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Labels: Windows
Features of Windows 7 Logon Background Changer.
Labels: Windows
Newegg on Tuesday posted pricing for OEMs versions of Microsoft's much-hyped upcoming Windows 7 operating systems. The pricing shows around a 50% difference between retail and OEM pricing for full (not upgrade) versions, bringing the full software below the price of an upgrade version.
This is OEM software, however, so there are a bunch of caveats. First, it's supposed to be sold for pre-installation on a new personal computer for resale. The system builder is supposed to provide tech support. That means, if you install it yourself, you can't get any support from Microsoft.
The license does not allow transferring the operating system from one PC to another. That doesn't mean you can't do it, but it does mean that technically you can't do so legally (and you'd probably have to call for re-activation as well).
You have to do a full install as well. There are no upgrade versions. Personally, I prefer a full, clean install anyway, but that's just me. It would mean having to restore all the programs and data that were loaded on the computer, but that's not a big deal for many (just time-consuming).
Also, the OEM versions do not supply both 32- and 64-bit versions on the DVD. They only supply one of them, which is, once again, not really that big a deal.
Here's a pricing comparison:
Windows 7 Home Premium
Upgrade: $120
Full: $200
OEM Full: $110
Windows 7 Professional
Upgrade: $200
Full: $300
OEM Full: $140
Windows 7 Ultimate
Upgrade: $220
Full: $320
OEM Full: $190
To make things still better, Newegg is offering pre-order discounts of from $5 to $15 until Oct. 20th.
Labels: Windows
Microsoft updated Windows Live OneCare in November, with much fanfare over its new features, such as OneCare Circle. A number of issues since the release, such as the service seemingly canceling itself, or the program no longer starting after updating to 2.0, have plagued users.
(Click the OneCare logo above to see a screenshot that shows a number of issues on the OneCare forum).
As you hopefully know, Windows Live OneCare was unveiled in 2006 as Microsoft's first foray into security software. As I said at the time, just as with a new car model, I wouldn't trust a new entry into the security arena, and it seems I was right.
Ignoring the fact that one of the biggest issues with 2.0 is that it won't start (!), the key to an antivirus (AV) product is effectiveness, and OneCare has poor results in various AV comparatives.
Things have gotten so bad that one user came up with the solution and posted it in a thread entitled "How to Fix LiveOneCare V. 2.0 Problems." His answer:
1. Find your purchase receipt, box it up, call Microsoft Customer Service and tell them you want a full refund. Mail it in to them and then wait the requisite six months for your refund.You know you've screwed up when the person moderating your forum becomes frustrated. Stephen Boots, the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) who moderates the OneCare forum, said in the same thread above (7th post in the thread):
2. Go to the OneCare web site and download and run OneCareCleanUp.exe to get Live OneCare off your computer.
Then google up AVG and dowload (sic) either the $29.95 edition or the free edition and install it on your computer..... and your troubles are over.
There *were* too many problems with the v2 upgrade and too many remain now. I believe that the test bed needs to be evaluated and expanded since the nearly infinite configurations that OneCare will be running on means that exposure to more configurations is crucial. Each release needs to be much better.As I said before, find yourself a good-rated AV solution from one of the comparatives (check my earlier post), one that doesn't bring your system to its knees (like NOD32), and go for it. If you're still using OneCare, you have my sympathy.
Labels: Windows
And people wonder why I complain that Microsoft has made it more difficult of late to do a clean install using an upgrade copy of Windows. A report issued by a Microsoft software engineer shows that depending on the state of your system and hardware, it could take as long as 20 hours to run an upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7.
I see nothing wrong with using an upgrade copy for a clean install as long as you had a valid copy of the previous OS and can prove it. Prior to Windows Vista, all you had to do was insert your old CD or your old serial number and off you went. With Windows Vista there was a double-install workaround.
According to past reports, it appears the same workaround will work for Windows 7. Somewhat of a blessing, even if you have to install twice, rather than having to wait 20 hours. Of course, you'll have to reinstall all your applications.
According to the blog post, the exercise was to determine if a Vista SP1 -> Windows 7 upgrade was within a 5% threshold faster than an upgrade from Vista SP1 -> Vista SP1. Microsoft chose to use a Vista SP1 -> Vista SP1 upgrade instead of Windows XP -> Vista as their baseline because:
Labels: Windows
Microsoft announced a new discount program on Thursday, one that would allow eligible students to get a $30 price on Windows 7 Home Premium (upgrade). There is also a mention of Windows 7 Professional, but it is unclear from the site what the price on that product would be. The program, announced via Twitter, is similar to other such student discount programs Microsoft has run in the past. It also follows an earlier, less generous pre-order campaign, where consumers could pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Home Professional upgrades for 50% off. That program ended on July 11th, however.
The program's website is here. Unless you want to spend an extra $13, the delivery of the software will be via download. Here's the eligibility information:
Promotion Eligibility: This offer is good only to eligible students who attend an educational institution geographically located in the United States. This offer is non-transferable. Only one product may be purchased per eligible student (but not required).
The following conditions serve to define student eligibility for the Promotion:
1. .edu: Individual must possess a valid e-mail address at a U.S. educational institution which contains the domain suffix .edu; OR Pre-Approved School List: Enrolled in a U.S. educational institution included on the pre-approved school list; OR Submission of school enrollment: Submit verifiable school enrollment via the validation process; AND
2. Individual must be a student at a U.S. educational institution and must be actively enrolled in at least 0.5 course credit and be able to provide proof of enrollment upon request.
Microsoft or Digital River may contact you to verify that you are a current student. If documentation is not provided indicating that you are a current student, you will be liable to reimburse Microsoft for the difference between what you paid and the estimated retail price of the software.
Microsoft, in their sole discretion, may accept other forms of validation to determine eligibility in lieu of a valid e-mail address when one is not available.
Program Description: Eligible students are allowed to purchase one license of the product below:
1. Microsoft® Windows 7 Home Premium
OR
2. Microsoft® Windows 7 Professional
The offer is live now for U.S. residents, and runs until January 3rd, 2010. Microsoft plans similar offers in Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico, France, and Germany, though the prices will vary somewhat, and most of those countries will have to wait until Oct. 22nd for the promotion to go live. The U.K. will be able to pre-order on Sept. 22nd, however.
Labels: Windows
Most of us who have used a Windows PC know what a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is. Well, there could be no more perfect timing for a BSOD than this. Right when Li Ning was rounding the lip of the Bird's Nest during the climax of the torch-lighting ceremony, someone snapped this photo of the familiar BSOD most of us have seen at one time or another.
The original pic was spotted at a Chinese language forum.
But the best pictures were the ones taken by rivercoolcool, who said he was sitting right below the BSOD image. Ironic, isn't it, that he's using a Microsoft Windows Live Spaces blog?
Click the below image to enlarge.
Some have speculated PhotoShopping (an obvious possibility), but quite a few have looked at these images already and seem to think, in particular, that the image was waaaaay too well done to be fakes, with all the shadows and even creasing.
Additionally, someone even reportedly found the image on his DVR. Assuming we now believe it to be true, the only remaining question is: genuine or pirated version of Windows?
Labels: Windows
You download, create, delete, and move around countless files and endless piles of data on your PC every day. While your PC would ideally handle all of this data for you, it doesn't take long before you end up with a disorganized, cluttered computer. On Tuesday we asked you to share your favorite Windows maintenance tools, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Hit the jump for an overview of the five best Windows maintenance tools, then cast your vote for the best of the bunch.
Labels: Windows
USB drives are the most popular virus carriers these days. Here is the simple yet powerful command prompt trick with which you can create a dummy file that can block any incoming virus to your Pen drive.
1. Note down the free space in bytes left in your USB drive. To do that, just right-click with your mouse on your USB drive and select properties where you can find the Used space and free space shown in bytes.
2. Go to start-->Run... and typecmd and click Ok to open the command prompt(DOS) window.
3. At the command prompt type the command having the syntax as follows:
fsutil file createnew [USB drive path\filename] [free space in bytes]
for example, if the drive letter for your USB drive is 'K', the free space available is 1528864758 bytes and filename you want to use is dummyfile then the command you have to type is:
fsutil file createnew k:\dummyfile 1528864768
As soon as you press ENTER after giving this command a file will be created in you USB drive occupying all the free space available.
Now your USB drive cannot accommodate any incoming viruses as it has zero free space. You can check that from your drive properties. As you can see in the image below the free space left is zero as we have created a dummy file with all the free space available in the step above.
And whenever you want to copy files to your USB drive from secured sources, just delete that dummyfile created and copy the data you wanted and again create a dummyfile that occupies the remaining free space.
This command prompt trick is the best preventive measure to block any virus form entering your USB drive.
Labels: Tips, Troubleshooting, Windows
Labels: Tips, Troubleshooting, Windows
Labels: Windows
There’s a lot of debate over what constitutes a “secure” operating system. The debates seem to become most heated when people compare the Big Three of home desktop OSes — Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS X, and the Linux family of operating systems. Of course, as I pointed out in Is Linux the most secure OS?, it’s difficult to convincingly offer a definitive declaration that any given operating system is “more secure” than another.
OpenBSD is rightly proud of its record of only two identified remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in default configuration through its entire stable release history, but even this is not proof positive that an OS is the “most secure”, considering that security needs change from one system deployment to another.
Ultimately, any of the widely used general purpose OSes can theoretically be compromised. The recent popularity of virtual machines, allowing one to simultaneously run multiple virtual computers on a single physical hardware platform, has provided hints of one particular threat that may apply even to an OS running outside of the controlled environment of a virtual machine: compromise by altering the OS image in memory during boot. This kind of danger has become something of a common bogeyman for VM users, as they worry that some piece of malware may be able to break free of the limits of the VM, and affect the OS in ways that have not previously been a concern for operating system installs on “bare metal”.
In theory, however, there is no specific reason something similar cannot be done to a system running without the virtual machine environment, as long as malicious security crackers can find ways to access the machine’s boot process itself. This may be prohibitively difficult to achieve remotely, at this time at least, but it presents a very worrisome state of affairs for cases where a security cracker may have physical access to the computer.
In the case of Microsoft Windows and certain Linux distributions, this concern is not just theory. It is also a very concrete reality. Piotr Bania has put together a proof of concept, a boot compromise tool called Kon-Boot, which so far has been tested and confirmed to work on at least four Linux distribution releases and a slew of common MS Windows releases.
The tool can be used for legitimate purposes, from security research purposes to simple recovery of a system where the administrative password has been lost. In the words of the creator:
In the current compilation state it allows to log into a linux system as ‘root’ user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password.
If you want to protect your computer against root compromise by someone with physical access to the machine, this provides an excellent case for removing any CD, DVD, and floppy boot capability, eliminating any external device ports that may be used to introduce boot capability outside of the internal hard drive, and lock the case.
You may also want to lock it in a closet, and perhaps use an operating system that hasn’t yet been targeted by this particular boot compromise tool, such as MacOS X or a BSD Unix OS like FreeBSD. Though it may only be a matter of time before these other OSes are similarly compromised, at least for the time being you can be reasonably certain they’re ahead of the game, even if only by chance.
Ultimately, the moral of the story is simple: be careful who you let near your computers, and under what circumstances you allow access.
Labels: Windows
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, is available as an integral feature of Windows Server 2008 and enables you to implement server virtualization with ease. Hyper-V allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With
Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product that provides a simplified, reliable, cost-effective, and optimized virtualization solution enabling organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. It allows organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server and is a good solution for organizations that want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments. Low utilization infrastructure workloads, departmental applications, and simple branch office workloads are also candidates to virtualize using Hyper-V Server.