Down Time

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it will make Security Essentials, its free anti-virus software, available to small businesses in October.

The announcement is a u-turn in licensing from earlier this year. Microsoft originally insisted that the product was strictly for home use and OEMs building home retail machines. Microsoft’s change of heart means small businesses will be able to download and install the product on up to 10 PCs in early October.

Microsoft says the reason is due to a change in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) that allows small business customers to legally download the software onto individually managed business PCs. “This new availability will allow small businesses to take advantage of Microsoft’s no-cost antimalware service that will help them save time, save money and remain productive while protecting them from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats”, wrote Microsoft’s Eric Foster in a blog posting on Wednesday.

Microsoft is currently readying a new version of Security Essentials. An early beta, released in July this year, shows that the future version will include a new protection engine and inspection system. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is designed to work on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and protects end users against virus threats and spy ware. MSE is Microsoft’s free anti-virus and anti-spyware product that replaced Microsoft’s paid Windows Live OneCare subscription service which was withdrawn last year.

The Hotmail team was hard a work over the summer, releasing a major update to Windows Live Hotmail that included a new design, faster inbox and many other cool features. Even though the update was released two months ago, the Hotmail team announced some more exciting changes, something that might just blow the competition away.

Shipment Tracking

First up on the changes is shipment tracking within your email. Hotmail will automatically detect the shipping tracking number and provide real-time shipping information. Once the update rolls out, users will be able to track USPS and Fedex shipments right from inside their email, without having to visit the shippers website. DHL and UPS are also supported, but will provide links to the shipper’s website for more detailed information.

Facebook Chat

Earlier this month, we posted information that Facebook Chat will soon be coming to Windows Live Hotmail, and now the Hotmail team is ready to roll out this major update. Users can already chat with Facebook friends through Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows Live Messenger for the iPhone.
Microsoft also mentioned that they will be making the signout button more noticeable for users to see, based on feedback from some users.

Attachment Upgrade

Windows Live Hotmail became the first email provider to allow up to 10GB of photos in a single email, by creating a new album inside of SkyDrive and connecting it with your email. This allows friends and family to share high resolution photos with one another. Hotmail users share more than 1.5 billion photos a month on Hotmail, and with the ever increasing demand, the Hotmail team is increasing total filesizes to 25MB per email. You’ll now be able to have larger attachments per email.

Dailymotion & Justin.tv

During the summer rollout, Hotmail announced you’ll be able to watch Hulu and YouTube videos right inside of an email. The next update rollout will now support videos from Dailymotion and Justin.tv.

Subfolders

The new Hotmail update will allow you to create subfolders in your inbox, so you can put folders in your folders (yo dawg yo). A great new feature for people wanting to stay organized, but have a massive list of folders in their inbox, now you’ll be able to separate your email using the Hotmail filters but keep a neat and tidy inbox.

Hotmail didn’t give an estimated time for the release, only saying they would be rolling out the update immediately. The process may take a few weeks to reflect on everyone’s account.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock then you may have heard that Microsoft recently released a public beta version of Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft officials showed off some impressive stats against their competitors, claiming the first and only browser to deliver full hardware acceleration of all HTML5 content. Being first is great but is being second more important?

Microsoft’s bold claims are accurate but one has to remember the product is still in beta. Google on the other hand has a remarkable way of dishing out product updates with lightning speed. The web search giant is currently readying Chrome 7 which it claims will be 60 times faster than Chrome 6. 2D graphics performance and canvas acceleration is now available in trunk and canary builds of Chrome 7. “This system picks the best graphics API to use on each OS that Chromium supports: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux”, wrote James Robinson, Software Engineer at Google.

During our early tests at Neowin using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer test drive site, IE9 still wins in canvas speed demos but Chrome 7 is greatly improved over previous versions. It’s important to remember that Chrome 7 is still in the very early beta stage so this could change significantly before it’s fully released. Google isn’t the only other browser looking at hardware acceleration. The latest beta builds of Mozilla’s Firefox also include hardware accelerated components for improved performance. It’s not yet clear when Chrome 7 will be available in non-dev form but Robinson says it’s coming. “With Google Chrome’s fast release cycles, we expect to be able to get these enhancements to users quickly and add new performance improvements over time.”

Google has also created a series of demos, ranging from an aquarium to 3D walls of photos. The demos show what is possible with the 2D accelerated APIs.

Microsoft released a beta refresh for Windows Live Essentials which saw a new feature in Messenger allowing people to chat with their Facebook friends just like talking to their Messenger friends. However, this ability was not made available on the Web version of Messenger and people could only chat to their Messenger friends. But this looks set to change.

Click to Enlarge

On the Windows Live Phone service (which Microsoft has recently tweaked), that we wrote about last week, it can be seen that a refined header is being used with a few new options and it features Facebook Chat integration. When hovering over the Messenger link in the header a Facebook category appears on this site. The status of contacts is shown just like within Messenger, if a friend is available to chat to they have a green icon and an orange one for away; if you are also friends with them in Messenger then they can also be set to busy which is a red icon.

The chat box has also been tweaked to reflect the Facebook Chat addition as it is now possible to select which chat protocol is being used for the conversation. This feature also allows people to select SMS as a chat option. This feature has also leaked in upcoming Windows Live Messenger 2011 Screenshots.

One final feature that was spotted by Liveside is that when a user is signed in to Messenger on a PC it’s not possible to have a conversation via Web Messenger as Messenger windows will now force themselves to be used. However if a user is not signed in to Messenger then it is possible to chat to people in the browser. Before this refinement it was possible to chat to people via both Messenger and Web Messenger at the same time. (Signing into Messenger when conversations in Windows Live Phone were open sees them closed, however when navigating to a different Windows Live site the conversation reopens. Microsoft have yet to update the Web Messenger across most of the Windows Live sites.)

It has been rumoured that Microsoft will make available a release candidate of Windows Live Essentials 2011 soon and it’s likely that at a similar time they will also update the Windows Live sites.

When Google introduced their instant live search earlier this week, some curious web enthusiasts looked towards Bing to answer back at Google, including Long Zheng from istartedsomething.

Back in August 2009, Long Zheng developed a tool using Bing’s public API’s that gave the search engine an instant live search. What’s more shocking is, this could have easily been added to Bing, with as much as a simple JavaScript file, according to Zheng.

12-months later and Bing still hasn’t included any feature similar to instant search, however, during Apple WWDC 2010, Bing showed off a brand new version of the site, powered by HTML5 with some very exciting and cool features.

The early future Bing preview showed a smooth transition between your query and your results, a feature close to instant search. The HTML5 version of Bing also included a quick tab preview of weather, maps and other features just by hovering over the menus, reducing the amount of clicks and page loading.

The video also demonstrates a brand new mobile version of Bing, including endless image scrolling and seamless transitions between images, all using the iPhone or iPod’s touch screen. The mobile Bing preview also includes the background image, giving the appearance of a native app, all within Safari.

Bing in HTML5 could be Microsoft’s response to Google’s instant search, and we could likely see this being released by the first quarter of next year, right around the Internet Explorer 9 launch.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft starting to advertise Internet Explorer 9 there is now a leaked video (first picked up by Softpedia) of the browser demoing the user interface and speed. Despite looking like a fake video, We understands the video is of an old, internal build of Internet Explorer 9 which was given to employees to test.

In the video, it can be seen that the user interface bears a resemblance to the leaked image of Internet Explorer 9 from last month but features older icons, gradients and buttons. Neowin has been informed that the leaked image is how Internet Explorer 9 will look when released as a beta next week. Therefore, the video above doesn’t display an accurate image of how Internet Explorer 9 will appear.

The rendering engine used for this build of Internet Explorer 9 appears to be the same as the most recent version of the developer platform preview of Internet Explorer 9. The speed at which the browser loads and functions in the video is expected to be similar to how quick the beta version will be.

Long Zheng has just spotted that Microsoft is already starting to advertise Internet Explorer 9 Beta ahead of its official launch next Wednesday. The banner advert was spotted on TechCrunch and it’s likely to be found on many other sites across the web.

The advert features a few quotes from people and web sites that who played with previous versions of Internet Explorer 9. The advert focuses on how Internet Explorer 9 will allow for a different kind of internet than the one we are used too telling readers to “get ready for a more beautiful web”. This has been the tag line used with Internet Explorer 9 ever since Microsoft announced they would be holding a special event for the launch of the beta.


Microsoft announced back in August that they would be holding an event in San Francisco on September 15th where Internet Explorer 9 Beta would be announced. It is unusual for a company to put so much emphasis on a beta version of a piece of software which suggests either Microsoft have got a lot planned for Internet Explorer 9 or have more to announce than just a browser.

An image leaked in late August that is rumored to be of Internet Explorer 9 but there have been many who have questioned the image’s authenticity.

Microsoft has been providing developer access to the much improved Internet Explorer 9 rendering engine on a regular basis. The company has been stressing that developers shouldn’t have to worry about which browser will be rendering a web page but should be able to just write code for all browsers. To that end Internet Explorer 9 will be far more standards compliant than any other Microsoft browser to date and appears to far faster than any previous versions of the browser, its now almost as fast as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Everybody is quite exciting about Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Now the wait is over Microsoft has released a beta refresh of its Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP) 1 to selected PC and Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners, company officials confirmed on August 30.

Microsoft made the refresh build — the build number of which is said to be Build No. 7601.17077 — available to a select group of testers on August 27. There’s no word (so far) on whether there is anything new in that refresh.

The spokesperson said Microsoft would not comment on whether the company will release to the public another interim SP1 build before the first service pack is released to manufacturing. Microsoft officials said earlier this summer that the company is planning to deliver the final SP1 code in the first half of 2011, and the spokesperson said on August 30 that Microsoft is still on track with that stated release date.

The server version of SP1 includes two new virtualization-focused features: RemoteFX and a dynamic-memory adjustor for Hyper-V. I’ve heard speculation that the server version of SP1 is what’s holding back the delivery of the client version, but have not heard this from any Microsoft officials.

Microsoft released a public beta of SP1 in mid-July.

Microsoft officials have been adamant that consumers and business customers don’t need to wait for SP1 to deploy Windows 7 and/or Windows Server 2008 R2. Still, a number of business customers use the release of SP1 as a milestone in terms of planning their deployments of a new operating system.

As we know Windows 7 is now become one of the most usage and successful windows after Windows XP. Everybody is now thinking When Will Windows 7 Overtake Windows XP ? And people are now really considering Windows 7 as compare to windows xp in many ways. I have noticed very strong evidence that Windows 7 has succeeded in a big way among early adopters and enthusiasts, who dominate the readership of a website like this one. I also see clear indications that businesses are adopting Windows 7 at a faster pace than in earlier Windows versions.

The monthly reports on operating system versions provide an ideal snapshot for my purposes, with data that goes back far enough to see meaningful trends. Using Excel, I plotted data from December 2008 (a month before the Windows 7 beta was made public) to July 2010 and then made some simple projections. Here’s what the chart looks like; actual Net Market Share data is to the left of the line in the center of the chart, and my projections are to the right:

Click to Enlarge Image

Yes, you can make a case for a hockey-stick growth curve with even a slight increase in the Windows 7 adoption rate. You could also argue for a slowdown, although I think that scenario is unlikely based on the overwhelmingly positive reception of Windows 7 in the market and where we are in the PC replacement cycle. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that the pace of migration from XP to Windows 7 will accelerate over the next two years as XP gets closer to its end-of-life date.

In the Net Market Share data, the percentage of Mac OS X use has remained in a very narrow range for that entire period. In December 2008, the total for Mac Intel and Mac OS was 4.45%. For July 2010, the Net Market Share report breaks usage by OS X version rather than hardware platform, but the total for OS X 10.6 and 10.5 is nearly identical at 4.42%. In between, the percentage of users never rose above 4.45% and never dropped below 4%.

As someone who’s watched every Windows release since the early 1990s, I find it remarkable that Windows 7 usage has overtaken Vista so quickly, roughly nine months after it was released. NetMarketShare noted that trend with its July 2010 report. That same crossover appears in the ZDNet visitor data I posted yesterday, except that it happened about 8-10 months earlier. If the broad PC market is still lagging early adopters by that same gap, then I expect Net Applications will report that Windows 7 has passed XP in usage sometime next summer.

Microsoft has just released the next major version of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta suite. The package comes with a number of improvements, bug fixes and added features.

Microsoft originally released a Windows Live Essentials beta on June 24. Essentials includes the popular programs Windows Live Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, Sync, and Family Safety. The Windows Live team has aimed to ensure that the next version of Windows Live Essentials takes advantage of Windows 7 fully. All applications now use the new ribbon UI and integrate further into Windows 7 by using Jumplists. Windows Live Sync is also included which keeps your files synchronized on the web and across multiple PCs.

Microsoft also introduced several new features for Windows Live Photo Gallery, including photo fusing to blend photos together and improved facial recognition.

Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta refresh (English full installer)

Build number: 15.4.3001.809.

Some applications carry a different build number, so here is a master list of the versions:

• Movie Maker – 15.4.3002.0810
• Messenger – 15.4.3002.0810
• Mail – 15.4.3002.0810
• Photo Gallery -15.4.3002.0810
• Sync – 15.4.3001.0809
• Family Safety – 15.4.3001.0809
• Writer – 15.4.3001.0809

Microsoft revealed this thursday that they are currently readying an Internet Explorer 9 public beta for September. Neowin believes this will be September 2.

Microsoft’s C.O.O. Kevin Turner announced the public beta date at the annual Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) on July 29. Screenshots of an early build of Internet Explorer 9 leaked to the web earlier this week. The screenshots revealed that Microsoft is planning a download manager and add-on manager for Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft originally unveiled Internet Explorer 9 Photos and concept at PDC 2009. IE 9 will take advantage of the power of the GPU for all page rendering and developers can exploit this using CSS, DHTML andjavascript. A new JS engine (codenamed Chakra) will also be built into Internet Explorer 9 with greater interoperability and standards support all round. Features such as rounded corner CSS support will be built in. In January, we revealed that Microsoft is planning to enhance tabbed browsing in IE9. According to a software patent, the Quick Tabs feature in Internet Explorer is likely to be enhanced with better functionality and greater tab management options.

Microsoft is also planning broader support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9 through its new script engine. Microsoft recently performed W3C Web Standards tests on IE9, including HTML5, SVG 1.1 2nd edition, CSS3 media queries, CSS3 borders & backgrounds, CSS3 selectors, DOM level 3 core, DOM level 3 events and DOM level 2 style. Microsoft, with the help of W3C, performed a total of 192 tests on a variety of browsers. Internet Explorer 9 scored 100% in all eight tests, while every other browser, except Firefox in DOM level 2 style tests, didn’t score perfect in any of the test categories.

In less than a year Windows 7 is really getting popular and become one of the most use Operating System by people today, Windows 7 is now being used more than Windows Vista, according to market researcher.

Windows XP is still the most-used operating system, used by more than twice as many users as Vista and Windows 7 combined. Windows XP was used by nearly 62 percent of devices accessing the Web.

Windows Vista's 14.34 percent, marking the first time that the newer version surpassed its predecessor. Windows 7 was used on 14.46 percent of devices accessing the Internet, as compared to Microsoft has said it has sold 175 million copies of Windows 7 since the product went on sale last fall.

Usage of Windows 7 has been growing quickly since its release, topping the 10 percent level by March. Within a month on the market, Windows 7 was being used by four percent of Net-accessing devices, a level it took Vista seven months to reach.

Everyone seems to waiting for Microsoft another OS Windows 8 after the success of Windows 7, which should arrive in early-2012, has yet to receive much media attention. That’s probably because the most exciting thing we’ve heard about it so far is that it ‘might’ have an ‘app store’, and other leaks have all been centered around performance improvements (which are a given).

Microsoft has a lot riding on Windows 8. Windows Vista hurt Microsoft’s reputation (rightly or wrongly), and Windows 7 was its savior. Windows 8 needs to be better than Windows 7 in ways that consumers can see, understand, and experience, and it needs to give consumers a reason to upgrade (or cross-grade) for it to equal or surpass Windows 7. The software giant’s latest release of Windows has “skyrocketed” PC sales, and scores a rating of”94 percent customer satisfaction”, according to CEO Steve Ballmer.

In the last few years, Microsoft has seen a lot of change – with the departure of Gates, and then Bach and Allard in recent months, and with constant management shuffling, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft pulls it’s resources together to make Windows 8 the success that many are expecting it to be.

Microsoft is all set to introduce company's first and new Motto called "Be What's Next". Today at the annual Microsoft Global Exchange (MGX) Conference, a showcase event for the company’s own employees and a few selected people, Microsoft introduced its new motto. This new motto was rumoured last month and many people whats to know what the truth behind it.

The new tag line was first officially shown in a video which also emphasises how flexibility exists between the various brands from Microsoft and partners. Some assumed that the ribbon icons within the video indicated that Microsoft was about to announce a brand new set of logos for its products. This new logo helps microsoft to market their products quite effectively and getting more visiblity amongst people.

You can also check out the new look of Microsoft Logo with its Motto label. Its looking great and quite catching.

Boy Genius has revealed the screenshots of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. The screenshots consists on major development of Microsoft Office 2011 applications of Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2011.

The appearance of Microsoft Office 2011 are much like Office 2010, Ms. Office 2011 for Mac includes the ribbon on every application and with several new functions are also integrated in it. Ms. Office 10 was lack of Outlook but this will also be the first time Outlook will be available in the Office Suite for the Mac. The appearance between Outlook for Windows and Mac appear to be similar, including a mail preview pane, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes available for use.

The screenshots also show a quick search in the toolbar for Outlook, Excel, and Word, for searching within your inbox, spreadsheet, or documents. Office 2011 is also said to include the same multi-use feature that Office 2010 includes, allowing for you and your co-worker to work on the same document at the same time.

Microsoft has released the Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 platform. The latest Microsoft Messenger provides several new features and update. The latest Microsoft Messenger beta, Build 08.00.00.100305 for Mac 8 Beta offers a audio/video feature for Windows Live users. Mac users will be able to share webcam and audio conversations with each other and their Windows counterparts through latest Microsoft Messenger.

The latest messenger software is still in beta process and has several known issues such as emoticons visibility, some video/audio calls do not work on certain configurations and display pictures do not display in the conversation window. Microsoft has not confirmed when a final version will be available. But you can try this latest version by your self to check more features and upgrade functions.

Download: Messenger for Mac Beta

If you have not upgraded your old windows version (windows xp 2 or windows vista RTM) to a latest version of windows (windows 7 or Windows Vista SP1) then you may faced some problem in near future because Microsoft is soon going to stop Support for Windows Vista RTM and Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2).

Support for Windows Vista (without any service pack installed) will be ending on April 13, 2010, meaning users must be running Vista SP1 or SP2 to receive any further product support. Users can upgrade to the latest service pack, SP2, for free, providing them with the latest security updates.

Support for Windows XP SP2 will be ending on July 13, 2010. Users still running Windows XP SP2 will no longer receive updates after this date, and are urged to update to Windows XP SP3, a free upgrade, or switch to Windows 7.

Users running Windows XP SP2 64-bit will still receive product support up until April 8, 2014, since Microsoft never released a 64-bit service pack 3.

Microsoft has now started the investigation to find out the caused of Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 F1 bug in Windows XP. Microsoft officials are now warning that Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution to the attackers but only in Windows XP. Microsoft officials confirmed the flaw could allow an attacker to host a maliciously crafted web page and run arbitrary code if they could convince a user to visit the web page and if the user presses F1, IE will load an attacker-supplied .HLP file with winhlp32.exe. Which allow attackers to remotely access your data online. So people have to look after these possibility issues in internet explorer to avoid this type of attacks in internet explorer.

Windows 7 is Microsoft latest stylish windows after windows XP and windows Vista. Many people love the glassy effects in windows 7 and also in windows vista. But with the compatibility issue with windows vista many people didn’t used it frequently, But after windows vista Microsoft released its best operating system with stability knows as windows 7. People love it and used it as a primary operating system after windows XP. Windows 7 is different from windows vista and windows xp in term of stability and also in look wize. Many XP users doesn’t afford core hardware for windows 7 and windows vista, that’s why they love to customize the look of windows xp as look like windows 7 and windows vista.

So for those people who wants to completely customize their windows? I prefer them to used stardock window blinds. Window blinds is one of the popular software from stardock which totally transform your windows xp and make it look like windows 7 or windows vista. You cannot even see the difference between real and artificial. Because WindowBlinds extends the existing painting routines of the operating system, it uses very little memory. You can choose thousands of free skins from their, you can customize Windows to look like another a new take on the standard Windows look, a totally different OS, or something completely different or any other look you want.

Download Link
Current Version: 7.0

According to Critix, Users will be able to run Windows 7 on the new Apple iPad when it released in March, at least virtually. The Citrix Receiver software currently works with the iPhone and iPod, allowing users to virtually connect to Windows from your device.

The Citrix Receiver software works with unmodified Windows 7 applications. The company mentioned in their blog that the iPad will be perfectly suitable to support a Windows 7 virtually:

“It turns out the 9.7 inch display on the iPad with a 1024×768 screen resolution works great for a full VDI XenDesktop. Windows applications run unmodified and securely in the data center, and even multiple applications at once.“

Vice President Chris Fleck said, “If your company has XenDesktop or XenApp you will be happy to know you will be able to use your iPad for real work as well.” The virtualization software already works great on the iPad SDK kit, and the company promises the application will be ready when the iPad launches.