Microsoft Fined For Suing Pirates

By DustinPosted on

Well, here is a story that’s not too positive for Microsoft. Apparently, in India, Microsoft has went to suing pirates of their software. Unfortunately, they filed the lawsuits in the capital of the country, forcing the pirates to drive hundreds of miles from their towns of residence to battle the piracy claims. Well, the court claims that it isn’t right. While, I’m don’t agree with piracy, I don’t think that two wrongs equal a right. There is a right way to go after pirates… And that wasn’t it.

According to the Court, Microsoft is needlessly abusing its unlimited cash flow as a power tool to financially hurt the defendants, who will have to travel all across the country in order to defend themselves. This abuse of

Windows 7 Complains Still Exist

By DustinPosted on

As much as I really love Windows 7 (hey, I loved Vista as well!), it isn’t without it’s problems. I’ve only had very minor issues, mostly from third party applications and drivers, others have had more severe problems. I’ve seen my fair share of issues helping others on various forums and newsgroups, so I know they exist, and I know that the majority of them are fixable. This article outlines some of the major issues and shows that Windows 7 isn’t perfect…. That’s being saved for Windows 8…. Right? 🙂

Windows Vista was the “new big thing” for Microsoft and while people liked it, it still had its fair share of complaints. That is why Microsoft developed Windows 7, the newest OS for the company. Windows 7, which was released in late October, opened to much fanfare. However, like all other previous Windows upgrades, bug complaints have already started coming in.

Update: Looks like the article was ripped from Yahoo (http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/108340/windows-7-complaints-begin)… The author of the above article didn’t cite his sources on that one, so I wanted to update the true author of the article: David Goldman. While not a 1:1 rip, it is definitely an obvious rip. Some of the sentences are spot on copies, while others try to change a word or two…

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Windows Live Messenger 2010 Revealed

By DustinPosted on

Neowin has been blessed with getting some screenshots of Microsoft’s newest Messenger client, Windows Live Messenger 2010. This looks like a nice upgrade for Messenger, with quite a few new features, just by judging from the screenshots.

Firstly the main Messenger window that contains your contacts has changed somewhat. Included on the left hand side is a “social stream” of updates provided by Windows Live. These are updates from your Messenger contacts and the data is provided by Windows Live. In current public Messenger builds some of this integration is present at the top of a conversation window. Windows Live Messenger aims to add to this by using the “social stream” as a showcase for your contacts updates. Providing your friends have including their Facebook, Twitter and Blog posts into Windows Live then you will see this in the stream.

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Build and Maintain a WSUS Server

By DustinPosted on

For those that are in charge of your IT department, or if you are the IT department, Ars Technica has an article on how to build and maintain a tiered WSUS infrustructure. While this may be overkill on home networks (unless you are studying or playing around with AD and advanced Windows networking), it is a Godsend for business networks.

What WSUS gives you, out-of-the-box, is a way to consolidate updates on one server, distribute them out to clients, and apply only approved updates from approved categories at approved times. It also includes some useful, if somewhat lacking, reporting capabilities. However, all of this still isn

New YouTube Channel

By DustinPosted on

I have decided that some things are better shown than just described. I have started a YouTube Channel that will showcase various FAQ’s, guides and information on Windows and other Microsoft products. This should help out with clarification of ideas and help you to see what exactly is being done. To start off, I have uploaded a new way of opening Windows 7 Jumplists: just drag them open with your left mouse button. Simple, but not a well documented way to open the jumplists.

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Bing’s Outage Compared To Sally Field?

By DustinPosted on

PC World compared Bing’s outage to Sally Field. I thought that the Bing outage was longer than 30 minutes, but probably not. Just pretty noticable! Although it wasn’t too big of a deal for me, as I just went to Google in the meantime, others were missing out on the Bing Cashback program.

In case you missed it–and most of you probably did–Microsoft’s Bing search engine was offline for about 30 minutes on Thursday evening. What’s noteworthy here isn’t that fact that a Web service was down briefly (just ask Gmail users) but that the short-lived outage resulted in a flurry of media coverage, including a couple of stories right here on PCWorld.com.

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Microsoft Pulls Windows 7 Family Pack

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has killed their money saving Family Pack offer for Windows 7 home users. This was a great deal for a lot of users with multiple PC’s around the home that are wanting to upgrade to Windows 7. Sad to see it die off so soon. And right before Christmas, too!

The special offer, which debuted shortly before the Oct. 22 retail launch of Windows 7, let buyers upgrade as many as three PCs from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium. The $149.99 price of the Family Pack represented a savings of $210 over three separate copies of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade, which lists for $119.99.

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Black Screens Of Death Not From Microsoft Updates

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft says that the “Black Screen of Death” is not caused by the recent updates in November. I haven’t heard much about people having issues with them, but I guess some people have.

“Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that that are resulting in system issues for some customers,” Microsoft security response communications lead Christopher Budd said in a statement. “The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports.”

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Microsoft Office 2010 Beta FAQ

By DustinPosted on

PCWorld has a pretty thorough writeup about why and how you should install the new beta of Office 2010. I’ve been running the technical preview and now the beta, and I have to say that it is a worthy upgrade. I agree with the “expert” quoted in the article:

But what does our expert say? “Anyone interested in Office should get a copy of this beta,” wrote Preston Gralla in his first-take review. “It was solid and performed well without crashing once. I experienced none of the slowness that you sometimes do with betas.”

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