While most people probably don't care what Microsoft does to patch or improve Windows Vista any more, Service Pack 2 is now available to Technet and MSDN subscribers and is slated for public release on December 4th.

Could SP2 actually take care of some of the irritations that have plagued other Vista users? Perhaps more importantly, does anyone really care? Vista has been taking such a beating in the media that it seems as though no one will. Prevailing sentiment seems to be that Vista should be ignored and left to die while development on Windows 7 continues.

While enhancements like Windows Search 4.0, native Blu-Ray media burning, improved wireless, and Bluetooth 2.1 support are great, I've yet to see any perception-altering features mentioned.

Personally, I've never hated Vista, and I've been able to work through or disable any of the annoyances I've encoutered (like UAC). I recently installed Ultimate x64 and I've been enjoying quite a bit. Photoshop CS4 runs like a dream, and Eset recently released a beta of my favorite internet security suite.

My Vista install is running just fine right now, but if SP2 can tweak my system's performance or squeeze a few more minutes of battery life out of my laptop, then I'm all for it.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Vista SP2 will do anything to really improve the OS, or does it stink of a last-ditch effort to "salvage" the experiment?

When you're using a search engine to find what you're looking for, you're probably used to typing a query, looking at the results, and refining your query. Every now and again you might even click a button that says it will show you similar results. Now Microsoft has added a button with exactly that feature to the company's image search engine.

When you conduct a search using Live Search Images, you can hover your mouse over any image and click the "show similar images" button. To be honest, it's a bit tricky to tell exactly what this does. Because if you've searched for something like "stick" you're probably already looking at a window filled with pictures of sticks. If you click the similar images button, you'll wind up on another page with images filled with sticks. That said, when I said I wanted to see similar images to a stick bug, I did get another picture of an insect - and several pictures of deodorant, glue sticks, and stick figures.

If you're looking for a more advanced image comparison service, check out TinEye, a beta site that allows you to upload a picture and find images on the internet that are compositionally similar.

[via Google Operating System]

Not everyone wants to let Windows handle downloading and installing updates. If you prefer the DIY approach, here are three ways to keep your system up to date without Windows helping out.

1. Windiz Updates provides an experience that's as similar to the original as its name. The twist is that this service won't work in Internet Explorer - you'll need Firefox and the Windiz addon. It doesn't collect any personal information, and IE doesn't even need to be installed on your system to use it.

It's an intelligent system and won't download old updates that have been superceded by newer ones. Windiz also won't install updates that have potential security issues. New updates with It can even provide updates for Microsoft's golden oldies like 95 and NT.

About three years after acquiring FolderShare, a utility for synchronizing files across multiple computers, Microsoft is retiring the application and plans to replace it with a similar utility called Windows Live Sync. You could make the case that what's happening is Microsoft is renaming FolderShare rather than replacing it, as the new version will likely look a lot like FolderShare and have many of the same functions. But it will also have a few improvements including:

• Ability to sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each
• You can login with your Windows Live ID
• Integration with the Windos Recycle Bin
• New clients for Windows and Mac
• Unicode support for synchronizing files in other languages (beside English)

Why Microsoft is continuing to push this software at the same time as it develops Windows Live Mesh which allows you to synchronize files across mutilple computers, the web, and mobile devices, is anyone's guess.

If it seems like every few days we're checking to see if Microsoft plans to buy Yahoo!, it's because we are. Earlier this year, Microsoft offered to buy the search company for $33 a share, but Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang said that bid undervalued the company. After a little back and forth, Microsoft walked away.

Flash forward half a year, and Yahoo! stock is trading at around the $10 mark, Yang has announced plans to step down as CEO, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company still isn't interested in buying Yahoo!. Ballmer says Microsoft is still interested in pursuing a deal with Yahoo! to leverage the company's search technology. But that's not too surprising, since Ballmer's been saying that for months.

Does this mean that we won't see two of the largest companies in the software and internet space join forces? No, not really. Ballmer could just be negotiating or waiting for Yahoo! stock to drop low enough that he can pick up the company with nothing but spare change found in his couch cushions. But it is interesting to know that the departure of Yahoo!'s CEO seems to have no bearing on Ballmer's position.

Microsoft announced yesterday that Live OneCare, its anti-virus/malware application, will be put to rest on June 30, 2009. A replacement offering is slated for release around the same time.

Currently codenamed Morro, the new program will be completely free. Microsoft's aim is to "[..]focus on getting the majority of consumers the essential protection they need by providing comprehensive, real-time anti-malware protection, covering such threats as viruses, spyware, rootkits, trojans, and other emerging threats, in a single, focused solution."

That's a fairly altruistic mission statement. Even though Microsoft has received plenty of praise for apps like SteadyState and Live Writer, the public still doesn't perceive Microsoft as a company that gives away good software for free.

And then there's last month's software report by NPD, which showed Live OneCare actually outselling McAffee Virusscan. It's done fairly well in terms of sales, so why change now?

The move makes sense in at least one way: protecting their own OS from malicious applications. Work never stops when it comes to finding exploitable weaknesses in Windows. If the new product is widely adopted and works at least as well as other free protection offerings (like Avast, AVG, Avira, Comodo), Windows might appear a bit more secure.

For full details, visit the Live OneCare team blog.

[ via BetaNews ]

While in in many cases it would be a security risk, having your Windows XP computer log in automatically can be useful. For example, I have my Windows XP instance running under a virtual machine on my Mac. The easiest way to do this would be to use the Administrator account and simply leave the password blank. However, this has two distinct disadvantages: you can't log onto a domain with a machine that is not using a password, and you cannot have a machine configured this way accept Remote Desktop connections.

I have no need to use Remote Desktop to access my virtual machine, but since my XP instance needs to access a Windows network, I do need a password set. In the past, the easiest way to configure your machine to automatically log on was to use TweakUI powertoy for XP, where there is a setting under Logon for configuring automatic logons.

But there's an even faster way do do this.

On the machine that you want to configure to auto-login, click Start, Run, then type "control userpasswords2" (without the quotation marks) and press enter. In the window that pops up, click on the user account that you would like to automatically log in, then uncheck the "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer" checkbox. You will now be asked for the password for this account. Set it, click OK and OK, and you're done.

Microsoft has launched a new online store, cleverly titled the Microsoft Store. I know, who woulda thunk? The fact that Microsoft is selling software like Windows Vista and Office 2007 as well as hardware like the Xbox 360 isn't particularly surprising. But what is new is the fact that Microsoft is offering customers the option of purchasing physical media like CDs and DVDs or downloadable software. And that covers all Microsoft software that's available on the site, including Windows upgrades, full versions of Windows, and Office.

Microsoft charges the same price for downloads as it does for softwar that comes on a disc and stuffed in a box. I would have expected Microsoft to charge a few bucks less for the downloadable version since there are no shipping or packaging costs. But the company apparently decided to go another way.

The other surprising thing? The fact that it's 2008 and this is the first time Microsoft has sold these products as digital downloads.

[via Profy]

Microsoft is rolling out a number of changes to its Live.com portal and Windows Live suite of applications. In a nutshell, the company is trying to add social networking-style features to the web portal. Users will be able to create profile pages where they can connect to other friends, share images and other media, and post short status updates. In other words, it looks a lot like Facebook. But Microsoft will be leveraging its existing services like Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. Your IM contacts will automatically be added to your Windows Live contact list.

The new Windows Live also supports integration with third party services like Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, and Twitter. And Microsoft is increasing the amount of free storage space for Windows Live SkyDrive users from 5GB to 25GB.

Microsoft is doing a phased rollout of the new services, so you may not notice any changes to your account right away. But all existing Windows Live users should see the new features within the next few weeks.

The company is also releasing new versions of its downloadable and web-based applications including Windows live Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Photos, and Windows Live People, a one stop shop for contact management.

The Windows Mobile team has publicly released Internet Explorer Mobile 6. There's just one catch: You can't run it on your Windows Mobile phone yet. Instead, the download lets you run Windows Mobile 6.1.4 on your Windows system in an emulator. So if you want to get a feel for how the new browser, which is based on Internet Explorer 6, will work, you can take it for a spin. If all you're waiting for a mobile version so that you can actually view full web pages on your Windows Mobile phone or PDA, it looks like you'll have to wait a bit longer.

This is the second time in the last few weeks that we've seen a software developer preview a mobile browser by releasing a desktop-only demo. But while Mozilla released a relatively light weight desktop version of Fennec, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 demo includes a full Windows Mobile emulator, which makes the installer file weigh in at 200+ MB.

That said, Internet Explorer Mobile 6 is a huge improvement over past versions of Pocket Internet Explorer. Like Safari for the iPhone, you can view full web pages the way they would look in a desktop browser and then zoom in tight for a better reading experience. Web pages did take a fairly long time to load, but it's not clear if that's the browser's fault or the fact that it's connecting to the internet through an ActiveSync connection with my laptop.

Internet Explorer Mobile 6 also features Flash Lite 3.1 and the Javascript v5.7 engine from Internet Explorer 8, which means you can watch Flash content from sites like YouTube and render Javascript-heavy pages like Google Docs.

My only real complaint with Internet Explorer Mobile 6 is that there's still no support for tabbed browsing.

[via Windows Mobile team Blog]

Photosynth, the much-anticipated three-dimensional photo experience from Microsoft Live Labs, has finally launched. "Synths," as they're called, are series of photos stitched together by a fancy algorithm that compares them to one another to create an immersive 360-degree viewing experience. You can start exploring Photosynth on most Windows PCs (and some Macs running virtual machines) now.

Photosynth is integrated with Live Maps, as well, so you can view other people's synths of various locations, right from the map. That's what's causing people to compare Photosynth to Google Street View, which is the closest product out there right now. But Google Street View doesn't let you create anything on your own, with a regular digital camera. Keep an eye on Photosynth as -- I know this is clichéd, but it may be true -- a game-changing technology.

While I'm generally pleased with Windows 7 so far, I've found myself shaking my head every now and then. In some instances it's obvious that Microsoft has been paying attention. Other times, not so much.

I've noticed five issues so far that, though minor, leave me wondering if Microsoft is going to be able to pull off a really great OS by its projected mid-2009 release.

.ZIP Files
Windows 7 still takes forever to extract files from a zip archive, which leaves me dumbfounded. An 18.4mb zip containing only two files took me almost 23 seconds to extract using the right-click context menu's extract all option. Using 7zip's context menu extraction, the same operation took less than three seconds.

Zip files have been supported natively since Windows XP. Seven years later, there's still no improvement. Third party applications are so much better at handling .zip files it makes me wonder why Microsoft bothered adding support in the first place.

After reading yet another rundown of what's so great about Windows 7, I noticed an annoying trend. Things like "no sidebar!" and "wallpaper slideshows!" appear to be among the most noteworthy achievements to some reviewers. I decided our loyal DS readers deserved to read a list of features that really do kick ass.

Enough mucking about: here are ten Windows 7 features that are genuinely worth getting excited about.

10. Easier and better wireless networking. Windows 7 takes a little from XP and a little from Vista, and rolls it all into a neat little package. Connection switching only requires two clicks and it can be done right from the system tray icon. Windows 7 also detects three more access points near my home than XP and Vista, and the connections to my work and home routers resume instantly when my laptop wakes.

9. Device stage. Right now, Windows treats multifunction devices like separate entities.This really doesn't make much sense: is your all-in-one three separate pieces of hardware? No? WIth device stage, you'll see only a single device in the control panel which you can then explore to access its multiple capabilities. To see it in action, check out Engadget's video from WinHEC.

Device Stage will improve integration with cell phones, PDAs, personal media players, cameras, and more - and it's a sign that Microsoft is more concerned about simplicity and ease of use than they were with Vista.

Microsoft has all but confirmed that the company is hoping to ship Windows 7 in time for next year's holiday season. In the past Microsoft has said the next generation Windows operating system would be available about three years after Windows Vista's January 2007 release. But CNET reports that a Microsoft official is confirming that things appear to be ahead of schedule.

The news came out of a presentation at WinHEC. And it's not a huge surprise. After all, an early build of Windows 7 is already in the hands of developers and a ton of folks who know how to use BitTorrent. The early build is still rough around the edges and lacks some of the features Microsoft hopes to ship in the final version. But initial reports indicate that it's more responsive than Windows Vista and has a number of improvements affecting startup, battery life, and general usability.

At least one computer maker has already said that it plans to release a laptop running Windows 7 as early as mid-2009. At the time, that sounded like optimisitc talk. Now it's starting to look a bit more realistic.

A few seconds after Google kicked Yahoo! to the curb by severing an agreement to place AdSense ads on Yahoo! search pages, folks started speculating that Yahoo! might go crawling back to Microsoft. The two companies had engaged in extensive talks earlier this year. But Yahoo! rejected Microsoft's initial buyout offer and everything went downhill from there.

Now Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a message for Yahoo! "We moved on." Ballmer says Microsoft might be willing to look at a partnership that would allow Micorosft to use Yahoo! Search or other technologies. But the software giant has no plans to purchase the internet portal.