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As he took the stage to usher Windows Vista to market, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week tried to put the software's laborious birth behind him. The company's 71,000 employees -- and the entire PC industry, for that matter -- could be excused for breathing a sigh of relief, too. "It's an exciting thing to finally be here, and that's probably all I'll say about the past," Ballmer said at the unveiling from Nasdaq's cylindrical high-tech building in New York's Times Square. Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 also were introduced, and 30 more products will follow over the next...

It's been a long time coming, but Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 is finally here. As Microsoft starts to collect feedback from a broad spectrum of users in one of its largest test programs ever, the company will soon be in a position to decide whether the product is solid enough to meet announced ship dates of November for enterprise customers and January 2007 for consumers. Earlier this week, I started using Vista build 5568, a version that Microsoft says should be virtually indistinguishable from the actual RC1 code. Since recent Vista revisions have been focusing on improving performance, compatibility,...

Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point....

Microsoft is cutting the cord on its antipiracy tool. The software maker this month plans to update the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications program so that it only checks in with Microsoft once every two weeks, instead of after each boot-up, a company representative said Friday. By year's end, the tool will stop pinging Microsoft altogether, the representative said. The changes come after a critic likened the antipiracy tool to spyware. He found that the program, designed to validate whether a copy of Windows has been legitimately acquired, checks in with Microsoft on a daily basis. Microsoft did not disclose in...

RECENTLY we managed to spend some time using a Vista machine. The machine had Athlon 4000+ and 2 GB of memory with Geforce 7800 GTX card. We installed a game and we didn’t have anything else than Far Cry at the moment. We wanted to check how much memory you actually will need to play games on Vista. We know it is a beta, but it will at least give you a feeling what could you expect from the final one.

Holy haberdashery, Batman! That's alot of friggin memory!

Computer users are being urged to be on guard for a bogus e-mail that pretends to offer news updates about Hurricane Katrina as a means to infect their PCs. The malicious e-mail gives a brief news bulletin on the disaster before urging people to click "read more" and be taken to the full story on a website. Yet once directed to the website, a virus is sent to the user's computer. People are also being told to watch out for fraudulent e-mail scams pretending to raise cash for Katrina victims. It's sickening to think that hackers are prepared to exploit...

Microsoft on Tuesday issued alerts on several security flaws in Windows, the most serious of which could allow an attacker to gain control over a victim's computer. Microsoft released six security bulletins as part of its monthly patching cycle, three of which it deems "critical." The Redmond, Wash., software gives that rating to any security issue that could allow a malicious Internet worm to spread without any action required on the part of the user. One bulletin addresses three flaws in Internet Explorer. Of all the issues Microsoft offered fixes for Tuesday, these put users at most risk of attack,...

Microsoft Corp. warned users of its Windows operating system on Tuesday of three newly found "critical" security flaws in its software, including one that could allow attackers to take complete control of a computer. Computer security experts urged users to download and install the patches, which are available at www.microsoft.com/security. "Users (should) apply the updates as quickly as possible," said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager of Symantec Security Response, part of security software company Symantec Corp. SYMC.O. Microsoft said that vulnerabilities exist in its Internet Explorer Web browser, the most severe of which could allow an attacker to take complete control...

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts Thursday that Microsoft is planning new, higher-priced versions of both Windows and Office in the coming years as part of its effort to grow sales. Ballmer said that the company will add both high-end desktop editions and new server options in the next versions of Windows and Office. Microsoft's chief executive made his comments at a company-sponsored financial analyst conference here. Ballmer noted that the existing premium Windows XP Professional version had added billions of dollars of extra revenue for Microsoft. "We have plans in the Vista generation to introduce an Enterprise edition,"...

SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 - Add personal computers to the list of throwaways in the disposable society. On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker's Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware - stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user's machine - he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He discarded the whole computer. Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine. He...

Here Comes Version 8.0 Will AOL's new software bring broadband users onboard? An early look says no. Despite the turmoil roiling the AOL division, everything appears to be A-OK for the October launch of AOL 8.0, the annual update to the world's most widely used (and widely reviled) Internet access software. Every year the software gets slightly better--or slightly less annoying--and this upgrade appears to be no exception. I've tested a succession of beta versions of AOL 8.0. Several significant new features will certainly be added before the launch, but even a late-July beta suggests that AOL has been successful...