Microsoft: Decidedly not R.I.P.

Microsoft: Decidedly not R.I.P.

Oh how frustrating when the mighty haven't fallen.

For some word-jockeys it apparently seems impossible to believe that a major tech company, born a full 33 years ago, could remain on top of the heap.

Hand-wringing warnings of doom and decline for Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), and for its CEO Steve Ballmer, are popping up in some quarters as the company faces a disappointing reception to Vista, its latest version of Windows, and criticism of its handling of its takeover bid for Yahoo. (YHOO, Fortune 500)

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/02/technology/Kirkpatrick_Microsoft.fortune/index.htm

WinXP SP3 Roll-out

WinXP SP3 Roll-out

It's been a wild week regarding SP3. This Tuesday, Redmond said that although SP3 was ready, they were going to give priority to Vista SP1, and that SP3 would have to wait. The reason given was bandwidth management. That caused a serious amount of noise from existing MSDN and TechNet users, who complained that the build had already made it on the bittorrent download sites and asked themselves why they would need to renew their subscriptions. However, Microsoft quickly came to its senses and around 10pm, April 23 the SP3 download appeared unannounced on both TechNet and MSDN. That's the right thing to do of course, as professional users need to go through a series of tests to make sure nothing breaks before they deploy. And for the large percentage of sites that is not planning to move their users to Vista any time soon, it's even more important to get their hands on SP3.

Unfortunately, there's not direct link to this story...

IIS Servers Experience Massive Cyber Attack

IIS Servers Experience Massive Cyber Attack

A massive cyber-attack is targeting vulnerable Internet Information Server based Web pages by redirecting visitors to the site toward one hosting malicious code, and it's growing rapidly. When Panda Security first noted the infestation, it put the number of infected IIS servers at 282,000. Less than a day later, security firm F-Secure wrote its own blog entry, putting the infestation at more than 500,000. The worst part of it all is that these infestations are not in seamy Web sites, they are taking place in legitimate Web pages. An IFRAME redirects the user to another page, where identity-stealing malware is downloaded onto their computer. So even users who think they are staying clean are not safe.

The full story can be found at ServerWatch.com.

Their passion is Windows XP

Their passion is Windows XP

Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems run most personal computers around the globe and are a cash cow for the world's largest software maker. But you'd never confuse a Windows user with the passionate fans of Mac OS X or even the free Linux operating system. Unless it's someone running Windows XP, a version Microsoft wants to retire. Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

Read about the growing Windows XP movement at Yahoo.com.

Win Server 2008 Directory Services, Read Only Domain

Win Server 2008 Directory Services, Read Only Domain

The two initial installments of our series dedicated to Windows Server 2008 Directory Services, provided a general overview of functionality incorporated into Active Directory since its introduction as part of Windows 2000 Server platform. It presented them in the context defined by modes and functional levels. Going forward, we will focus on features specific to the latest operating system, describing their characteristics in a more detailed fashion. We will start this new approach by discussing a new concept: the Read Only Domain Controller (RODC).

Find the link to the two previous installments of this series, plus finish reading this article at ServerWatch.com.

MS keeps admins busy with critical Vista patches

MS keeps admins busy with critical Vista patches

Microsoft will be putting out eight security patches on 8 April, five of them with the unlovable critical label, in the latest run of its regular update cycle.

The critical updates cover a brace of bugs in Internet Explorer, a pair on Windows and one involving Office. All five might lend themselves to remote execution of malicious software on vulnerable clients.

All supported versions of Windows - including Vista - ought to be updated once the patches come out. Vista is subject to as many critical patches as XP (four), which doesn't say a lot for its much-vaunted enhanced security, especially since they arrive less than a month after the release of the first service pack for Vista.

For the rest of the story, go to www.channelregister.co.uk.

How to back up desktops and laptops

How to back up desktops and laptops

Losing a hard drive on an aging system is just as common as the accidental deletion of a file, data corruption or a computer virus. There are also the more infrequent catastrophes, such as fire, flood and theft or loss of a laptop. If you're like me, data on a laptop or desktop is your lifeline -- whether it's business or personal files. If access to data is lost, the impact could be huge. So what's the best approach to PC backup? Onsite backup could be as simple as manually copying critical files to a USB pocket hard drive, CD or DVD. Or it could be more sophisticated -- leveraging a backup utility that automates the collection, transfer and cataloging of files to some external device. Backup utilities come in all price ranges (including freeware and utilities built into your operating system), levels of complexity and methodologies.

While this information may be pretty basic for some of you, considering...

How to speed up Windows Vista

How to speed up Windows Vista

SP1 may not give your system much more oomph, but there are other ways to speed Vista up. Spending a few minutes (or a few dollars) optimizing your Vista PC can help it get its groove on. Get flashy: If you have an extra USB flash drive that you don't use for much else, Vista can cache disk reads on it, thereby boosting performance beyond what you'd get from your hard disk alone. Simply insert your flash drive into a USB 2.0 slot. If the drive is fast enough, a prompt will appear, asking whether you want to open the folder for the drive or use it to "Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost." Choose the latter option, and follow the remaining prompts. When you're calculating how much space to set aside for ReadyBoost to use, Microsoft recommends that you let ReadyBoost use one to three times the amount of RAM on your system.

The rest of this advice can be found at...

Photoshop goes online, free

Photoshop goes online, free

Adobe today announced an online, free, version of its popular Photoshop application. The Flash-based Photoshop Express application is a stripped down version of Photoshop allowing users to manipulate and store their images online. And because Photoshop Express is Flash-based the application will run across most operating systems including Linux, Mac and Windows. Many of the advanced features of Photoshop, such as layers and adding text, are not included in PE which is geared at everyday users that simply want to make their photos look better. PE makes it easy to crop and rotate pictures, add highlights, correct exposures and adjust hues among others manipulations. Registering for an account on the Photoshop Express site gives users access to up to 2GB of free storage space in a style similar to Flickr. The storage space syncs with Facebook, MySpace and Picasa meaning users can pull pictures from those albums and edite...

Evidence mounting: Windows 7 going modular, subscription

Evidence mounting: Windows 7 going modular, subscription

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most "modular" yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customized for deployment but developed monolithically. One modular OS to rule them all, let's say.

Full story at ars technica.