Windows Archive

With the announcement of Longhorn's official name, Microsoft has left many users asking: why Windows Vista? Company representatives told BetaNews that Microsoft felt the new version of Windows "deserved a name that was more representative of what it specifically brings to customers."

Some third-party applications are encountering problems introduced by the cumulative Windows 2000 Update Rollup that Microsoft introduced in late June.

Running a background process on the Windows platform requires running a Windows Service. To run a Windows Service, you must have an application that is Windows Service aware. A Bash script is not Windows Service aware and neither are many console applications. XYNTService allows an administrator to define a console program and its options to execute. The XYNTService application is a Windows Service that reads a configuration file to know which applications to run. Read more...

Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn. They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches.

Time to throw out the old Pentium I/MMX computers? Not yet... read this guide on how to install Windows 2000 on a very old computer with only 32MB RAM and tweak it to run very fast.

Sunday night saw the release of several screenshots of Longhorn Build 5203. Many questions arose, in particular on Microsoft's Longhorn newsgroups. Mike Brannigan from Microsoft has taken the liberty to have tried to answer everyone's questions, questions often repeatedly asked.

Longhorn will have some new features that will be particularly interesting for hardware hackers: The Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSat) is basically a built-in benchmarking tool that should help with determining what affect a new component is having on the system, and another, unnamed feature looks for hardware changes on boot, and, if it finds any, will restart the hardware configuration process.

Mike Nash, Microsoft's security business and technology unit corporate vice president, has said Longhorn would accord end-users certain rights and privileges apparently ending the concept that everyone using their PC is also the PC's administrator. Update: More on new Longhorn features here.

"Longhorn Beta 1 is still a few weeks away from release. And Office 12 Beta 1 isn't slated to debut until this fall. But that isn't stopping Microsoft from peeling back the covers on some of the new features slated for the pair of products due to ship in the latter half of 2006."

Today the Web Standards Project announced (Editor Note: Actual announcement date 5th July 2005) it has formed a task force with Microsoft Corp. to provide support as the company increases Web standards support in its products including Microsoft Visual Studio and ASP.NET. The group will work together to better understand and execute on Web standards as defined by standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Coming patch tuesday, Microsoft will issue fixes for two Windows critical bugs, and one for Microsft Office, among others. In addition, here is a short interview with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO. You can watch the video (140MB, Windows Media), or read the transcript.

Microsoft's forthcoming Longhorn operating system places great emphasis on locking down PCs to prevent unauthorised access to hardware and software, the software giant revealed today.

On Tuesday, Microsoft posted a patch to its web site designed to prevent the problem, known as a memory leak. This error has plagued Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system for a long time. In addition, the software giant has promised not to charge for security fixes, but will charge for virus protection.

Microsoft is planning to make RFID applications and tag-readers compatible with Windows. According to Scott Woodgate, group product manager of business processes for Microsoft, the company is trying to integrate RFID programs with the operating system and make the majority of devices work with plug-and-play functionality.