A new feature of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system that created a stir is its "XP mode" feature, where the operating system provides the user with a sandbox Windows XP desktop environment, complete with all its features, and application support. What makes the feature even more interesting that documents, settings, and XP-affine applications installed in the environment could be seamlessly integrated with the host Windows 7 environment.

It turns out now that the feature explicitly requires hardware-level virtualization support. AMD and Intel, both have their proprietary virtualization features, although the two chose to make it available only to a few CPU models. Generally, entry-level desktop/mobile CPUs don't carry the feature. For consumer client desktop variants of Windows 7, the "XP mode" feature would require AMD-V feature by the processor. Currently all processors by AMD support this, except those from the Sempron series, according to an AMD spokesperson. For enterprise variants of the OS, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) MED-V 2.0 builds on top of Windows Virtual PC and provides centralized management of Windows XP Mode. MED-V is a virtualization management platform. It will be made available within 90 days of the commercial availability of Windows 7.

AMD is ready with the industry's first WHQL-certified set of drivers for Microsoft Windows 7. The Catalyst WHQL Windows 7 driver comes as yet another first for AMD, and a first for Microsoft's Windows 7 certification program. Dated 5/5/2009, the drivers carry the version 8.612, feature full support for Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.1 and works with ATI Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 series. The drivers also provide support for ATI Stream GPGPU technology.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.612 WHQL for Windows 7 64-bit, and Windows 7 32-bit.

The wait is over, Microsoft has published the official download page for Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC), that's not some pirated torrent link. Offered now directly from Microsoft are five different language versions (English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish) of both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 RC. Minimum system specs to run Windows 7 include:

• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Don't waste more time, and go directly to the Windows 7 RC download page.

Ahead of the launch of Microsoft's next big update to its Windows operating system, the company seems to be ready with its product compatibility assurance logo. The "Compatible with Windows 7" logo, was leaked to the media, sourced by MadboxPC. It may feature electronically, or printed as stickers. The logo will be featured on computer hardware and software that is compatible with Windows 7. What criteria exactly define qualification for this logo is not known at this point in time.

It is predicted that silicon giant Intel may face the greatest fine for its alleged anti-competitive practices, in a case heard in the European Union. Intel is currently being investigated for irregularities including encouraging hardware vendors not to use AMD products, and offering discounts. Legal analysts estimate the fine to be well over 1,000,000,000 EUR, over double that of what is heading Microsoft's way. In a statement to the New York Times, says Howard Cartlidge, head of the EU competition group at law firm Olswang in London, "I would be surprised if the fine isn't as high or higher than in the Microsoft case. Technology markets are where the European Commission has perceived particular problems due to dominant companies."

The ongoing trial in EU runs parallel to similar anti-competition trials in Japan and Korea, where Intel is found guilty. It is a joint effort between EU and United States Federal Trade Commission investogators. Despite previous convictions, Intel maintains that it has done nothing wrong and is confident of being found innocent. Says Intel spokesperson Robert Manetta, "Overall, Intel's conduct is lawful, pro-competitive and beneficial to consumers." Naturally, AMD begs to differ. Sources in AMD reveal that Intel conducted anti-competitive practices throughout, to maintain an 80-20 competition. The number took very little change even when AMD was at the peak of technology advancement over Intel.

In a conversation with Pocket-lint, Acer's UK MD Bobby Watkins, has said that Windows 7 will be available pre-loaded on their upcoming All-In-One Z5600 PC from the 23 October 2009. Any of these models which come pre-loaded with Vista which are purchased up to 30 days before this date are also eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 7.

"23rd October is the date the Windows 7 will be available. There is a 30 day upgrade time so that customers don't wait to buy a new computer, so if you buy during that 30 day period, you'll get a free upgrade to Windows 7", Bobby Watkins, Acer's UK MD told Pocket-lint.

The Z5600 comes with a built-in touchscreen which one would presume is the reasoning behind Acer's decision to start pre-loading their AIO PC with Windows 7, so as to take advantage of the new OS's capabilites. Also mentioned was the fact that the new Asus Eee Top shipping at the end of september will be in store for people to "touch and feel".

There is still no official word from Microsoft on the matter, but although Windows 7 may be released to manufacturing from the end of October, it could still be a long wait to the expected date of January 2010 for Windows 7 to hit retail.

Today Microsoft Corp. has reached a significant milestone with the Release Candidate (RC) of the highly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, now available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers here. Broader public availability will begin May 5 on the Microsoft Download Center here. The RC milestone is a result of feedback from millions of customers and partners around the world. It indicates the operating system is entering the final phases of development and is ready for partners to develop new applications, device drivers and services, and ready for IT pros to evaluate Windows 7 and examine how it will operate in their environment.

Microsoft has announced the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Except applying all updates released to date, this issue of SP will bring some key features to both operating systems. Those are:

• Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy in searches
• Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack supporting the most recent specification for Bluetooth Technology
• Ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Windows Vista
• Adds Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi Configuration
  Windows Vista SP2 enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronization across time zones.

A single installer of SP2 will be supplied by Microsoft, and it will work with both Windows Vista and Server 2008. For a complete overview of the changes introduced in SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, check TechNet. As usual, a final date hasn't been set. At present, the final SP2 release for Vista and Server 2008 is scheduled for the Q2 2009 period, but this might change.

Across generations of its Windows operating systems based on the NT architecture, Microsoft has been courteous enough to pack application compatibility layers that let users run applications in compatibility modes for older versions of the OS. The company seems to be taking this to the next level with Windows 7. The release candidate of the OS slated for April 30, will pack an "XP mode" virtualization feature. The feature quite literally runs a Windows XP environment inside a sandbox complete with support for applications such as Internet Explorer 6, etc.

The environment will work on a virtual machine created by Windows 7. Native Windows XP applications you install in the environment, along with your documents and settings will further be accessible from the host OS. Client variants of Windows 7 may feature a Hyper-V hypervisor that handles applications such as these. The feature makes Windows 7 especially something to look forward to, for those complaining lack of Windows XP features. In short, it's the OS some probably clung onto, and refused to move to Vista, running as an application.

Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $13.65 billion for the third quarter ended March 31, 2009, a 6% decline from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $4.44 billion, $2.98 billion and $0.33 per share, which represented an increase of 3% and declines of 32% and 30%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.
The financial results for the third quarter ended March 31, 2009, included $290 million of severance charges related to the previously announced plan to reduce up to 5,000 positions and $420 million of impairments to investments. Combined, these two charges reduced earnings per share by $0.06.

Never in recent times have we seen NVIDIA and ATI locked in such fierce market competition. The two are seen exchanging blows with product launches and price-cuts. ATI looks to be in the mood to take this competition to the next-level: DirectX 11 compliant GPUs. Microsoft has already released DirectX 11 with the pre-release versions of Windows 7 operating system. A recent report by Heise Online indicates that AMD will be ready with an ATI RV870, the company's first DirectX 11 GPU by the end of July, or early August.

Another source, The Inquirer, states NVIDIA's GT300 GPU launch for October. If you were to count these claims, AMD is put two to three months ahead of NVIDIA when it comes to time-to-market introduction of a new GPU generation. Now, whether you have DirectX 11 compliant software that makes use of the new technology available that soon is a different thing altogether. This will determine the practicality of a DirectX 11 GPU in July/August.

The offficial release candidate (RC) version of the next-generation operating system from Microsoft - Windows 7 - will be publically released on May 5th, and should be available for MSDN and Technet subscribers now. This information comes directly from Microsoft, who by mistake updated one of the Windows 7 related web pages to display the following text: "Partners: if you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now. Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 starting May 5, 2009." As you can expect, the page is now fixed and the text was removed. The page has now been reverted back to inform about Windows 7 beta, and how to obtain trial keys for partners.

Microsoft Corp. today announced a new addition to the award-winning family of SideWinder gaming products, the SideWinder X3 Mouse, which combines gaming performance and versatile design at a value price of $39.95. This ambidextrous, eight-button gaming mouse delivers comfort for either hand along with the performance features fans of SideWinder products know and love, including a 2,000 dots-per-inch (dpi) laser-tracking engine with on-the-fly dpi switching between high, medium and low sensitivity. The SideWinder X3 Mouse is easy on the wallet, but it does not skimp on performance, offering gamers a full set of features and launching them ahead of the competition.

"Our research shows that in-game comfort continues to be the main consideration for PC gamers," said Bill Jukes, product marketing manager for Microsoft Hardware. "We designed this mouse to be ambidextrous and small in size, providing comfort to a wider variety of people and making it ideal for gaming as well as everyday use."

The CUDA architecture continues to blaze a trail as the leading platform for developing and running GPU Computing applications, with support for C, OpenCL, DirectX Compute, Fortran and other languages and APIs. The latest CUDA 2.2 Beta contains a host of significant new features, including:

Hardware debugger for the GPU
Linux developers can now use a debugger on CUDA-enabled GPUs that offers both the familiar interface of the popular open-source GDB debugger and the ability to debug kernels as they execute on the GPU. The GPU-side debugger has all the features that developers expect from GDB, including the ability to have breakpoints, watch variables, inspect state, etc., as well as additional functions for CUDA-specific features.

Even though there's still some time left before the official release of Windows 7, Microsoft - the creator of this OS - confirmed today that just like some Windows Vista distributions could be downgraded to Windows XP with ease, the same will apply to Windows 7. General users of Windows 7 will be given the option of downgrading right over Vista to Windows XP, a Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed.
"This is not the first time that Microsoft has offered downgrade rights to a version other than its immediate predecessor," the spokesperson told Betanews, "and our Software Assurance customers can always downgrade to any previous version of Windows."
Microsoft hasn't detailed exactly how downgrade rights will work with Windows 7 - for now we know that Windows 7 will be downgradable to either Windows Vista or Windows XP - the rest of the details remain unclear.

I once posted a news story on how well computer manufacturers are treating the environment according to the Greenpeace organization. Well I'm going to give you a little update on that story today. Last time Nintendo was the worst among worst when talking "green" and this year it is strengthening its position even more. From zero to eleven in being "green" (zero means worst) Nintendo scores the whooping 0. HP, Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell are next to have poor scores when it comes to preserving the world we live in. According to Greenpeace only Apple is "truly kicking the habit", maybe that's because they have an apple as their logo. Philips learned a lesson from last Greenpeace research and the company jumps from 15th to 4th place this year, well done Philips. The two best "green" manufacturers as of March 31st 2009 are Samsung and Nokia.

Microsoft Corp. and TomTom N.V. today announced that they have settled the patent infringement cases brought by Microsoft before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and the International Trade Commission (ITC) and by TomTom in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The cases have been settled through a patent agreement under which TomTom will pay Microsoft for coverage under the eight car navigation and file management systems patents in the Microsoft case. Also as part of the agreement, Microsoft receives coverage under the four patents included in the TomTom countersuit. The agreement, which has a five-year term, does not require any payment by Microsoft to TomTom. It covers both past and future U.S. sales of the relevant products. The specific financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the Mini-PC segment and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions, today introduces the XPC H7 4500H complete system for satellite TV reception. Unlike present proprietary solutions, the H7 4500H now comes with satellite television conveniently and reliably integrated in Windows Vista.

The whole feature set of Windows Media Center that had previously been available for DVB-T tuners and analogue cable TV only, can now be used with a DVB-S TV tuner card as well. Timeshifting (pausing TV programmes), EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and recording, all this can be done right from the sofa by remote control.

Continuing its momentum and leadership in virtualization technology, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. today released the first video and images demonstrating live migration across three generations of AMD processors on VMware ESX 3.5, including the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor code-named "Istanbul." Live Migration of virtual machines across physical servers is key to providing superior flexibility for managing today's data centers. Additionally, AMD is highlighting its continued, cooperative development efforts with Microsoft as evidenced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which is available today as a beta and adds support for AMD-V technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing. The new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor provides scalable performance for both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and has received support from all four global OEMs.

Today Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new Web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the Web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at www.microsoft.com/ie8 starting at noon EDT on March 19. Internet Explorer 8 is easier to use, faster and offers leading-edge security features in direct response to people's increasing concerns about online safety. A new study commissioned by Microsoft and the National Cyber Security Alliance and conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. shows that 91 percent of adults in the U.S. are concerned about online threats in the current economic climate, and 78 percent are more likely to choose a Web browser with built-in security than they were two years ago.

"Customers have made clear what they want in a Web browser -- safety, speed and greater ease of use," said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. "With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match."

Microsoft Corp. and Lexmark International, Inc. signed a patent cross-licensing agreement that furthers the development of each company's product lines and will expand technological innovation to enhance the overall customer experience.
The patent cross-licensing agreement covers a broad range of products, including Lexmark printers and multifunction products, and Microsoft software products. The agreement allows greater mutual access to each partner's respective patent portfolio. The terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Notebook sales are now outpacing desktop PCs three to one, and to meet that growth, the Microsoft Hardware Group is entering a new category of notebook accessories with the introduction of the Notebook Cooling Base, designed to make notebook use more comfortable with a built-in fan and sleek form. Microsoft Corp. is also responding to the rapid success of the Arc Mouse, which reached the top-10 list of best-selling mice after just two months on the market, by releasing the award-winning mouse in four special edition colors: deep olive green, marine blue, eggplant purple and frost white. These products provide a great way for people to display their unique style and work in comfort on their notebooks.

Rumor has it, that Microsoft will be ending the mass availability of the Xbox 360 Elite console in many parts of the world and plans on positioning it as a "limited edition" console instead of a regular one like it was until now. That's a result of the drop in the interest of the premium priced console. Consumers choose to buy the Arcade or Pro models and do not pay attention to the more expensive model. Microsoft will start winding down production of the black Xbox 360 Elite model in the spring and will eventually leave just the limited editions of the consoles on the market, like the recently introduced Resident Evil 5 Elite bundle for example. To compensate the small crowd of people that want to have the 120 GB hard drive found in the Elite models, Microsoft is said to prepare an upgrade standalone hard drive that's even bigger than 120 GB. Expect more information in the following weeks.

As expected, both Windows Vista Service Pack 2 RC and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 RC were made available for public download today. This build is the same one that was sent to testers last week. Download links follow:

• Five Language Standalone DVD ISO for Windows Server 2008 x86/x64/ia64 and Windows Vista x86/x64
• Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista x86 version
• Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista x64 version
• Windows Server 2008 - Five Language Standalone for ia64-based systems

Today, Microsoft Corp. and Lenovo announced the availability of the Ultimate Academic Personal Computer promotion with high-powered, highly functional, affordable laptop PCs designed specifically for college and university students, faculty, and staff. As part of the program, initially offered as a pilot by Microsoft, Lenovo will offer four different ThinkPad laptops pre-loaded with Windows Vista Ultimate and Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007.