8 April 2014, allowing businesses and individuals plenty of time to consider their options before plumping for a new operating system. From today Redmond will charge XP and Office 2003 customers who need assistance on a per-incident, per hour, or alternative basis. The changes apply to all editions of the Office suite as well as all versions of XP with the exception of Embedded. Non-security critical fixes will be available to those punters who signed up to Microsoft’s Extended Hotfix Support program 90 days before mainstream support was killed off. Security updates will be pumped out free of charge for Office 2003 and XP until 4 August 2014."

The Conficker worm, which spreads by infecting Windows computers who are not properly kept up-to-date, was supposed to make a big splash on April 1, but that day passed with a deafening silence on the Conficker front. Since then, there has been some movement by the worm, and data gathered from enterprise users of Sophos' Endpoint Assessment Test indicates that 10% of Windows machines have still not been properly patched, leaving them wide open to a Conficker infection.

Microsoft will soon start encouraging users running old versions of Internet Explorer to upgrade to the latest edition of its browser. People running IE 6 and 7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 will in the third week of April receive a notification through the Automate Update service that encourages them to upgrade their system to IE 8, Microsoft has said. This is not a hard sell, though. IE 8, released last month, won't start automatically installing itself on your machine - you'll have to opt in, by clicking the install button itself on the update message's accompanying screen.

LinuxFund and the Open Graphics Project are teaming up to raise funds and supply 10 Open Graphics Development boards to open source developers. After several years in development the Open Graphics project is offering pre-orders of development boards. The Open Graphics Project aims to design an open source hardware/open architecture and standard for graphics cards, primarily targeting free software/open source operating systems. LinuxFund is accepting donations on their website to help fund the project. Additionally you can pre-order an OGD1 board for yourself through Traversal Technology.