From istartedsomething.com blog :

Sometime after the launch of XP, somewhere in Redmond, someone on the Microsoft design team was in the progress of developing something for Media Center. It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. Now 3 years later, a young hobbit man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard of theme, and traveled far and wide to uncover its mysteries. One theme to find. One theme to upload. One theme to rule them all.

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I'm not sure yet about what's new in these release. But I was a big user of WDS vers 2.06 so the upgrade seems natural to me.

More infos at support.microsoft.com

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This is a community site for PC users who want to run without administrator privileges (also known as least-privileged user accounts or limited-user accounts ou LUA). Running as non-admin is a great way to improve your computer's security, and you don't need to buy any extra software to do it!

Source : nonadmin.editme.com

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Yesterday Microsoft released the final version of Windows Defender. Don't wait to long to upgrade the BETA 2 will expires on december 21.

Read the Release Notes and Download at Microsoft.com

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Microsoft Corp. today released to the public Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 for Windows XP, the latest version of the world’s most popular Web browser.

More info at www.microsoft.com/presspas

Download IE7 (in english only) :

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From Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows :

In a recent showcase, I highlighted five things I really like about Windows Vista. That's a cute list, and certainly, I could easily come up with another 5, or 10, or 20. And you know, maybe I'll do just that. But first, I'd like to discuss a number of problems I have with Windows Vista. This, to be honest, is a long list. That doesn't mean that Windows Vista is a waste of time, or a product to be reviled. As a friend once noted, "it's good enough to criticize." Well, maybe. It certainly deserves to be criticized.

You see, Windows Vista isn't perfect. It's not even close to perfect. It's better than Windows XP is, of course, but it damn well should be: It benefits from five more years of experience and work. Being better is the minimum requirement. Whether Vista is enough of an improvement over XP to warrant your hard earned money is a subject I'm saving for my eventual review of the final shipping version of the product, but I'll give you a bit of preview now and say the answer may surprise you. In the meantime, let's harp a bit on the things I don't like about Vista as it now stands in RC1 form.

Read the complete article at www.winsupersite.com

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This update enhances support for Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) options in Wireless Group Policy. This update helps prevent a Windows wireless client from advertising the wireless networks in its preferred networks list.

Read the complete description at support.microsoft.com
Download the update at www.microsoft.com/downloads

Note : This update is not distributed via Windows Update or WSUS.

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Today Microsoft announced the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance. A desktop management solution designed to complement Windows Vista Enterprise to provide even higher levels of manageability for desktops and software assets.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance includes:

  • Microsoft SoftGrid, an application virtualization and streaming solution that can deliver applications to users in seconds, without being locally installed, on any PC they login to. Virtualization also resolves many application compatibility conflicts because each application can run with the version of a supporting file that it needs.
  • Microsoft Asset Inventory Services, which analyzes all programs on employee PCs, reducing the labor and guesswork that often stymies attempts to inventory the applications on the PCs within an organization and turns that into intelligent reports and analysis.
  • Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management, which provides versioning, history, and rollback of Group Policy settings, along with delegation and role based administration.
  • Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset, designed to help IT departments quickly pinpoint the causes of PC troubles, recover lost data, and reduce future downtime with post-crash analysis.

Unfortunately looks like you have to buy the Software Assurance for your PC if you want to use this pack. Anyway it is supposed to be available in january 2007.

Read more at Microsoft.com/windowsvista

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Matthew David introduces the new .NET 3.0 Framework, comparing it to previous releases and pointing out the fancy new features we can look forward to using.

Read the article on Informit.com

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From the MSC team in Ireland :

  • Press ctrl-G and enter a line number to go to (VERY useful when debugging VBScript errors)
  • maintain a log file with timestamps :
    • open notepad
    • set the first line to be (without the quotes and in uppercase) ".LOG"
    • press enter and save/close the file
    • every time you open the file, notepad will automatically insert the system date/time at the end of the file and add a new line where you can begin typing

Read the complete article at blogs.technet.com

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Paul Thurrott as an excellent article to clarify all the things you read about licensing in vista.

I'm here to tell you that virtually everything you've read online about the changes to Windows Vista's end-user license agreement (EULA) is wrong.

Read it on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows.

[october 16th] Koroush Ghazi from www.TweakGuides.com reply to Paul

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IBM just released another good article form the Redpaper series : «Tuning Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM eServer xSeries Servers». Haven't read it yet, but looks really cool.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Understanding Linux Performance
Chapter 2. Monitoring tools
Chapter 3. Tuning the operating system
Chapter 4. Analyzing performance bottlenecks
Chapter 5. Tuning Apache
Chapter 6. Tuning database servers
Chapter 7. Tuning LDAP
Chapter 8. Tuning Lotus Domino

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Myth (Definition) - "A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology." There are numerous Myths floating around the Internet regarding Windows XP, especially relating to Optimizations and Security. Hopefully this site will debunk some of these.

Note : Also check the Optimize XP and Firefox Myths.

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QUALCOMM is announcing that its Eudora email program will become an open source product effective the first half of calendar year 2007. As an open source product, it will be free to all customers.

QUALCOMM is also announcing today the launch of the last commercial versions of Eudora, version 7.1 for Windows and version 6.2.4 for Mac. The commercial versions will be available until the open source version is available at the discount price of $19.95 and will include three incidents of technical support in a six-month period.

To know more read the FAQ on Eudora web site.

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There is a new add-in for Windows Desktop Search (WDS) that allow you to index your Internet Explorer History.

Download it at Microsoft.com

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By now you must be thinking about upgrading to IE7. If you want to know more or are searching for any info about what's new you should look at this index at msdn.microsoft.com

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The Virtual PC 2007 beta 1 is now available on Microsoft Connect.

What’s new in Virtual PC 2007 Beta

Hardware-assisted virtualization*

Virtual PC 2007 includes support for virtualization technology from Intel and AMD. By default, hardware-assisted virtualization is enabled if the feature is enabled on the physical computer. You can turn this assistance on or off for each virtual machine by modifying the virtual machine settings.

Support for Windows Vista as a host operating system

This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a host operating system. The following versions of Windows Vista are supported: Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate.

Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system

This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system. The following versions of Windows Vista are supported: Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate.

Support for 64-bit host operating system

This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 supports 64-bit host operating systems. However, there is no support for 64-bit guest operating systems.

* Installing Virtual PC 2007 Beta on a computer that has AMD hardware-assisted virtualization support and uses an x64 version of Windows as the host operating system may generate a bug check and shut down the operating system. This occurs because x64 versions of the Windows operating system protect a critical system register that Virtual PC 2007 modifies to enable hardware-assisted virtualization. You can resolve this issue by installing a hotfix prior to installing Virtual PC 2007. The hotfix is available and can be downloaded from this beta site by clicking on the ‘Downloads’ link on the left pane of this page.

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So here are 10 deployment differences between Windows® XP and Windows Vista™ that you'll be glad you discovered when it's time to make the move.

Source : TechNet Magazine / November 2006

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Microsoft employee Robert Flaming has been publishing some excellent information about how Vista's UAC and MSI interact.

Read the post in the Setup Sense and Sensibility blog

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The small Word & Excel online-apps from Google is released. Thanks to AJAX this is a neat application. Try it at docs.google.com

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As students ignore their campus accounts, colleges try new ways of communicating

Interesting article by Dan Carnevale from THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

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Mary Jo Foley wrote on ZDNet All about Microsoft Blog :

For those who’ve yet to hear about it, Volume Activation is a new digital-license activation technology aimed at businesses. It’s part of the larger “Software Protection Platform” that Microsoft is constructing to combat piracy.

In short, Microsoft is not going to allow enterprises to operate on an honor system, when it comes to proving how many copies of Windows they’ve paid to license. Just like it does with individual Windows users, Microsoft is going to start requiring companies to authenticate their new versions of Windows within 30 days of installing.

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There is an interesting artice in Technet Magazine's october issue about Microsoft Groove 2007.

Read the article

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The following is a summary of the changes in the Writer 1.0 (Beta) Update (build 141) :

  • Tagging support
  • Support for Blogger Beta
  • Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
  • Improved startup performance
  • Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
  • Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
  • Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
  • Custom date support for Community Server
  • Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
  • Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
  • Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
  • More robust image posting to Live Spaces
  • Improved style detection for blogs 
  • Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
  • Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
  • Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts

Read the complete article and download at Writer Zone Blog

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