Stardock, the people that brought you ObjectDesktop and WindowsBlinds now have released TweakVista (as part of the ObjectDesktop suite). From their page: Microsoft has increased both the power and complexity of its popular Windows operating system with the release of Windows Vista. Stardock’s TweakVista™ enhancement application helps you configure Windows Vista to meet your personal needs by improving performance. Unlike other power tools for Windows, TweakVista™ automatically prompts enhancement...

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Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world. As the next wave of innovation from Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, these three products will provide a reliable and security-enhanced enterprise platform, serve as the foundation for the next generation of Web-based service applications, and broadly support virtualization and business intelligence....

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Jeff Atwood has a good piece on why you shouldn't run as an Admin. He even links to another good piece on the subject by Aaron Margosis. Jeff makes his point by visiting a malware website with an unprotected system running an unpatched IE 6.0. The site installed the following spyware on his machine (not that he didn't click on anything or download anything) (Quote from Adam McNeil of Webroot Software): Webroot SpySweeper detected the following spies after allowing the installer to run over night....

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3 Component Details Subscore Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7400 @ 2.16GHz 5.0 Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB 4.7 Graphics NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M 3.5 Gaming graphics 399 MB Total available graphics memory 3.0 Primary hard disk 44GB Free (93GB Total) 5.0 Not all that impressive for a Dell Latitude D820, IMO. I do like that the disk is a 5. I expected the disk to be lower, since typically disk performance on laptop computers is, in a word, abysmal...

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PC World is reporting that your wonderful ReadyBoost drive doesn't boost your performance all that much in Vista. Sadly, that is my experience also. Yes, I finally got my new laptop and it's running 64-bit Vista Business. I haven't prepared a report on it yet, but that will be coming in the (relatively) near future. They sum up perfectly how ReadyBoost is supposed to work here: The premise is this: Although writing data to and reading it from a flash drive is in most cases slower than writing and...

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According to Microsoft Watch, Windows Server 2008 will be Microsoft's last 32-bit OS. After that, future Microsoft OSes will be 64-bit only. Microsoft Watch - Server - Microsoft Looks to 64-Bit Future UPDATE: engadget is reporting that the 64-bit move applies only to server products and not desktop products...

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Paul Thurrott claims to have the inside scoop on both Vista SP1 and XP SP3. Microsoft will ship Windows Vista SP1 concurrently with Longhorn Server in Q3 2007 and SP1 will include a major kernel update for Vista that will bring the client OS up to speed with the version of the Windows kernel in Longhorn Server Certainly that has been my impression for quite some time. If you spend any time trying to read between the lines with MS, that's the only reasonable conclusion. He's not happy at all about...

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Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror tells you how to legally evaluate Vista for 120 days (instead of the standard 30) before entering a product key. When you install without a product key, you get an automatic 30 day evaluation period.* This probably isn't news to anyone. What may be news to you, however, is that you can easily extend the 30-day Windows Vista grace period to 120 days. No hacks required. This is an official, supported operation directly from Microsoft. To extend the grace period another...

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Posted yesterday on the Microsoft Live Labs blog: We are excited to announce public availability of the Deepfish technology preview from Microsoft Live Labs. Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. This looks pretty cool. Basically, it enables you to see the whole page on your mobile device, and then zoom in...

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Yesterday, MS released SQL Server 2005 SP2, and Virtual PC 2007. I'm downloading both right now, but I doubt that I'll end up using Virtual PC 2007, which is somewhat odd since I play around with virtual machines all the time. On my disk, I have virtual images of just about every OS Microsoft has released, a virtual image of my old TRS-80 Model I Level II, and I even played around with Mac OS X 10.3 (pre-Intel--thank you PearPC). I first started playing with virtual machines way back before MS had...

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