windows7

Amazon appears to have, in effect, preannounced a Dell 14-inch Ivy Bridge-based ultrabook.

The new XPS 14, which Amazon just listed on its site ("temporarily out of stock," it says), looks pretty enticing, including a thickness of only 0.7 inches, 12 hours of claimed battery life, and the latest version of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors: the most power-efficient U series. Let's check out the specs of the two models. … Read more

Although Windows 8 is expected to hit store shelves later this year, Microsoft believes its current operating system, Windows 7, will have an awfully good year.

Speaking at a forum in Seoul this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that his company expects 350 million Windows 7-based devices to be shipped this year. Bloomberg, which was in attendance at the event, was first to report on the news. Ballmer said that the operating system's success "makes Windows the most popular single system."

If that many Windows 7 devices are actually shipped this year, it would indicate accelerated … Read more

Microsoft published a "brief" history of the Windows interface in a blog post today that offered some flashes of candor about Vista and Windows 95 and argued that the tablet as we know it today is one device too many. Redmond also said it was dropping Aero Glass.

First and foremost, Microsoft said it has "moved beyond" Aero Glass on the Windows 8 desktop, in Friday's Building Windows 8 post.

"We spent a lot of energy carefully considering how substantially to update the appearance of the desktop in Windows 8...Our primary goal was … Read more

Still plugging along with Windows XP or Vista? Dreading the prospect of upgrading to Windows 7 because Microsoft offers no direct upgrade path? (More on that in a bit.)

Help is on the way. Today only, in honor of its 29th birthday, Laplink is offering PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant absolutely free. It regularly sells for $29.95.

To get the software, click here, then click the little "Add to cart" box in the upper-right corner of the free-PCmover banner. Scroll down and click "Proceed to Cart." Follow the instructions on the following page.

Not interested? … Read more

One of the great things about Windows 7 is the way you can tweak its performance, appearance, and behavior through various options and settings scattered throughout your system. The problem, of course, is keeping track of where everything is, not to mention finding it again when you actually need it. SuRe Softwares' Windows 7 Tweaker is a free tool that unifies access to these far-flung settings and options in a single interface. With it, you can modify your Windows installation to extract the best performance from your hardware and programs. You can use it to customize your security settings, network … Read more

Best Buy has kicked Hewlett-Packard's Folio ultrabook down to a new low of $798. This is happening as HP announces new competitively priced ultrabooks and as rumors about a $799 MacBook Air swirl.

The HP Folio 13 (model 13-1035nr) is now priced at $797.77 at Best Buy. That includes a "Sandy Bridge" 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor; a 13.3-inch display, 4GB of memory, and a 128GB solid state drive. (More specs here.) … Read more

Intel's second wave of Ivy Bridge chips for ultrabooks are due by early June, when Computex gets under way, an industry source told CNET.

In the first week of June, consumers can expect to see a new wave of ultrabooks based on Intel's just-announced Ivy Bridge processor, according to the source, who is familiar with the plans of Intel and PC makers.

That's the time frame in which Intel is expected to roll out power-efficient versions of Ivy Bridge. Last week, Intel announced only high-performance, quad-core versions of the processor that typically goes into larger laptops, like … Read more

Windows XP isn't going down easy.

The ten-year-old OS has gradually been shedding users over the past several years but is still hanging onto to its huge chunk of the market.

In April, XP's market share inched down to 46.08 percent from 46.86 percent in March, according to data out today from Net Applications. That followed a roller-coaster ride that saw XP's audience rise and fall slightly each month since last November 2011.

At the same time, Windows 7 continues to grow in popularity. Last month, the current flavor of Windows grabbed a 38.67 … Read more

The XPS 13 ultrabook is selling well above expectations, a Dell executive told CNET this week, offering some hope for the new class of skinny laptops.

"We can't build enough of them at the moment," said Sam Burd, vice president of Dell's Consumer and SMB (small and medium business) product group, speaking about the higher-end laptop announced back in January.

"A little bit less than 3X the expected demand," he said. Burd declined to be more specific, saying Dell "never" discloses numbers.

Still, an upbeat statement about sales -- however nonspecific -- … Read more