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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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For Windows 7, we have a dedicated team focused on startup performance, but in reality the effort extends across the entire Windows division and beyond. Our many hardware and software partners are working closely with us and can rightly be considered an extension to the team.
Startup can be one of three experiences; boot, resume from sleep, or resume from hibernate. Although resume from sleep is the default, and often 2 to 5 seconds based on common hardware and standard software loads, this post is primarily about boot as that experience has been commented on frequently. For Windows 7, a top goal is to significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times. In the lab, a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.
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Here are some features we just released as part of the Game Creator Beta:
Features for everyone:
* New profile pages, with easier ways to view people’s projects, friends, recent activity, and more
* View anyone's favorite projects
* Earn badges by creating compelling content, being a good game player, making friends, or just being lucky!
* Lots of performance improvements and bug fixes
Features for game creators of all skill levels:
* Undo support for actor appearance editing * Insert images and videos directly into your actor or scene .....................
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Internet Explorer 8 comes packed with new features designed to make browsing the web much easier and finding what you want much quicker. Matter of fact, based on my own experiences with IE8 these past few weeks, finding your "stuff" quicker is a very strong theme in IE8. I've discovered with IE8 that browsing the web is much more efficient. There are some brand new features in IE8 I'd like to call out, based on my own experiences that I think users will find very useful in browsing the web. I've found these features in IE8 so useful in fact that I am using IE8 Beta 2 on all my PCs. Keep in mind there are far too many new features and changes in IE8 for me to highlight in a single post. I'm only going to cover some of IE8's biggest new features and features I use the most.
Many folks have commented and written email about the topic of performance of Windows. The dialog has been wide ranging—folks consistently want performance to improve (of course). As with many topics we will discuss, performance, as absolute and measurable as it might seem, also has a lot of subtlety. There are many elements and many tradeoffs involved in achieving performance that meets everyone’s expectations. We know that even meeting expectations, folks will want even more out of their Windows PCs (and that’s expected). We’ve re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area in Windows 7 (and IE 8). This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams (Fundamentals). For this post, I just wanted to frame the discussion as we dig into the topic of performance in subsequent posts. Folks might find this post on IE8 performance relevant along with the beta 2 release of IE 8.
Performance is made up of many different elements. We could be talking about response time to a specific request. It might mean how much RAM is “typical” or what CPU customers need. We could be talking about the clock time to launch a program. It could mean boot or standby/resume. It could mean watching CPU activity or disk I/O activity (or lack disk activity). It could mean battery life. It might even mean something as mundane as typical disk footprint after installation. All of these are measures of performance. All of these are systematically tracked during the course of development. We track performance by running a known set of scenarios (there are thousands of these) and developers can run specific scenarios based on exercising more depth or breadth.
We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!
You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.
While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.
We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
We looked very hard at how people really browse the web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists. As tempting as it is to list here all the changes both big and small in IE8, we’ll take a more holistic approach. That’s how we built the product and how we’d like to talk about it.
From our customer research, we saw that the bulk of user activity outside of web pages involved tabs and “navigation” – the act of getting to the site the user wants to get to. We also knew that adding features has an impact only if they’re “in the flow” of how people actually use the product. Another menu item might matter in a checklist on a blog somewhere, but won’t matter to real people browsing. That’s why IE8’s New Tab experience is so remarkable: it’s obvious – after you see it:
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Not much to see here, but I just got word from Zune team member Cesar Menendez (of Zune Insider fame) that the 120 GB Zune we saw in the FCC docs is official:
"You've probably all seen about 120GB @the FCC- and just wanted to send you a note to confirm that is indeed part of the plan. There's definitely more details coming in the way of new software and hardware, pricing etc."
Haptic technology maker Immersion said on Tuesday it has settled its legal dispute with Microsoft.
The maker of tactile feedback technology for mice and joysticks sued both Sony and Microsoft in 2002 for patent infringement. Though both suits were settled, Microsoft filed a separate suit against Immersion in June 2007 and asked the court to enforce a portion of a sublicensing agreement between the two companies that stated Microsoft would get a portion of Immersion's settlement it received from Sony. Immersion countersued, alleging Microsoft had breached a confidentiality agreement.
Readers of sites including Engadget and Gizmodo have uncovered references to and photos of a new Microsoft "Blue Track" mouse on sites including the German version of Amazon.com and the YouGame online store. Among other things, the logo on the front matches the image at the end of Microsoft's teaser animation.
Here's how the YouGame site explains the technology. (This is a rough machine translation from the Italian-language description.)
Updated Windows Live Hotmail Coming Soon! Even Faster Even Better !!
Updated Windows Live Hotmail Coming Soon!
Even Faster Even Better !!
Faster than ever. It'll be up to 70 percent faster to sign in and see your e-mail.1 Of course, along with more speed, you'll get powerful technology that deflects spam and helps protect you against viruses and scams.
Simpler, cleaner design. We're combining the classic and full versions of Hotmail, so you get access to everything Hotmail has to offer. The reading pane will let you check out your e-mail without having to open it up.
Put more you in your e-mail. New themes and colors will let you design the look of your inbox, so your personality can really shine through.
Closer to your contacts. Just start typing in the "To" line and you'll get a choice of e-mail contacts that most closely match what you've typed. Plus, it'll be even easier to e-mail groups of people.
Cool stuff coming soon. We've got even more great updates to Hotmail for you to look forward to, like ever-increasing storage2, the ability to IM right from Hotmail, and new calendar features that make it easier to share your calendar with family and friends..............Full Story At Source
Don’t have three servers spare to trial EBS? Why not check out our Click Through Demo of Windows Essential Business Server. These demos require .net framework 2.0 and either Windows XP or Vista.
These cover scenarios like
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4264a0fe-c3af-44c9-868a-c5a2a6d12fd4&DisplayLang=en
Simplifying the installation and making it easy to stay up-to-date
In this release we're making it easier to install and stay up to date with the latest release of WGA Notifications. We've changed the installation experience and are again using the Windows Update install prompt we have used previously. There are a couple of reasons we're doing this now. One is that in recent research, customers (particularly the ones using genuine software - or at least that think they are) have told us that they would prefer the simplest, shortest way of installing. Our research has clearly shown that customers value the ability of Windows to alert them when they may have software that is not genuine, but they also want the ability to stay up to date with the least effort required on their part. The other reason is that hundreds of millions of installs of WGA Notifications have already taken place, and most customers are already aware of what the program is and just want the fastest and most seamless way to install and stay up-to-date. For this reason, in this release we've also added the ability for future updates to WGA Notifications to have both the validation logic, as well as new forms of notifications, installed without additional steps. This will only be the case for those who install this latest version or future versions of WGA Notifications.
Another thing we're doing with this release is focusing on the product edition that is most often stolen. This will reduce the number of customers that will be offered the package. This release will be offered to the most pirated edition of Windows XP and therefore to users with the highest likelihood of having a non-genuine copy, those using Windows XP Pro. We're also offering it to those using editions based on Pro code such as Tablet and Windows Media Center, but plan to narrow the offering to Pro in future releases.
Increasing the effectiveness of notifications and aligning experiences across Windows XP and Windows Vista
With this update to WGA Notifications in Windows XP, we've implemented a couple of related features that draw on the notifications experience we designed for Windows Vista SP1. After installing this version of WGA Notifications on a copy of Windows XP that fails the validation, most users will discover on their next logon that their desktop has changed to a plain black background from whatever was there previously (see below).
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Chart Advisor is a prototype Excel2007 Add-In from the Office Labs that appears as a button on the Insert ribbon next to the standard charting tools. It attempts to automate the process of chart generation by using an advanced rules engine to scan your data for properties that inherently make good charts. It will generate some charts, rank them, and display the set as thumbnails in a new dialog. From this dialog you can manipulate the charts by changing how the data is mapped and filter out data from the chart.............Download At Source
Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing “off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person using it to know at which website you bank. What if you want to delete your browsing history after the fact, but you don’t want to lose your preferences at websites that you use frequently?
With respect to privacy, IE8 gives users more choice about controlling what information they keep and exchange.
InPrivate BrowsingIf you are using a shared PC, a borrowed laptop from a friend, or a public PC, sometimes you don’t want other people to know where you’ve been on the web. Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing makes that “over the shoulder” privacy easy by not storing history, cookies, temporary Internet files, or other data. ....................Full Story At Source
Take it for what it's worth, but we've received a tip from a source close to Microsoft's marketing department who has shed some light on the Xbox 360 price cuts that are rumored to be going down in a few weeks time. More specifically, the $199 Xbox 360 Arcade bundle.
According to the source, Microsoft will be positioning the Arcade bundle to be in direct competition with the Wii, meaning that the marketing push behind it will focus on family friendly entertainment. With family oriented games on the packaging, the Arcade console will come packaged with the traditional Arcade goodies (512MB memory card, etc.), the new Fall update pre-loaded as well as a motion controller and a few motion controlled mini games developed by Rare. That's right, a motion controller! Supposedly, the motion controller will work with all 360 consoles and will even be sold separately, bundled with an even more expansive list of mini motion controlled games. This new $199 Xbox 360 Arcade bundle is said to release Holiday 2008.