Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Microsoft Warns of New Windows Worm

Microsoft is warning consumers that a bug patched by the out-of-cycle patch a little over a month ago is being exploited in a new worm that’s seeing a recent surge. The vulnerability lies in the Windows Server service that runs on all Windows machines that allows the OS to connect to shares over the network. The worm has been named ‘Conficker.a’ by Microsoft and ‘Downadup’ by Symantec. According to Ziv Mador, a security researcher and Technet Blogger, the worm “mostly spreads within corporations but also was reported by several hundred home users”. Once the worm infects a machine, it will spread itself across the network to other un-patched systems that it finds. If you haven’t been keeping up with your Windows updates, now’s a good time to start.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Nov 30th, 2008

My Windows 7 Experience

I finally was able to get my hands on a preview copy of Windows 7. After all the hype of the new OS being much lighter than Vista, I decided to put it to the test. While I didn’t crunch together any stats on performance (Windows crashed before I could), I was able to install it on some pretty low-end hardware. I used my old school-issued Gateway tablet. It’s a Gateway M275 running at Centrino processor at 1.7Ghz with a whopping 512MB of RAM. I’d heard the chatter about running on 1GB of RAM and wanted to see what it could really do.

The first thing that I noticed was that it was pretty much the same as Vista. This early preview didn’t have the newer taskbar or application switcher as Microsoft promised. The machine was fairly responsive and my tablet pen worked right ‘out of the box’. I could launch IE, Windows Journal, Paint, and a whole host of the default built-in tools that Windows comes with at the same time and it didn’t choke out too bad. Sometimes it was obvious that Windows had to swap an application out to disk and when I switched it brought it back, but the GUI was still fairly responsive. The network manager was slightly clunky. I had to add my network manually before I could just select it out of the list and connect, but I would assume that that is just something that hasn’t been implemented yet.

In all fairness, the OS ran about as fast as Ubuntu does on that machine with XGL enabled. Of course, I am comparing Ubuntu with most of the GUI eye-candy enabled with Windows 7 without any eye candy. That being said.. we’ll see what happens when the changes are actually implemented, but Microsoft did make a vast improvement over Vista performance-wise. We’ll see what happens to performance once the release date comes closer and some of the changes are actually put into a public beta.

Unfortunately, my experience came to an end after a couple of hours of playing. I closed the lid and went away for just a few minutes. When I came back the machine had shut itself down. I went to turn it back on and Windows said it had been corrupted and couldn’t boot. I didn’t even have time to pull off my screenshots! Luckily, just a bit of quick thinking, a Ubuntu live CD, and a forced mount on the partition later I had my screenshots pulled off onto a flash drive. Windows 7 is definitely much faster than Vista and I think it might actually be slightly better than XP on that older machine. It even ran decently on my little laptop with only half a gigabyte of RAM which is much better than Vista would have done.

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Filed under News : Comments (3) : Nov 12th, 2008

Microsoft Strikes Deal with Sun for Search

Old enemies Sun and Microsoft have struck a deal for Microsoft to leverage Sun software to install the Live search toolbar on PCs. Sun has agreed to package the toolbar along with its Java software. The toolbar will install itself into the IE browser and help boost Microsoft in their fight to climb the search market share ladder. After the Yahoo deal fell through, Microsoft has been pursuing other options. The deal comes to Sun at a time while it is struggling financially - some welcome help, I’m sure.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Nov 10th, 2008

Microsoft Says No Deal to Yahoo

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a public statement today stating that the company is no longer interested in a deal with Yahoo. The two companies have been going back and forth about the issue dating back as early as May of 2006. Yahoo received a large offer in January of this year for $45 billion or $31 per share. Yahoo turned the offer down and sought other opportunities. Potential deals between Yahoo and Google and Yahoo and AOL both surfaced in the interim, but both deals seem to have fallen through.

Just a couple of days ago, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang stated that he thought “the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo.” Yahoo’s stock closed today at $12.20, barely a third of its value in the deal proposed by Microsoft that Yahoo shot down. Ballmer’s response to Yang’s statement went like this: “Look, we made an offer, we made another offer. It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on.”

Microsoft wanted to purchase Yahoo’s business as a way to get a jump start on its battle to contest Google for the search market share. Microsoft and Yahoo, however, seem to be losing ground on Google on market share. According to seoconsultants.com, Yahoo and Microsoft both lost around 3% of their market share from the end of 2007 through October. Google swept up that market share jumping just over 6% over that same time span. Sadly enough, that 3% that Microsoft lost was almost half of its market share. Google seems to be eating up the market and there’s nothing anyone else has been able to do about it. According to Alexa, Yahoo does have the most visited site on the Internet. Also, Yahoo recently picked up Zimbra which looks like it could be one of the biggest rivals to Microsoft Exchange, so the future of Yahoo isn’t entirely bleak assuming they can stop the bleeding and pull out some profits.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 7th, 2008

Microsoft: Hardware Vendors Be Ready for 7

This week is Microsoft’s WinHEC conference. The conference is aimed at hardware manufacturers to help them develop the best hardware and drivers for the Windows platform. According to APC Magazine, Microsoft is urging hardware makers to be more prepared for Windows 7 than they were for Vista. Microsoft appears to have learned their lesson that poor cooperation from hardware makers can really mess things up for them. Microsoft doesn’t want the assault it took when Vista was launched for the release of Windows 7.

This type of attitude from Microsoft towards hardware vendors has been showing ever since they started talking publicly about the next release of their Windows operating system. A beta of Windows 7 is promised in early 2009 with a release promised the same year as well. Microsoft stated that there will not be another WinHEC before the release. Since WinHEC is an annual event, that pretty well locks them into sometime before the latter half of Q4.

Microsoft is finally getting a taste for what Linux users have been experiencing for years: bad hardware support. Having to rely upon outside entities for your flagship product to be a success is a dangerous road to walk down. Luckily for Microsoft, they can push their weight around quite a bit with vendors to ensure things are in place and Windows 7 has a nice platform to launch from, but if hardware makers are as prepared for 7 as they were for Vista, they could be in for a lot of trouble. In its early days, Windows really took off because Microsoft made an OS that didn’t have to be prepared with a certain model or brand of computer. Remember that video for just over a month ago on Ballmer laughing at how the Apple didn’t have separate its OS from its device? Now, it seems that Microsoft is not wanting to sleep in the bed it made for itself.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 6th, 2008

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