Windows Archive

Microsoft is hard at work trying to battle the public and businesses' perception about Windows Vista. They already published a whitepaper named "Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista", detailing some of what they believe are misunderstandings. Now, they also published a document wit five reasons to deploy Windows Vista - and why you shouldn't wait for Windows 7.

I personally doubted that Windows 7 would make an actual appearance during the Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer joint interview up on stage at the D6 conference, but as it turns out, it has made an appearance. During an interview conducted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about Ballmer and Gates' past, present, and future, a short demo was given of Windows 7.

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have released a new version of a real-time process monitor for Windows (tentatively called 'Process Monitor') that combines the features of Regmon and Filemon. There is a whole set of new features too, of course.

"Right now, Windows Vista SP1 is supposed to be slowly winging its way out to 140 million Vista users, offering better general stability and improved copying performance (albeit perhaps not for dual boot users). After a protracted testing period, SP1 was made available for download in March, and was released for the Automatic Update service in mid-April, where it will in theory trickle down onto most Vista machines over the next few months. But just how many Vista users will actually ever receive it? Microsoft has admitted some users may never be offered the option to download SP1 via Windows Update.

Last week, we reported on a peculiar price difference in Australia between the Linux and Windows versions of the Asus Eee PC 900, the new model in the Eee line. The Windows model was 50 USD cheaper than the Linux model - the Linux model did have a bigger hard drive, but interestingly, the version with the smaller hard drive was not available as a Linux machine. This gave rise to speculation that Microsoft had been putting pressure on Asus to favour Windows XP over Linux. It appears Microsoft's assault in this segment of the market goes deeper than just Asus and the Eee alone.

Just about everyone using Windows XP runs the operating system as administrator - or root, if you come from a UNIX background. Such is the case because Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, figured it somehow made sense to give every user full access to the system, and to more or less completely ignore the intricate and advanced security systems in place in Windows NT and the NTFS file system. This kind of turned out to be a very bad idea, and allowed Microsoft and its 3rd party developers to become hopelessly sloppy; most Windows applications more or less assumed they were run by administrators. It also allowed malware full access to the system when executed. Cue User Account Control.