Windows Archive

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.

Continuing the recently started trend at Microsoft to be a bit more aggressive towards the competition, Brandon LeBlanc wrote on the Windows Experience Weblog about why Windows is such a huge success on netbooks compared to Linux. Also, what is up with that story on AppleInsider about Microsoft offering Windows-7-to-XP downgrade rights? Is that really so special?

Thanks to Windows Server boss Bill Laing, we now know that Windows Server 2008 R2 will be released this calendar year. Since Windows Server 2008 R2 is the server version of Windows 7, we can deduce from this announcement that the successor to Windows Vista will certainly arrive before the end of the year. And what's up with the "quite major announcements" about Windows 7 Microsoft is talking about?

Remember, back in the day, before USB drives became common place, you had to use those weird square disks? We called them floppies, and they had about as much storage capacity as my current computer has in its power switch alone. One of the problems with floppy drives was that it was impossible to determine whether there was a floppy in the drive without actually spinning up the drive. Windows 95 almost had a feature that could detect whether or not there was a floppy in the drive without spinning it up.

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, Microsoft has finally started to run an ad that's a direct attack against Apple. Previous marketing campaigns by Microsoft have always more or less ignored Apple, but the company's latest commercial is a direct attack on Apple in a place where it should hurt Apple the most: price.

The Windows 7 beta release is already a few months old now, and Microsoft has already made quite a number of changes to its new windows release after that, as detailed in the Engineering 7 weblog. These changes would make it to the public via the release candidate, but it has always been a bit unclear as to when it would arrive. Thanks to a slip-up, we now know the RC is coming in May.

"Over the weekend, I put Windows 7 build 7000 on my desktop and Windows 7 build 7057 on my laptop, and went through trying to spot as many changes between the two as I could. Although I go deeper than I did with build 7048, this is still not a comprehensive list. There is almost three months difference between the two builds: the beta was compiled on December 12, 2008, at 2:00pm and the leaked build 7057 was compiled on March 5, 2009, at 8:00pm, so there's a lot of work to cover. This post is about tracking every noticeable visual change; although I do mention some fixes here and there, I'm mainly focusing on tweaks that are "tangible" as opposed to the thousands of bugs that have been fixed."

For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, holding a series of press interviews to explain how the company's Vista mistakes changed the development process of Windows 7, InfoWorld reports. Chief among these changes was to 'define a feature set early on' and only share that feature set with partners and customers when the company is confident they will be incorporated into the final OS. And to solve PC-compatibility issues, Microsoft has said all versions of Windows 7 will run even on low-cost netbooks. Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November.

Will there be a specific windows 7 SKU tailor-made for netbooks, or not? Until recently, that seemed very likely, but as time went on, the answer to that question got muddy again. During the past few weeks, Microsoft has been very adamant to reiterate that all Windows 7 SKUs can run on netbooks, and that it will enable customers to upgrade to higher SKUs easily. Recent comment by Steve Ballmer, however, indicate that Microsoft is still thinking about a specific netbook edition.

"Shadow Copies is the informal term for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), also known as 'Previous Versions'. All three names point to the same feature: the automatic saving of copies of files. The purpose of the service is to allow you to restore these backups of files that you have lost for any reason - file corruption, for example. VSS works in conjunction with both System Restore and Windows Backup. If it's properly set up, simply right-click a file name from within Windows Explorer and choose Restore Previous Versions to access this feature. Vista - or Windows 7, for those already using the beta of Microsoft's new OS - will open the Properties dialog for the selected file or folder, and from there you'll select the previous version you want to restore. Some users won't have to set up VSS, but in case your system isn't already configured to save versions of files, here's how to get started."

Microsoft has released the release candidate for Vista's second service pack to the public. "Microsoft has released the Release Candidate build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to the public. The build number is 6002.16670.090130 and it contains 691 hotfixes."

The Engineering 7 blog has a post on how Microsoft hopes to ensure application compatibility between Windows Vista and Windows 7. "Delivering a new release of Windows includes a major effort to insure that applications continue to function as well on the new release as they have on the previous release. At the PDC we talked about some of the new areas of Windows Vista that reduced this level of compatibility, such as changes we made around the OS security model. With Windows 7 we renewed our engineering efforts to maintain compatibility. As with device testing, compatibility testing is an effort that spans the entire engineering organization, though we also have a group that is dedicated to this effort."

Based on all the user feedback ignited by the Windows 7 beta, Microsoft has made a set of tweaks to the release candidate of Windows 7. The Engineering 7 weblog details 36 of those tweaks, in quite some detail actually. Let's take a look at some interesting ones.

Microsoft plans to release "something akin to" a netbook version of Windows, but for servers, not PCs, over the next month or two, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on a call with members of the financial community on Tuesday. He said that although there is not high demand at the moment for netbook-like server hardware, declining prices in the server market make a low-cost OS an attractive option for customers. "We don't exactly have a netbook phenomenon, but if somebody can buy a $500 server, they're a little loathe to spend $500 for the server operating system that goes with it," Ballmer said. He described the software as a "low-cost, low-price, low-functionality Windows Server SKU" called "Foundation Edition," but did not offer more details.