Windows

While many were left scratching their heads over Microsoft's decision not to ease its Vista virtualization rules, one reader sent in an interesting theory.

For those who missed the story earlier this week, Microsoft was on the eve of allowing home versions of Vista to run inside virtual machines, but abruptly shifted course and said it would stick to rules that only allow the Ultimate and Business versions to run inside virtual machines. That left lots of folks disappointed and confused as to why Microsoft was doing such a thing.

San Diego developer Floyd James posits that one reason … Read more

In unsurprising news, Microsoft has finally put a stop to the "Longhorn Reloaded" project, an effort to continue development of an early version of Windows "Longhorn," the precursor of Windows Vista.

The programmers wanted to keep working with an early version of Longhorn, which still had features, such as WinFS, that were later cut. Of course, despite some moves to get along with the open source world, Microsoft hasn't exactly decided to make its crown jewel (even test versions of it) free for the world to modify.

Nonetheless, the group behind Longhorn Reloaded expressed dismay … Read more

It's been an incredibly busy evening in Microsoft-land, with news Tuesday of the company's agreement to change desktop search in Vista and its flip-flop on virtualization licensing changes.

But it's worth pointing out that, as part of its court filing on the desktop search changes, Microsoft says it will have a beta version of Vista Service Pack 1 before the end of the year. It's especially noteworthy given how little Microsoft has said on the matter until now.

There's no word in the filing on when the final version of SP1 will arrive, so I'… Read more

Microsoft plans to make changes to Windows Vista to try to assuage concerns from Google that its desktop search product is disadvantaged by the operating system.

The software maker is expected to detail its planned changes to the desktop search mechanism later Tuesday in a federal court filing being jointly made with the Justice Department. A Microsoft representative declined to comment on the report ahead of its filing. A Justice Department representative was not immediately available for comment. The planned changes were reported earlier Tuesday by Reuters and Bloomberg.

Microsoft plans to use the first service pack for Vista to … Read more

Microsoft is discontinuing one of its products, and I'm bummed.

Having one less piece of software to write about is no big deal, but this particular program happens to be one I actually used--a lot. Microsoft's Digital Image Suite served as my introduction to photo editing and photo manipulation. I've since taken to using both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but just this week I installed Digital Image Suite on the Windows portion of my iMac so I could keep using it as well.

Microsoft noted the change with a terse statement on its Web site.

"Microsoft … Read more

You can check out our slide show, posted last week, for a rundown of the main features of Windows Home Server. We don't want to award anyone before the final product is out, but we'll say that we came out of the closed beta very impressed. We suspect it will take a while for the non-tech-savvy to really grasp the benefits of Home Server, but thankfully, this week Microsoft threw the doors open to the general public to download and check out its newest Home Server release candidate.

Go here for the download. You'll of course need … Read more

Microsoft's Home Server software is one step closer to reality.

The software maker on Tuesday released a near-final "release candidate" version of Windows Home Server, a custom version of its Windows Server 2003 operating system. A final version is expected to come out later this year. Microsoft is pitching the software as an option for multi-PC households to manage burgeoning collections of media files.

Chairman Bill Gates announced plans for the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, saying that HP would build a product based on the software. At last month's Windows Hardware Engineering … Read more

Microsoft has released its June 2007 security bulletin, which includes six updates: four are designated Critical by the software giant. Two of the patches affect Windows Vista, with one Critical patch specific to Internet Explorer. One of the Important patches affects Microsoft Office. To keep your Windows XP SP1 system secure, update to Windows XP SP2 today. All Microsoft security patches for Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via the individual bulletins detailed below.

MS07-030: ImportantEntitled "Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Visio Could Allow Remote Code Execution (927051)," this bulletin affects users of Microsoft Visio … Read more

Adobe Acrobat 8, which shipped two months before the January release of Windows Vista, can now run on Vista and Citrix 64-bit systems. Acrobat and Reader version 8.1 enhancements will download with Adobe update notifications and can be found at Adobe's Web site.

There's also new integration with Microsoft Office 2007, such as the capability to create a PDF file by right-clicking the mouse from within supported applications. Microsoft Outlook 2007 can now preview multipage PDF files within e-mail messages, just as it already displays Office documents. And Mac users will be able to view Flash movies … Read more