Jean-Pierre Paradis's Blog: October 2006

Archive for October 2006

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.

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

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

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

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) :

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Interesting article by Dan Carnevale from THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

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.

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

Read the article

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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What’s new in Virtual PC 2007 Beta

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