Posts Tagged: microsoft

0Internet Explorer 9 LogoIE10 for Windows 7 finally arrives

Anoth­er item that we’re a bit late to cov­er is the arrival of Inter­net Explorer 10 for Win­dows 7 (and Serv­er 2008 R2).  As with past releases, older OSes are being left behind with no sup­port for Vista or XP, which are stuck on IE9 and IE8 respect­ively. If you have Win­dows 7 we recom­mend upgrad­ing (even if you don’t use IE) and of course there is no harm giv­ing it a try. We’ll prob­ably be stick­ing with Fire­fox and Chrome ourselves, but IE some­times has its uses.

Makalenin Tamamını Oku

0windows 8 logoThree more strikes against Windows 8

In case the Metro UI isn’t[int­link id=“2543” type=“post”]repellent[/intlink] enough, Microsoft have admit­ted 3 more things that should make any­one con­sid­er­ing Win­dows 8 think twice.… Makalenin Tamamını Oku

0Storage SpacesMicrosoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Microsoft’s Steve Sinof­sky has writ­ten a detailed art­icle about a genu­inely excit­ing new fea­ture of Win­dows 8 — Stor­age Spaces. I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth. How­ever I will point out a key line from a home media serv­er point of view: “There’s anoth­er resi­li­ency attrib­ute, called par­ity, which dir­ects Stor­age Spaces to store some redund­ancy inform­a­tion along­side user data con­tained with­in the space, thereby enabling auto­mat­ic data recon­struc­tion in the event of phys­ic­al disk fail­ure.” To me, this sounds a LOT like a soft­ware RAID5 sim­il­ar to that provided by UnRAIDUntil Win­dows 8 is released and the tech­no­logy is fully reviewed the details are of course some­what spec­u­lat­ive, but my read­ing of the art­icle leads me to believe that Stor­age Spaces will enable the strip­ing of disks, with a par­ity in the event of single disk fail­ure. Fur­ther, it is reas­on­able to assume that this sys­tem will work with stand­ard non-enter­prise drives without suf­fer­ing any [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]compatibility issues[/intlink].  Finally, it is reas­on­able to assume that Stor­age Spaces will offer some of the per­form­ance bene­fits of hard­ware raid‑5 too. If you have a home serv­er with a lot of media and you want some redund­ancy, without huge cost, then this tech­no­logy sounds like it might be the per­fect solu­tion. Thanks Microsoft!

0Serial Key LogoRetrieving serials from Windows

I am fre­quently giv­en PCs to repair that require a rein­stall of win­dows. These often don’t come with a full list of seri­al num­bers for the soft­ware installed on them. To avoid the hassle of ask­ing the own­er to dig the seri­als out, it is easi­er to simply pull the seri­als from the old install before wip­ing.… Makalenin Tamamını Oku

1Internet Explorer 9 LogoInternet Explorer 9 — Better than many expected?

Just a quick post, it seems that Microsoft have finally made a reas­on­able web browser, or at least the folks at Tom’s Hard­ware seem to think soI’m still look­ing for­ward to Fire­fox 4, and hop­ing Moz­illa will deliv­er a 64bit ver­sion as prom­ised, but a bit of com­pet­i­tion from the (still) dom­in­ant play­er in the browser mar­ket can­’t be a bad thing.

5Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree anti-virus / anti-malware for Windows Server 2008

Microsoft are offer­ing a down­load­able Beta of ver­sion 2 of their free secur­ity app Secur­ity Essen­tials.  This works on Win­dows Serv­er.  For any­one (like me) who is using Serv­er 2008 at home (e.g. on a file serv­er) and needs anti-vir­us, I highly recom­mend this.

Update: [int­link id=“96” type=“post”]Version 2 final[/intlink] is now available.

0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoMicrosoft Security Essentials final

Microsoft have updated their free secur­ity essen­tials pack­age again. The soft­pe­dia link from my [int­link id=“20” type=“post”]original post[/intlink] now offers ver­sion 1.0.1611.00 to download.

-update-

This appears to be the final release and is now avail­able dir­ect from Microsoft

0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoMicrosoft AntiVirus updated

Microsoft have now updated their free anti-vir­us to ver­sion 1.0.1500 which is avail­able from win­dows update if you have the pre­vi­ous ver­sion installed (see [int­link id=“10” type=“post”]my pre­vi­ous post[/intlink]). If you want to install 1.0.1500 without installing the old ver­sion first it can be down­loaded from Microsoft. If you’re in a coun­try where its unavail­able then you can down­load it from Soft­Pe­dia

0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree Anti-Virus from Microsoft

Microsoft have released (a few weeks ago) a free Beta of their new Anti-Vir­us / Secur­ity product Microsoft Secur­ity Essen­tials. Unfor­tu­nately as a UK res­id­ent when I vis­it the offi­cial Microsoft page I am told “This beta is avail­able only to cus­tom­ers in the United States, Israel, China and Brazil”. A quick google search quickly turns up a down­load link on Soft­Pe­dia which works. There are down­loads of x86 and x64 ver­sions of Secur­ity Essen­tials for Win­dows XP, Vista and 7