Continue reading »]]> As you may have been reading in the news, Microsoft has recently agreed to purchase the popular VoIP service Skype. After a couple of previous acquisitions in the past, Microsoft has made it’s biggest purchase – this time worth well over $8 billion.

Before I even start, I think it’s fair to say that this is either going to be a monumental win or a catastrophic fail – one or the other.

The question is, what will Microsoft do with Skype? Obviously, Skype certainly hasn’t been in the green lately – it’s debts have definitely been on the rise. So, Microsoft have evidently got to make a few considerable changes – otherwise the rather large purchase will become rather a large waste of money – even on Microsoft’s terms!

I can imagine Microsoft will probably implement increased charges for the paid services. However, I do hope that Microsoft will lower the charges for features in Skype that could potentially become very popular – such as group video calling. I happen to think that group video calling was a very well implemented feature into Skype – but unfortunately Skype started charging ridiculous amounts of money for it. If Microsoft lowered charges to £1-2 per month, I would probably consider purchasing it.

The other big question is whether they will continue to support all of the operating systems that Skype currently supports. Microsoft has never really supported Linux and people are starting to ask if Microsoft will drop support for it. Personally, it wouldn’t surprise me hugely if they did – but it would be a real shame.

The sale probably won’t finalise for another few months at least, so we’ll just have to wait and see what changes Microsoft will inevitably implement. In the mean time, enjoy Skype in it’s current form while you can!

Continue reading »]]> Internet Explorer 9 went live in the early hours of today after a year of development. You can grab the new version from http://www.microsoft.com/ie9.

After a relatively quick installation, you are presented with the new interface (see below).

There are several issues with IE9 that I haven’t really liked since the Platform Preview. For example, I’m really not sure why Microsoft bothered to make it so that tabs appear on the same row as the web address. On a low resolution display such as a netbook, this becomes extremely frustrating when you can’t see the titles of your open tabs. This can be fixed by right clicking on the title bar and selecting ‘Show tabs on a separate row’ but I’d rather it did this by default.

On the plus side, launch time definitely seems to have improved and seems to be relatively comparable to Google Chrome.

Doing an acid3 test on IE9 will give you a result of 93/100, which isn’t perfect – but isn’t awful. The latest version of Chrome will give an acid3 result of 100/100.

Whilst it still is no comparison to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (and probably won’t ever be), it has to be said that there have been several improvements. Sadly, Internet Explorer’s rendering system has always been a let-down to me as it just isn’t half as good as Webkit or Gecko.

Continue reading »]]> It has been confirmed by Microsoft that on February 22nd, 2011, the new service pack for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will go live.

The service pack has been in testing for several months, but Microsoft has previously said that it won’t really bring any new functionality (for Windows 7 at least). Microsoft admitted that the service pack is merely a combination of various updates that have already been released.

“For Windows 7, SP1 will help keep your PCs well supported by delivering ongoing updates, many of which have been made previously available through Windows Update.” – Windows Blog

Windows Server 2008 R2 users will see more fixes in the service pack and a couple of new features.

If you’re a Technet or MSDN subscriber, you can grab the update from February 16th.

Continue reading »]]> Well, today marks one year since Microsoft launched Windows 7 to the general public.

By the sounds of it, Windows 7 has been a great success from Microsoft – after the dismal performance of Windows Vista. Windows 7 (as of September 2010) has a market share of 17% which is pretty amazing for 12 months on the market.

I’ve had Windows 7 since launch day and I have been extremely impressed with it. If you haven’t already given it a spin, you could be really missing out as it definitely performs much better than Vista and has considerably better features than XP.

Users of XP still don’t seem to be giving up just yet, though. Although XP’s market share is dropping rapidly, it still (as of September 2010) has just over 60% of the market share – so it still has some way to go. With basic security support for XP not due to expire until 2014, I don’t think too many will be rushing to upgrade their existing PCs.

Continue reading »]]> I can’t believe I’ve only just stumbled across this, but Microsoft are now offering a whole bundle of professional software to students for free.

They call it Microsoft Dreamspark, and it’s a website ran by the company. If you’re in post-16 or university education, you can get a hefty chunk of their professional software for free. Being a student myself, this is very handy.

Amongst other things, you can get Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Pro, Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Ultimate and Windows Server 2008 for free until you finish university.

All you have to do is prove your education. This is relatively easy – if you have an ISIS card, an .edu (or .ac.uk) email address you can activate within a few minutes. If not, you can go through the process of applying for activation from your college or uni. You have to re-activate every year to get continued use of your software, but it’s well worth it.

It’s available in multiple countries, so don’t hesitate to check if you aren’t in the US or UK.

If you are a student computer enthusiast or programmer, head over to www.dreamspark.com and claim your free software!

Continue reading »]]> Microsoft is already handing out the release candidate to a select group of testers.

Microsoft has given a select group of testers access to the latest build of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite – the release candidate.

Sadly, at present, the release candidate isn’t available for public download. However, I would think that Microsoft will probably give it to TechNet customers in a few days (or weeks), and then once that’s done everyone else will probably get it shortly after.

This new release candidate would show that Microsoft is really trying hard to reach it’s target of RTM (release to manufacturer) by June 2010. It’s only February and they would appear to be reaching their final stages.

I have to say that I think the beta was very successful – I am yet to find any bugs or hold-backs. I’ve been using the beta since launch day and haven’t had a problem with it yet.

Update: Thanks to Sebastian (see comments) who has informed me that the RC will not go out on public release. It’s a shame, but many thanks for that information.

Continue reading »]]> Time’s almost up for the testers…

If you’re still one of the few using the Windows 7 Release Candidate, you’ll be interested to know that Microsoft are [finally] starting the bi-hourly shutdowns next month. It means that from March 1st, you’re computer will automatically shut down every 2 hours. Three months after that (1st June), you’ll loose use of the release candidate altogether.

So, now’s the time to be making decisions. You either need to buy a copy of Windows 7 (which I seriously recommend you do if you have previously used Windows) or change your operating system.

Continue reading »]]> Windows 7 appears to be doing quite nicely at the moment. According the HitsLink, the Windows 7 market share nearly doubled in November. It went from 2.15% in October to 4.00% in November.

In addition, Vista and XP are beginning to loose their market share. Vista’s market share has fallen from 18.83% in October to 18.55% in November and XP’s has fallen from 70.48% in October to 69.05% in November.

This definitely shows that Windows 7 is pulling people over from older versions.

I have to say I think this is a bit of a fluke. Microsoft’s advertising campaign in the UK has been pretty awful – this “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea” junk.

Oh well, I suppose I should be glad that people are finally moving away from XP – but there’s clearly a long way to go…

Continue reading »]]> Microsoft today confirmed to Ars Technica that Office 2010 is expected to be in general availability by June 2010, after a beta tester apparently reported similar information.

The good news to that is that we should hopefully have 6 months of beta testing! Awesome.

However, don’t get too excited. OK, Windows 7 did actually launch on time, but Vista and Office 2007 were severely delayed. Microsoft aren’t brilliant at meeting deadlines, lets face it!

Oh well. GEEK! will keep you posted if any other news crops up, but for now lets hope that Office 2010 is worth it. Personally, I am yet to see anything that makes Office 2010 worth upgrading from 2007 (or 2003 for that matter). It still uses the annoying DOCX format unless you specifically tell it not to use it – but that removes some features from Word.

If you haven’t got your hands on the Office 2010 beta, you can grab a copy here.

Continue reading »]]> It was in tech news today that Microsoft has let loose its new free security system to replace Windows Live OneCare. It’s been expected for release for quite a while but we didn’t know an exact date.

So, GEEK! decided to have a quick go with the new software and see whats up.

You can download it for free here, providing you have genuine Windows software. The download is under 5MB, so you don’t have to worry about a large download. Once it is downloaded and you run it, it will do a verification of genuine Windows software, and then it will install. Installation is remarkably quick, and before you know it the software will be downloading updates.

Surprisingly, this took a very long time. It took nearly 10 minutes for my mid-spec laptop (dual core, 2GB RAM) to download the relevant updates.

Once it had finished, I did a quick scan. This wasn’t too bad actually. I was quite pleased at how little resources this used. While it was scanning, my computer told me it was using about 7MB of RAM and very little CPU power so I was very impressed at how quietly it runs.

I also did a couple of hours of browsing around the software. I have to say it is extremely simple to use and navigate.

I’d like to see it become popular because I’ve always had my views that paid antivirus is a waste of time.

In my case, I won’t be keeping it because I like Comodo Personal Firewall a lot, but if you’re a novice computer user and you need a simple way to get protected, this might be for you. It will work on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and as long as you have genuine Windows software you can get it for free.

I have to say I like it, but I’m looking forward to seeing if it gains any form of popularity.