Windows Archive

At the launch of AMD's Athlon 64 processor, the 2GHz 3200+ Athlon XP and the 2.2GHz Athlon 64 FX51, Microsoft is announcing a beta version of its Windows OS for 64 bit processors, called "Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems." It's expected to be available to MSDN subscribers in the first half of 2004.

Microsoft has told firms to wait until next month for clarification of its roadmap for Windows, after the latest delays to the next release left firms unable to plan for the future.

Within three years, most bank machines that dispense cash will run on the Windows operating system, according to a study published last week.

With the push of a new campaign, Tools to Compete, Microsoft has effectively admitted that they see Linux as a legitimate threat. Even with the massive reduction in the cost of Windows in big deals, Microsoft has still lost customers. It almost causes one to ask - a passing trend, or the beginning of the end?

After some time in development, XPlite has finally been released. XPlite (successor of 98lite) lets you remove Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and several other components from Windows XP/2000.

Web sites continue to be switched from Linux to Windows Server 2003 at about the same rate as in July, according to statistics compiled by Netcraft. The company said the number of active sites running on Windows Server 2003 had grown to about 185,000, an increase of 109 percent since July.

Microsoft launched on Wednesday the Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system, accompanied by support from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Veritas Software.

The fifth revision of Windows Update is set to enter beta testing, as Microsoft continues efforts to improve its facility for keeping customers' systems up to date. Windows Update V5 is slated to be a significant upgrade, eventually extending the service's reach beyond Windows to all Microsoft products. The company will initially support updates to Office 2003, as well as SQL and Exchange.

Microsoft is expected to announce with vendor partners the pending rollout of a number of NAS appliances based on its Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system. Microsoft initially unveiled details of this OS and released it to NAS OEMs last June. The OS allows the creation of point-in-time copies of a single volume or multiple volumes using Volume Shadow Copy Services.

"While it's common knowledge that Microsoft has been working on Windows XP and Server 2003 for the AMD64 architecture for some-time, little is known about the workings and limitations of this new operating system. We recently got the chance to try out the first publicly released variant of the operating system (Build 3790), and combined with reading through loads of tech docs and talking with folks over at AMD, we've comprised a summary of how we think the OS is shaping up, where it's headed, and we'll try to answer some of the common questions about the OS in general." Read the preview article at the GamePC web site.

Microsoft has just released a downloadable version of the "evaluation edition" of Windows XP Embedded with Service Pack 1. Previously, the evaluation edition was available in CD/DVD format only, and had to be ordered from Microsoft for a nominal charge. The first downloadable evaluation version of Windows CE was made available earlier this year.

It's semi-official: the next major update to Windows, which has already had its release slip from 2004 to 2005, will likely be even later. Microsoft executives are now reluctant to even discuss a release date. "We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work," said Bill Gates at a recent financial analyst meeting.

After months of speculation, Microsoft plans to give developers their first hard look at the next version of Windows in October.The Redmond, Wash., company expects to release a "developers preview" of the new operating system, code-named Longhorn, at its professional developers conference in Los Angeles. Although it won't be a full beta, or test, version, Microsoft executives have promised it will be more than just "slideware," software that companies haven't been using and don't know when it will be coming.

Robert Scoble, technology evangelist for Longhorn at Microsoft, has called into question several purported screenshots of the next-generation Longhorn interface code-named "Aero." "These look like early demonstration screens, and not how Longhorn will eventually look," Scoble wrote in his Web log. "The real "Aero" is one of Longhorn's biggest secrets -- I've seen it, but can't load it on my own machine and am locked out of the server where it's kept," says Microsoft's Scoble. "I am not even sure they'll show it off at the PDC." Indeed, the screenshots are using icons from all over the place (including a BeOS icon), which proves that these are just early concepts/mockups and not the real/finished thing.