Windows Archive

Microsoft has announced the public availability of Windows XP SP2 RC2. A network install for both English and German can be found here.

Microsoft Corp. on Monday released the Release Candidate for its Virtual Server 2005 software and announced that the product would ship by the end of the year in two versions: an Enterprise Edition and a Standard Edition. While the features remain the same across the two product versions, the Standard Edition will support up to four CPUs while the Enterprise Edition will support up to 32 physical CPUs.

Microsoft says its set of upgrades for Windows Server 2003, due to be included in Service Pack 1, will make its products more secure by default and give enterprises more options for locking down servers.

In a move that could ultimatety deal a heavy blow to Microsoft's intellectual property rights, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will re-examine patent the company holds on the FAT (file allocation table) file system, a format used for the interchange of media between computers and digital devices.

My normal policy is not to review beta releases of any software. But because Windows XP SP2 is so important I decided to break away from the norm. Readers should be aware that a release candidate is not a final release and this in should no way be construed as a review of the final product.

Microsoft put up a site asking for feedback about Win2k3. All feedback submitted will be sent to the Windows Server Development Team for review and analysis. Your ideas can impact Windows Server in many ways, and might even be incorporated into new Service Packs, Feature Packs etc.

In what could be a sign of things to come, Microsoft Corp. is offering a small sweetener to its Software Assurance licensing program. From this week the company will allow servers used for disaster recovery to carry copies of its Windows server software at no extra cost. Update: Elsewhere, IBM this week relaxed stringent requirements for running the highest-end version of its Windows server software, effectively lowering the overall price 30 percent in some cases and potentially expanding the pool of interested customers.

The first Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2003 is out, and Brighthand's Ed Hardy brings us his impressions of the new version of Microsoft's handheld operating system.

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005—the first major upgrade to the Tablet PC operating system—provides enough enhancements to entice some new converts. The update also will tide over current fans and developers until the release of a "Longhorn" version for Tablet PCs—or whatever Microsoft has planned for the Tablet operating system on the company's long and often-winding product road map.

Microsoft Corp. gave a sneak preview yesterday of new functionality in Windows Server 2003 R2, an update to Windows Server that the vendor plans to ship next year. During a keynote presentation by Corporate Vice President Andy Lees at the Tech Ed conference in San Diego, Microsoft demonstrated an early version of R2, which hasn't yet reached the beta stage. More at Computerworld.

Microsoft has launched an effort to produce a version of Windows for high-performance computing, a move seen as a direct attack on a Linux stronghold.

Given yesterday's exposure of the Microsoft PPT slides from WinHEC, Joe Beda takes the time to reply to some questions people had in the forums: he discusses about the importance of eye candy, Windows and 64bit, the Longhorn machine requirements and more.

This is the Platform SDK for Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 1. Developers can use this to build and test pre-release applications for Windows XP Service pack 2.

Joe Beda writes that slides from the WinHEC sessions are posted up: Greg Schecter: Avalon Graphics Stack Overview , Joe Beda: Avalon Graphics - 2D, 3D, Imaging and Composition , Kerry Hammil: Graphics on the Windows Desktop , David Brown: Avalon Text . The slides were targeting hardware people. This was really about letting IHVs know what they can do to prepare for what is coming in Longhorn and Avalon.