by wildcherry on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | 1 Comment

The new Microsoft online storefront features some new categories including ‘Computers’, so you can now go there to buy Windows 7 PCs as well as accessoriesand even third-party software like Adobe Photoshop and Nero 9.

So far, the new look and fresh categories are only reserved for the U.S. online store. The online Microsoft Store opened for business last November. The online store was a replacement for Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace site. When it opened, the online store only allowed users to purchase Microsoft hardware and software — games, keyboards, games and gaming consoles, Windows (client and server versions), Office and development tools. The electronic distribution capability of the online store made it an ideal complement to netbooks, Microsoft executives said.

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by wildcherry on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | Deals, Products Review | 1 Comment

Microsoft has analysed the data from millions of user computing sessions to find out exactly what people do with their computers, then attacked the “pain points” to make Windows 7 quicker and smoother. (About 15m people used the Windows 7 beta.) Get your version at Windows 7 Download Center

The most obvious difference is that Windows 7 doesn’t keep annoying you with prompts — though it’s also true that the latest version of Vista is much less annoying than the original. In fact, you can set the degree of annoyance on a sliding scale, though reducing it increases the risk of security breaches. However, Windows 7 is vastly more secure than XP and, in any case, the threat landscape has changed since XP was trashed by worms such as Blaster and Slammer. Today, the more important security changes are in the Internet Explorer 8 browser which, uniquely, defends against cross-site scripting.

Another obvious difference is that Windows 7 uses fewer resources.

Where Vista really needed 2GB of memory, Windows 7 will run quite happily in 1GB on a slow dual-core Intel processor, though I’d still recommend 2GB or, for preference, 4GB with the speedy 64-bit version of Windows 7.

The reduced footprint and some optimisation means Windows 7 sleeps and wakes up faster (though it’s still not in the same class as Mac OS X).

And laptop batteries should last longer. I’ve been running Windows 7 on an Asus UL30 laptop with a claimed battery life of around 11 hours with Vista: it now does more than 12 hours.

Any PC that currently runs Vista will be better at running Windows 7 – a first for Microsoft – and it should also run on most PCs that will run XP SP2. (Search YouTube and you will find users showing off by loading it on unsuitable systems, including antiques with Pentium III chips.) The catch is that upgrading a PC running Windows XP requires a clean installation of Windows 7: you can’t do an in-place upgrade. This has been a source of complaints, because it means reinstalling all your applications as well.

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