Computer News

Microsoft has big plans in store for its Windows Vista operating system. The company released a release candidate version of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista in mid-November. SP1 is supposed to address a number of performance-related issues with Vista and includes a number of security update and bug fixes that have been rolled [...]

Microsoft Corp. is pulling back from a system that disables programs on users’ computers if it suspects the software is pirated, opting instead for a gentler approach based on nagging alerts.Microsoft said late Monday it will roll out the new version of Windows Genuine Advantage with the first “service pack” for Windows Vista, due in [...]

Yahoo! and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.
The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter [...]

Microsoft Corp. is raising its Silverlight rich-media delivery software to a new level — in name, at least. Instead of calling the next release of the cross-platform browser plug-in Version 1.1, as previously planned, Microsoft will bestow a Version 2.0 name on the upgrade, according to a blog posting today by Scott Guthrie, a general manager [...]

Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system is about to get faster and Windows Vista isn’t, according to a report that caused a stir online this week as industry watchers speculated that a zippier XP could keep customers from upgrading to Vista.
Microsoft, however, said it’s too early to evaluate the two service packs it plans to [...]

In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla, and technologies such as Ajax and software-as-a-service, as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft’s monopoly in the operating system and browser markets. Ten states and the District of Columbia made the unusual claim to try to [...]

Windows XP Service Pack 3, the update scheduled to be released next year, runs Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite 10% faster than XP SP2, a performance testing software developer reported Friday. Devil Mountain Software Inc., which earlier in the week claimed that Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of [...]

Not a Windows XP SP3 beta tester, but can’t wait for the official release? Or just like to stay on the bleeding edge? There’s a way you can get access to it via Microsoft Update. It does involve editing the registry, but it’s not that difficult.
Here’s all you need to do. You need to create [...]

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate build is live. Microsoft is hammering away at the third and final service pack for Windows XP, and is making consistent headway in the matter. Truth be told, since the 2004 availability of XP SP2, and after the numerous delays of SP3 across 2006 and 2007, Service Pack [...]

A new Trojan horse that started to spread early Sunday via Microsoft Corp.’s instant messaging client has already infected about 11,000 PCs, a security company said today. The as-yet-unnamed Trojan horse began hitting systems about 7 a.m. EST on Sunday, according to Roei Lichtman, the director of product management at Aladdin Knowledge Systems Ltd. “We [...]