Microsoft has finally released a new operating system that is long overdue after the infamous Vista disaster. The new operating system, called Windows 7 (for the lack of a better name), offers a smoother user experience, multi-touchscreen capability and more seamless networking with other computers.

Early reviews have been promising. It’s argued to be the best operating system that Microsoft has released thus far. It’s even comparable to Apple’s Snow Leopard (much cooler name).

But before you rush out to purchase a copy of Windows 7, you need to consider the following facts to see if it’s right for you.

System Requirements:

1. 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
2. 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
3. 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
4. DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Requirements For Additional Features:

1. Depending on resolution, video playback may require additional memory and advanced graphics hardware
2. For some Windows Media Center functionality a TV tuner and additional hardware may be required
3. Windows Touch and Tablet PCs require specific hardware
4. HomeGroup requires a network and PCs running Windows 7
5. DVD/CD authoring requires a compatible optical drive
   BitLocker requires Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2
6. BitLocker To Go requires a USB flash drive
7. Windows XP Mode requires an additional 1 GB of RAM, an additional 15 GB of available hard disk space, and a processor capable of hardware virtualization with Intel VT or AMD-V turned on

If you’re not sure what all that means, try downloading a free Microsoft tool called a Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, which will scan your PC, report any potential problems and offer ways to fix them.

Should I Upgrade To Windows 7?

Let’s see, if budget is not an issue and you generally like newer technologies, then sure go for it. But priced between $120 to $220, upgrading can be expensive if you don’t really need all the features. If your laptop or desktop is an ancient piece of junk, then consider upgrading your computer to one that comes preloaded with Windows 7. These days, you can probably find one cheap for under $500. If you are happy with XP or Vista (can’t imagine anyone is happy), then you can afford to wait until the prices drops. If you are still not sure, check out Microsoft’s comparison chart or top 10 reasons.

If you had purchased your computer after June 26, 2009, you may be qualified for an upgrade to Windows 7 from the manufacturer. Check out more information here.

What Versions of Windows 7 Should I Get?

The differences between the Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions are as follows:

Home Premium:

• Make the things you do every day easier with improved desktop navigation.
• Start programs faster and more easily, and quickly find the documents you use most often.
• Make your web experience faster, easier and safer than ever with Internet Explorer 8.
• Watch, pause, rewind, and record TV on your PC.
• Easily create a home network and connect your PCs to a printer with HomeGroup.

Professional:

• Everything that Home Premium has plus…
• Run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode.
• Connect to company networks easily and more securely with Domain Join.
• In addition to full-system Backup and Restore found in all editions, you can back up to a home or business network.

Ultimate:

• Everything that Professional has plus…
• Help protect data on your PC and portable storage devices against loss or theft with BitLocker.
• Work in the language of your choice and switch between any of 35 languages.

Is It Difficult To Install Windows 7?

If you currently have Vista, then upgrade is a piece of cake. Just pop in the CD, run Setup, and choose Upgrade as the option. The upgrade process is smooth and automatic.

If you currently have XP, your best choice to start fresh. Backup your files (using a USB external drive), reformat the hard drive, and install a fresh copy of Windows 7. I wouldn’t recommend with the complicated process of upgrade from XP to Windows 7. Someone suggests that you may try to upgrade to Vista first then to Windows 7.

Will Windows 7 run old XP programs?

Since Windows 7 just released, most devices still lack updated drivers for Windows 7. However, most users reported that Vista and XP drivers seem to work just fine. For older applications, Microsoft introduced XP Mode, which creates a virtual, or “shadow” Windows XP operating system running inside Windows 7. XP Mode is only available in the higher-priced Professional and Ultimate editions, though.

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Today’s the day which Microsoft officially replaces its unsuccessful Live Search with a new technology invention: Bing. How is Bing different from Google? For starters, Bing is also set up to organize search results in relevant groups rather than as a series of links. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) for its search presentation.

What that means is that Bing simply displays search results in a more elegant way than Google. While Google is proud of its unique and simple design, users often had to follow through a series of links to find the results they are search for. Bing does a better job in group the search results into different categories. In fact, Microsoft has put up a sponsored ad in Google. Type in Bing in the Google and you will find the following phrases at the top of the page:

Lost in the Links?
It’s Time to Try Bing ™ - The New Decision Engine from Microsoft.

Bing and Decide
It’s Time to Turn Key Words into Key Decisions. Search on Bing Now!

Look at the following search for “Kobe Bryant”:

Notice the small box at the upper left corner? It provides quick navigation to different categories of search results for “Kobe Bryant”. Within the search results, notice how the results are grouped into different categories:

After playing around with different search keywords, the Bing seems to provide reasonably accurate search results. This was a big improvement over the old Live search engine. Just maybe, Bing is the new technology invention worthy of challenging Google’s mighty throne. Or maybe Bing isn’t aimed directly at Google as Microsoft is formally calling it a decision engine rather than search engine.

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Microsoft has applied for a patent on metered, pay-as-you-go computing. The application details Microsoft’s vision of a situation where a standard PC is given away or heavily subsidized. The consumer then pays to use the computer, with charges based on length of usage time and performance levels.

Microsoft notes in the application that the end user could end up paying more for the computer, compared with the one-off cost entailed in the existing PC business model, but argues the user would benefit by having a PC with an extended “useful life.”

The document suggests that “both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model” because “the user is able to migrate the performance level of the computer as needs change over time, while the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.”

By way of example, the application posits a situation involving three “bundles” of applications and performance: office, gaming, and browsing.

“The office bundle may include word-processing and spreadsheet applications, medium graphics performance and two of three processor cores,” the document reads. “The gaming bundle may include no productivity applications but may include 3D graphics support and three of three processor cores. The browsing bundle may include no productivity applications, medium graphics performance and high-speed network interface.”

“Charging for the various bundles may be by bundle and by duration. For example, the office bundle may be $1.00 [68 pence] per hour, the gaming bundle may be $1.25 per hour and the browsing bundle may be $0.80 per hour. The usage charges may be abstracted to ‘units/hour’ to make currency conversions simpler. Alternatively, a bundle may incur a one-time charge that is operable until changed or for a fixed-usage period,” the document reads.

I see this as another attempt by Microsoft to expand its revenue source. This idea may work very well for business computing. However, I don’t believe it will ever work for personal computing. Savvy users like us who can easily upgrade computer parts for a low cost will never opt for this.

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Remember when you were a kid and you misbehaved? What was the first thing  your parents did to make you learn your lesson? Well, mine would take away my playstation and my tv. I could go WEEKS without my gaming fix. I do remember wishing i could run away to a world of fun and games but you know, thats not really logical is it… or isn’t it?

Well, one 15 year old canadian kid lost his xbox 360 privalages and has been missing ever since October 13th. Apparentlyn his parents took away his console and Call of Duty 4 privelages and he went missing that very same day. Do we blame him? Poor kid.

Anyway, jokes aside. Microsoft has decided to double the reward for the safe return of the child which currently stands at $25,000 CAD. Microsoft will also be revealing the information of the people he last played the game with in hopes that they will have more information for the canadian police.

This just goes to show how seriously these kids take gaming. It seems to resemble an addiction in my eyes.

If you are from canada and have more information, please use the contact form to email me. Right now i am going on information from various other blogs.

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Apple and Microsoft have been having this bizarre pissing match for a few years now, but this new set of ads marks confirms what previous volleys seemed to imply: these companies have no intention of actually talking about their products. Microsoft’s feel-good “I’m Joe the Plumber and I’m a PC” campaign was about as substantive as Apple’s disingenuous and outdated attacks on its opponent’s software, but this new set of ads is really nothing more than a vague indictment of Microsoft’s marketing strategy. Maybe that’ll fly with tech news hounds, but most people who see these on TV won’t even know what they’re talking about, much less care.

There’s also the minor matter of Apple accusing Microsoft of spending money on advertising that would be better allocated to fixing Vista. The message, of course, is delivered in an expensive advertising campaign, the week after Apple released brand new, prohibitively expensive laptops. Justin Long’s Mac moves on to criticize Microsoft’s ‘reluctance’ to call Vista by its real name, which is either a misguided dig at the Mojave campaign or some kind of odd jab at the logical dropping of the ‘Vista’ name for Windows 7.

Everyone expects misinformation and questionable techniques in advertising, but that’s not the issue here. These ads seem directed at Microsoft’s corporate management, not their customers. Redmond and Cupertino are having a useless, protracted argument with each other, unaware of the fact that their shouting is going completely over everyone else’s heads.

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One might suppose it’s due diligence to listen to the arguments of companies enormously invested in the outcome of regulatory decisions, so the onus of coming to a reasonable conclusion rests solely on Congress whether to believe Microsoft or Google in two hearings today in the Senate and the House.

And to be sure, legislative judgment will be closely scrutinized. At issue is whether Google’s search advertising deal with Yahoo violates antitrust laws and/or poses significant privacy concerns. It seems only fitting the government—with books on tube systems, dump trucks, and pervasive economic indicator denial—would be dragged out to referee the urination streams of three tech giants, all of them praying the wind doesn’t shift.

Yahoo hasn’t been as quick to issue regulatory statements via press channels, preferring perhaps to sit back as two suitors duke it out, solidifying its place as a pawn, as a piece of meat. Microsoft and Google, however, have their weapons readied, their steely-eyed stares, their tap-dancing shoes.

Because, really, it’s not, never has been about sober judgment; it’s about money, plain and simple, and each company’s end game. They’re asking legislators to settle a civil, monetary dispute, as if legislators don’t have other things to do, and legislators will have to listen to both sides just as judges would have to, fully knowing both sides are slightly (okay, more than slightly) full of it, their arguments tainted by their own goals.

It all comes down to who sings prettiest. Or there is the smallest chance members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee will step outside the razzle-dazzle long enough to make an informed decision.

Microsoft’s argument, predictably, is this: “If search is the gateway to the Internet, and most believe that it is, this deal will put Google in a position to own that gateway and the information that flows through it,” says Brad Smith, Microsoft Corp. senior vice president and general counsel.

“Never before in the history of advertising has one company been in the position to control prices on up to 90 percent of advertising in a single medium. Not in television, not in radio, not in publishing. It should not happen on the Internet.

“When Yahoo! talks about this deal generating up to $800 million in additional revenue, that’s money out of the pockets of American businesses, big and small, who will pay higher prices for the very same ads they buy from Yahoo! today.”

It’s actually a very smart argument, even if rich coming from king-market-cornerer Microsoft, and echoes another smart theory about the leverage Google stands to gain in the online space. Smith also argues that so much control by default sets the nation’s privacy policy, too.

“If one company – Google – controls up to 90 percent of online search advertising it will have a complete picture of your online activities,” says Smith. “If that happens, Congress won’t need to enact a federal privacy policy, we will already have a national privacy policy – Google’s privacy policy.”

Just as predictably, Google believes those fears are unfounded and spins it so 90 percent control is good for everybody involved. Their argument, mainly rests on something rather abstract but plausible: A true monopoly is hard to come by on the Internet, so long as its open and interoperable natures are preserved. There will always be competition, always a challenger.

One of those challengers, Google argues is still Yahoo, despite the search ad agreement. Google will not be providing a search engine for Yahoo, only advertisements, which will not increase Google’s search share. Senior VP for Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond argues the agreement is actually beneficial for Internet users and advertisers alike because of more precise targeting.

Also, it’s not unusual for companies to make commercial arrangements, and regulators have recognized the end-value of such arrangements to consumers. Privacy concerns, says Drummond, are overblown and cites an agreement between the two companies to anonymize IP addresses before search requests are passed to Google.

That may actually degrade search ad targeting, an outside voice says, making ads on Yahoo’s search results less on the mark than Google’s own. But these are all just details that cloud the reality: Google wants more reach, Yahoo wants protection from Microsoft, and Microsoft only wants the government to step in as a bouncer so Google is effectively junk-blocked and Yahoo’s head is pushed closer to Microsoft’s lap.

If the government’s smart—i.e., not willing to be manipulated—it will step away from this issue for now. The chief plaintiff is far from altruistic, is self-serving and hypocritical; Microsoft’s own interests, as always, prevail over everything. By weighing in heavily against Google, despite Google’s own self-interest, the government is a party to and accomplice in Microsoft’s greed and bullying, indeed providing Microsoft the crowbar to wedge them apart long enough rend Yahoo to pieces—which will probably happen anyway at Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting in August. A nice regulatory ruling is just the insult to injury Microsoft seems to be looking for.

The market will probably decide this issue, and if not, then anybody except Microsoft should be on Capitol Hill complaining. Ask? AOL? MIA so far.

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In one of the more bizarre responses in a three-way merger deal fracas since the Viacom/Paramount/Blockbuster deal of the early 1990s, a Microsoft statement this afternoon — ostensibly to refute some of the details described in a Yahoo statement early Sunday morning — also manages to separate Microsoft’s point of view from that of financier Carl Icahn. Specifically, the statement characterizes Icahn as exacerbating a deal that Microsoft was trying to put together at the request of Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, not the other way around.

“The enhanced proposal for an alternate search transaction that we submitted late Friday was submitted at the request of Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock as a result of apparent attempts by Mr. Icahn [emphasis ours] to have Microsoft and Yahoo engage on a search transaction on terms Mr. Icahn believed Microsoft would be willing to accept and which Microsoft understands Mr. Icahn had discussed with Yahoo.”

This new statement makes it appear as though Icahn and Yahoo were working out the terms and that Microsoft worked to meet their demands, in a move which, like the others before, ultimately failed. In his own statement this morning, Icahn said he tried to broker a deal that would enable Microsoft to purchase a chunk of Yahoo, which contained its search business but which also contained its more valuable Asian business assets, for a partial deal Icahn valued at $33 per share. Yahoo flatly refused that deal late Saturday night, Pacific coast time.

“Microsoft’s proposal did not include changes to Yahoo’s governance,” reads Microsoft’s statement this afternoon. “At the time Microsoft submitted its enhanced proposal, Microsoft asked that Yahoo confirm whether it would agree that the enhancements were sufficient to form the basis for the parties to engage in negotiations over the weekend on a letter of intent and more detailed term sheets. This discussion has been mischaracterized as a take it or leave it ultimatum, rather than a timetable in order to move forward to intensive negotiations. Yahoo informed Microsoft on Saturday that it had rejected the proposal.”

Yahoo’s statement early Sunday morning included this: “The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo. The Yahoo Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo for the up to the one year [sic] it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal.”

Strangely, Icahn’s statement this morning agrees with neither Microsoft’s nor Yahoo’s presentation of the events, saying that the deal would mean changes to Yahoo’s board, but that CEO Jerry Yang would stay on as “Chief Yahoo” (which may not necessarily have meant CEO).

“Yahoo tells you in their press release that a condition of the deal was the immediate replacement of the current board and removal of top management,” Icahn wrote, directing his statement to Yahoo shareholders. “Yahoo neglected to mention we were willing to discuss keeping a number of the current board members and Jerry Yang as Chief Yahoo.”

Microsoft’s statement today did not say whether it would discontinue attempts to acquire part of Yahoo, after being spurned once again over the weekend.

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Ending all speculation, Microsoft has finally officially confirmed that it is cutting the price on its Xbox 360 Pro model by $50 USD as well as introducing a new 60GB model that will retail for $349 USD.

Starting today the 20GB Pro model will sell for $299. The software giant says the new model will go on sale beginning in early August. Strangely though, Microsoft will continue to sell their stripped down Arcade model for $279. The Elite model will stay with its $449 pricetag.

Albert Penello, Xbox director of product management, explained the release of the new model.

“No one device offers the depth and breadth of entertainment that Xbox 360 can deliver, and now you’ll have three times the storage to manage all that great content,” he said.

The confirmation puts an end to a poorly kept secret. For weeks now flyers from different retailers have shown off the $50 dollar price cut, yet Microsoft refused to comment.

The price cut is seen as a way for the company to pick up lagging sales. For 2008, the console is constantly being outsold by the Wii and the PlayStation 3 and both Nintendo and Sony have said they are not planning a price cut for 2008. The Wii retails for $250 and is still hard to find on retail shelves, while the 40GB model of the PS3 sells for $400.

When asked about the new price cut, Sony’s Howard Stringer said that it was simply “evidence that the Xbox 360 was falling behind in the contest for sales.”

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Yahoo formally rejected a proposal from Microsoft and Carl Icahn in a statement issued on Saturday.

They had been given 24 hours to reach a decision by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Friday night. They reached a decision, but probably not the one that Ballmer and Icahn were looking for.

Yahoo says that its advertising deal with Google offers “superior financial value, reports Kyung Bok Cho at Bloomberg.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock has said that the alliance between Microsoft and Icahn has “anything but the interests of Yahoo’s stockholders in mind…it’s ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal”.

Microsoft had recently said that it could no longer negotiate with Yahoo’s current board, and it appears that this has been proven to be an accurate statement.

Ballmer and Icahn have yet to get the final words out on the matter. Nobody seems to be able to reach them for comment, though I’m sure that will change in the near future.

Meanwhile, Google should be happy with Yahoo’s decision not to sell Microsoft their search business.

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News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said it was “very unlikely” his company would reach any type of deal with Yahoo and said Yahoo and Microsoft will not be involved in any type of transaction.

On the Microsoft/Yahoo deal Murdoch said,” There won’t be a deal. There’s bad personal feelings.”

Microsoft was in negotiations earlier this year to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion but talks broke down in May after the two companies failed to reach an agreement.

“In six months, (Microsoft) will walk away,” Murdoch, said at the annual Allen & Co media and technology event, Reuters reported.

After Microsoft tried to take over Yahoo, News Corp was in talks with Yahoo to combine its MySpace social network with Yahoo and also discussed a deal with Microsoft to take over Yahoo.

Murdoch said Capital Research, a major investor of Yahoo and its portfolio manager Gordon Crawford, publicly criticized Yahoo for not being able to reach a deal with Microsoft and that Crawford would have been happy with a $33 per share buyout.

“He’s pissed he didn’t get $33,” Murdoch said, referring to Crawford.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang echoed what Murdoch said about a possible Microsoft/Yahoo deal telling Boomtown that allowing Carl Icahn to manage a deal would be bad for shareholders.

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