Windows

Stay safe while using Microsoft Office 2003

You trust Microsoft Office with your most important documents, spreadsheets, e-mail, and presentations. Unfortunately, many of the default security settings in Office applications may not provide a sufficient level of protection for your data, your system, and your reputation. Follow these steps to fine-tune the security settings in Office 2003; tomorrow I'll cover the new security options in Office 2007's Trust Center and elsewhere.

Office 2003 lets you encrypt files so that you need a password to read or edit them. In Word 2003, open the document and click Tools > Protect Document. To restrict the styles that … Read more

Microsoft glitch offers up Vista SP1 early

Updated: 2:40 p.m. with some clarifications from Microsoft.

Brett Zehr was surprised on Thursday when he saw that his Windows Vista PC had a new update ready: Service Pack 1.

The software wasn't supposed to be available until mid-March, however a glitch on Thursday meant that Zehr and some other general users were able to download the Vista update.

The update was not pushed out via Windows' Automatic Update feature, but was listed for owners running the 64-bit version of Vista who chose to "check for new updates" via Windows Update.

"A build of … Read more

Debugging Windows crashes with minidumps? Not at Lenovo

Like many of you, my copies of Windows XP crash with the now-classic "blue screen of death" (BSOD). When this happened a couple times recently to a new ThinkCentre A61 tower, I called Lenovo tech support. As the title of this posting suggests, it did not go well.

When Windows XP crashes, the default behavior is to create a minidump, a small file (only 88K) with a summary of, hopefully, the most important information about the failure. I wrote about minidumps back in November (see Dealing with software crashes, Part 2). If your copy of Windows has crashed (… Read more

Microsoft pledges not to sue over open source

Microsoft's top executives are set to announce a broad interoperability strategy that includes an agreement not to sue open-source developers for products that connect to Microsoft software, a source familiar with the company's plans told CNET News.com.

The software maker had already taken baby steps in this direction, signing individual pacts with companies like Novell and Turbolinux, as well as agreeing not to sue individual developers.

The company has scheduled a conference call at 8:30 a.m. PST on Thursday to discuss the news. Among the executives on the call are CEO Steve Ballmer, Chief Software … Read more

PC Gaming Alliance tries to save PC gaming where Microsoft failed

Gamespot reported from the 2008 Game Developer's Conference that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, and a collection of other PC hardware and software vendors have joined forces in a newly formed nonprofit organization dubbed the PC Gaming Alliance. Its goal, according to the press release, is "advancing the PC as a worldwide gaming platform." If this sounds familiar, Microsoft used similar language in its Games for Windows marketing campaign that saw a major relaunch last year. Let's hope the PCGA takes its mission more seriously.

If you're wondering why there's so much emphasis on promoting … Read more

Keyboard, mouse to get company in Windows 7

PALO ALTO, Calif.--I still don't know much about what Windows 7 will do or what it will look like, but I can tell you that you won't have to rely on a keyboard and mouse to use it.

After decades of investing in things like speech technology and handwriting recognition, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that users appear ready for new ways of interacting with machines. And, he said, advances in those areas and in touch-based gestures will find their way into the next version of Windows, known as Windows 7.

"The version after Vista is … Read more

Gates on Yahoo: It's the people

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Bill Gates is willing to pay a lot for engineering talent.

Asked what makes Yahoo worth more than $40 billion, Gates pointed not to the company's products, its huge base of advertisers, or its market share, but rather to Yahoo's engineers. Those people, he said, are what Microsoft needs to go after Google.

In an interview after his speech at Stanford University, Gates said that it turns out it takes a lot of manpower to build tools for advertisers, mobile, and video products as well as improving its core search algorithm and building an infrastructure … Read more

Microsoft expands XP update testing

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it is making public its latest test version of Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The software maker said Release Candidate 2 of XP SP3 will be available after 5 p.m. PST via Microsoft's download center. "We're broadening the availability of the release candidate in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3," it said in a statement.

The same test version was released to a smaller group of testers on February 8. Microsoft said at the time that it was still on track to … Read more

Move your e-mail out of Outlook and into the folders of your choice

There's something about Microsoft Outlook that reminds me of the old Soviet Union: the program wants to centralize everything and store it in one big PST file that only it can access. There may be advantages to this approach to managing your e-mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar, but you know what can happen when you put all your eggs in one basket.

That's why it makes sense to move copies of your important Outlook files to folders that live outside the Office system. Saving messages and other data to local storage is relatively easy, whether you move them … Read more

New computer, old software

New computers come with old software, a situation that, considering the recent slew of critical bug fixes, can be quite dangerous.

To illustrate just how old some of the software is, consider a new Windows XP machine that I got yesterday. The computer, a ThinkCentre A61 tower, was ordered from Lenovo on January 6, 2008. It was delivered to someone on January 16th, exactly who I'll never know. As I wrote about last month, UPS lost my computer. But that's another story.

I've got my new computer routine down pat at this point. First, I run a … Read more