windows

Microsoft on Tuesday offered up a few more details on its once-secretive project to use virtualization to offer an "XP Mode" for Windows 7.

As noted on Friday, Microsoft is using its Virtual PC technology to allow Windows 7 users to run programs that work in Windows XP but not in Windows Vista. On Tuesday, it noted some more of the fine print regarding the product.

As far as technical requirements, XP Mode needs a beefier system than that required to just run Windows 7 or XP alone, including at least 2GB of memory and a system that … Read more

Updated April 29, 2009 at 8:45 am with more details about integrating third-party services.

We've been keeping our eye on Zimbra Desktop, the e-mail client that Yahoo acquired in 2007 and held onto for about a year before development work picked up again in earnest. Now, more than a year later, Zimbra Desktop 1.0 has shaken off its beta and is available as a free download for Windows and Mac.

Zimbra differentiates itself from Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client (Windows|Mac) and from Gmail in its amphibian nature as both an online and offline in-box. It also … Read more

Updated 12:40 p.m. PDT with Microsoft comment.

Verizon executives sure seem busy this week: in addition to reported discussions with Apple over next-generation mobile devices, they're also supposedly talking to Microsoft about a smartphone.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Microsoft and Verizon are talking about launching "a touch-screen multimedia cell phone on the carrier's network early next year." The phone is supposedly based on the "Pink" software that had been rumored earlier this year as a combination of Windows Mobile and Zune software. Microsoft would likely get somebody else (HTC … Read more

With a new product called Vine, Microsoft is tackling the issue that, in the Digital Age, contact management is no longer static--where you are and what you're doing at a given moment can matter just as much as what your cell phone number is. But instead of focusing on roving business travelers, Vine's slant is community management and emergency preparedness. It's in a private beta test right now.

Here's how it works. You download a "dashboard" application, and then you log in with your Windows Live account. Its interface takes the form of a … Read more

Windows XP users can't get no respect. A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced that it would no longer offer free support for XP, apart from critical security patches. XP machines are much more likely than Vista systems to be infected with a virus, according to a recent Microsoft Security Intelligence Report.

And dis of disses, Microsoft delayed patching the AutoRun glitch in XP (and Windows Server 2003) until last February, more than six months after the same hole was plugged in Vista and Server 2008.

But just because Microsoft believes XP has outlived its usefulness doesn't mean … Read more

Could a Mac be what it takes to get my in-laws to love the Internet?

Last week, I had the very rare opportunity to help get my in-laws, who live off-the-grid at 4,000 feet in the middle of a national forest, online for the first time and, my wife and I hoped, to instantly end more than 30 years of their being cut off from media innovations.

As I wrote afterward though, their initial experience was quite a bit less than stellar, mainly due to the vagaries of navigating what seem like fairly restrictive download threshold policies implemented by … Read more

IBM is creating a computer that will go to battle against contestants on Jeopardy, and we envision that it will be something like an Internet-connected Google computer searching for the answers in real time. Something tells me this computer will be a little bit smarter than that. Also, Nicole Lee joins us to discuss a slew of cell phone-related news.

Verizon and the iPhone: Nothing to report…yet http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10227945-94.html

Investigated: Unlocked GSM Palm Pre on sale http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39029453,49302115,00.htm… Read more

Updated on April 27 at 8:20 a.m. PDT with additional information about DirectX 11 and correcting for Intel comments at bottom.

Graphics chips will be tapped to accelerate more tasks in upcoming versions of Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems, according to Nvidia.

In an interview Friday with Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia's Tesla products, Gupta described how new programming environments will tap into the latent compute horsepower of graphics processors to accelerate software in Apple's upcoming OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft's Windows 7 operating systems.

Graphics chips aren't just for games anymore. The trend toward general-purpose graphics processing is defined by an acronym that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue: GPGPU. But the essence of General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units is pretty simple: use the scores--or even hundreds in higher-end chips--of processing cores inside GPUs to speed tasks that, in some cases, would be done much less efficiently by the central processing unit (CPU).

This is where OpenCL (Open Computing Language) comes in. OpenCL is a programming environment for "heterogeneous" computing. That is, computers using a mix of multicore CPUs and GPUs. Microsoft's analogous programming environment is DirectX.

Apple says this about OpenCL on its Web site. "Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL...makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit."

Today, on a PC or a Mac, the CPUs made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are adept at handling general operating system tasks. For instance, handling the sequence of things that must happen after the user clicks on an icon to start an application on their desktop. … Read more

Microsoft is trying to make it easier to sway users of Windows XP onto the latest version of its operating system.

For some time now, the company has been quietly building a "Windows XP mode" that uses virtualization to allow Windows 7 to easily run applications designed for Windows XP. According to sources familiar with the product, the application compatibility mode is built on the Virtual PC technology that Microsoft acquired in 2003, when it scooped up the assets of Connectix.

By adding the compatibility mode, Microsoft is aiming to address one of the key shortcomings of Windows … Read more