With Windows 7 released and currently making its way to shelves in time for the holiday season, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade our copy of the official Windows System Recovery Discs for compatibility with Windows 7.

If you’re like most PC users, you probably got Windows 7 with a new PC or laptop. And if you’re like 99% of the population, you get your new machines from one of the major manufacturers. Dell, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo; who all have one thing in common: they don’t give you a real Windows 7 installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a “recovery disc” (that’s if you’re lucky – otherwise you’ll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that.

It doesn’t matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows 7 license – your computer manufacturer just don’t want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows 7 installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.

The problem is, with Windows 7, the installation media serves more than one purpose. It’s not just a way to get Windows installed, it’s also the only way of recovering a borked installation. The Windows 7 DVD has a complete “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.

Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows 7 DVD’s “recovery center,” as we’ve come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows 7, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC. Technically, one could re-create this installation media with freely-downloadable media from Microsoft (namely the Microsoft WAIK kit, a multi-gigabyte download); but it’s damn-decent of Microsoft to make this available to Windows’ users who might not be capable of creating such a thing on their own. You can make your own copy from Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, but now you have an easier alternative.

NeoSmart Technologies is hosting a copy of the Windows 7 Recovery Disc for your convenience. It’s a 143 MiB download (165 MiB for the 64-bit version), and in the standard ISO format, ready to burned directly to a CD or DVD. Don’t wait until your PC crashes to download a copy! Download and burn your recovery disc today, so that when the time comes, you’ll be ready!

What it does: The Windows 7 Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows 7 Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

Download Links

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 32-Bit (x86) Edition

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 64-Bit (x64) Edition

Please note that the above links point to .torrent files. Torrent files are like a shortcut, they tell a download manager on your PC where to download the actual files from. Downloading large & important system files with torrents is highly recommended since torrents are protected against corrupt downloads and tend to be faster when well-shared.

(All torrents are currently being seeded by 100mpbs servers, they should be blazing fast).

You can download the Windows Vista recovery discs from here.

Instructions

1. Download the appropriate .torrent file from above that corresponds to the version of Windows 7 you have installed.
2. Download and run µTorrent.
3. Open the .torrent file you downloaded with µTorrent. (File -> Add Torrent)
4. Select where you want µTorrent to save the 7 Recovery Disc.
5. Wait for it to download.
6. Burn the .iso file that µTorrent downloaded to a CD using these instructions.
7. When you want to use the recovery center, put the CD in your drive and boot from it. This is usually done by pressing F8 at startup, or changing the boot drive order in the BIOS.

Support

Please don’t ask for help below, it’ll get real cluttered real soon! Open a support thread at http://neosmart.net/forums/ and we’ll help you resolve your problem ASAP.

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition’s "Ultimate Extras" have been a constant source of derision and anger from Vista users ever since its release 3 years ago. If the blog posts are to be believed, millions of users purchased Windows Vista Ultimate Edition in the hope that the added-value "Ultimate Extras" package – which was left un-described and of unknown worth at the time – would turn out to be a good investment.

Ultimate Extras are a couple of the minor Ultimate Edition exclusives that Microsoft used as a selling point to get users to purchase the most expensive version of Windows Vista. It was originally marketed as something similar to the ancient "Plus! for Windows" package that was quite popular back in the days of Windows 98; except it never really panned out that way.

Ultimate Extras was something of a hoax for the first couple of years, bringing nothing more than animated wallpaper and extra cards game to the table. Since then a couple of new themes/sounds have been added to the package along with a couple of other lame games – all of which made Vista users feel all the more "tricked" into purchasing a more expensive version of Windows that they, in all honesty, didn’t need.

Well, it looks like Windows 7 will be doing away with the Ultimate Extras though it’s anyone’s guess what the final SKU lineup will look like and what the selling points and feature-sets of each of the editions will stack up to. But here’s to hoping that Microsoft learns from (even more) of its mistakes and provides something of real worth with the more expensive editions of its latest OS offering.

In the article, Ben Goodger, lead Chrome UI developer, states

[Google avoids] cross platform UI toolkits because while they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native looking UI on a variety of target platforms, once you go a bit deeper it turns out to be a bit more problematic.” [... Your applications end up] speaking with a foreign accent.

But there’s something we’re not getting here. Obviously given enough brilliant programmers and a good team lead to keep the different codebases in sync, going with native APIs is the better approach. But the reasons Goodger is offering aren’t very convincing.

The problem is…. Google’s Chrome for Windows doesn’t look native. In fact, it’s about as far from native Win32 as you can get. We had originally explained away the non-win32 looks by assuming it was because Google wanted an interface that was consistent across the different platforms and different at the same time from any of the operating systems native UI toolkits: in line with Google’s vision of turning the browser into an OS, regardless of the platform beneath.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product – from the codebase to the user experience – and that to the end user it shouldn’t matter what OS you’re on. And that in the future Google could ship a standalone (OS-free) browser that looks like Chrome and acts like Chrome, regardless of the platform beneath?

Otherwise there is no good explanation for the horrendously-different user interface that comes with Chrome. It requires learning the tips & tricks to a whole new UI, and forgetting a number of “niceties” you may have been accustomed to (such as pressing the ’spacebar’ to OK pop-up dialogs, etc.).

With the preliminary screenshots of Chrome for Mac, the platform Chrome runs on begins to peek through.

Does this mean that Google’s vision of Chrome as its own OS has come to pass – with Google now content to just launch a cross-platform browser without attempting to lull users away from the platforms they’ve come to love?

Whatever the case, it’s sure to be interesting watching and waiting to see what Google has planned for its users. Whether its a cross-platform browser experience that’s different enough to be the same across all platforms while retaining a feel of the platform or if it’s paving the way for the OS to come it’s quite obvious that the gears are now in motion and something big just might happen.

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

The problem is that Windows – standalone or in a dual-boot – is quickly becoming the lesser-appealing option when compared to a gaming console… in large part thanks to Microsoft’s ridiculous, biased, and fairly infuriating decisions to release games for Xbox and then for PC.

A major part of the gaming/entertainment Vista PR that went out around the same time as the OS: Microsoft Announces Spectacular Windows Vista Title Lineup. Spectacular? Hardly so. Take a look at the Microsoft Game Studios release history for 2006 and 2007, you’ll find a great disparity between the number of titles MGS released for Windows verses those for the Xbox (360)…

If you ignore expansion packs (the Zoo Tycoon development team seems to love these), you’ll find that Microsoft Game Studios released a total of nineteen titles for the Xbox over these two years, compared to a mind-blowing six titles for the PC over that same period – half of which were either available on the Xbox simultaneously or years before!

But what does Microsoft have to say about the obvious deterioration of the Windows gaming market?

The Windows gaming world continues to evolve, and we believe in the future of that property.

-Shane Kim, Microsoft’s Vice President of Interactive Entertainment

Sorry Mr. Kim, but we find that a bit hard to believe. Mr. Kim’s statement came in response to the recent (shocking) news that Microsoft’s (PC game development) Ensemble Studios – authors of Microsoft’s Age of Empires claim-to-fame hit series – would be shut down for "fiscal reasons."

Obviously Microsoft is in a hard place here, needing to cater to both of the (competing) PC and gaming console markets at the same time. However, due to the serious 3rd-party hardware/platform competition in the gaming console market it seems that Microsoft’s decision has been to give Xbox the priority here.

It’s obviously not Microsoft’s job to develop games for its own platform – technically, all they have to do for either the PC or the Xbox is develop the APIs and provide 3rd party gaming developers with the tools and support they need to make it work. And 3rd party developers have not let anyone down, with astonishing numbers of titles being published for both platforms.

But if Microsoft wants to ensure that its platform retains its current hold on the PC gaming market they’re going to need to do a bit more to convince potential Windows gamers to stick to their platform and not go out and get a gaming console instead. It’s quite a logical choice to focus on Windows here – there are literally millions of Windows users who would be using something else if it wasn’t for Windows’ vice-like grip on the gaming market.

The fact is, PC gamers and console gamers aren’t the same market targets. It won’t kill Microsoft’s Xbox division to treat their Windows gamers with a little bit more respect than they’re currently doing – if not for the users’ sake then for their own.

But no matter what Microsoft Game Studios does or doesn’t do, it can’t actually damage the Windows gaming platform – all it does is create a scenario wherein another OS can work hard and potentially overtake Windows at its own game (pun intended!).

Mac OS and Linux both have a rare opportunity on the horizon – but for it to have any impact on the current PC gaming sector’s dynamics, they’ll have to put a bit more effort into the gaming scene than they’re currently doing. Something that requires this sort of centralized coordination is definitely not one of Linux’s strong suites, so the ball is now squarely in Apple’s playing field, and it’s up to them what they do with it.

Basically, Microsoft needs to watch its step. The incentives for PC gaming are at their lowest levels in years with even real-time strategy games – the PC’s long-standing forte – being developed first for the gaming consoles and then, possibly, for the PC (yes, we’re looking at you, Halo Wars!).

And then there’s Bungie – cross-platform game developers bought up by Microsoft years ago, authors of the internationally-acclaimed “Halo” series, and now released from Microsoft’s reigns with its sights set squarely on developing games for the Mac once more.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s size is getting the better of itself once more; with its own divisions failing to compete with themselves they way they should. Microsoft needs to pick up on this slow degradation of PC gaming satisfaction and do something to buck the trend, or else they could suffer some serious consequences.

While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.

If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.

Obviously not all of Windows Sentinel’s (only) three thousand subscribers are included in the numbers above (it’s highly unlikely that even 80% of the 3000 subscribers are using hardware that only comes from the OEM with Windows Vista installed). And of the percentage that are using late-model hardware, a hefty percentage dual-boot.

We don’t have any numbers as far as the number of dual-booters out there, but they’re certainly not few enough to be discounted. Keeping that in mind, it’s rather unprofessional of InfoWorld to claim that 35% of all Vista users will downgrade to Windows XP. Obviously big numbers make for better headlines, but this is the kind of stuff that can damage stocks and ruin jobs – you don’t want that on your conscious, at least, not without good reason.

Not that we’re suffering from any delusions or hallucinations with regards to Windows Vista’s relatively shoddy performance and stability, but you’ll agree that it’s a rather far cry to go from “a lot of people have reservations about upgrading to Windows Vista” to “a lot of people will take the time and effort to remove Vista from a PC and put Windows XP in its stead;” especially keeping in mind that Vista’s been out for two years now and there’s an (unfortunately) increasingly-large number of Vista-only products out there on the market.

More data from InfoWorld and the Windows Sentinel service would certainly be most-welcome in giving a clearer picture of what the actual numbers are and where end-users stand in this OS mess.

Richard Stallman: legendary founder of the Free Software Foundation, purveyor of the GPL, defender of open source. And – as of today – expert FUD manipulator.

Obviously someone was seriously pissed off at the abundance of (largely positive) press coverage Bill Gates has been receiving as he stepped down from his final roles at Microsoft.. and it appears Mr. Stallman just couldn’t bear to let the man he hates more than any other step down without getting that last word in.

In an article by Richard Stallman published on BBC today, Stallman pulled back no punches bashing not only Bill Gates, Microsoft, and makers of proprietary software everywhere but also took the incredibly cheap shot of accusing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of working to ruin the very countries they’re trying to help:

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

Never mind the fact that those are unsubstantiated rumors following money trails several-hundred pockets deep – what does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have to do with Free Software? Is Stallman so desperate to make Mr. Gates out to be the bad guy that he’d sink this low?

Stallman, one of first people to accuse people of spreading FUD to further their opinions, doesn’t stop there:

Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

It said, in effect, "If you don’t let me keep you divided and helpless, I won’t write the software and you won’t have any. Surrender to me, or you’re lost!"

Here Stallman is referring to Gates’ now-famous letter asking people illegally copying, distributing, and using Altair Basic to stop. Stallman somehow neglects to mention that – regardless of whether morally acceptable or not – Microsoft had the legal right to demand payment in exchange for their software. Ignore for a second whether or not Bill Gates and Microsoft were in the right or in the wrong to ask for payment in exchange for their work – is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?

It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying. Gates chose to ask for money, users (as Richard Stallman himself has advocated on many occasions in the past) should be looking for an alternative if they don’t want to front the cash.

Who Richard Stallman thinks he’s kidding, we don’t know. But he’s obviously crossed that line that shouldn’t be crossed; apparently desperate enough to stop Microsoft the minute he senses an opening… even if it means spreading FUD, making pointless accusations, and generally talking nonsense to get his point across. This isn’t any way for a respected figure in the open source community to act, especially not when it comes to someone who has – whether Stallman likes it or not – contributed as much to the tech community as Bill Gates has.

Whether or not MinWin is the very same kernel that went into Vista or not is officially unknown at the moment; but what we do know is that Shipping Seven is either one huge fake, or else that the Windows core programmers at Microsoft are so stupid that they don’t know the first thing about coding, kernels, operating systems and compilers.

The post at Shipping Seven is littered from beginning to end with fallacies, lies, and incorrect deductions that anyone with even the most basic coding skills would know better than to ever post, especially not when attempting to pass it off as the work of some of the more talented coders out there.

Here are some of the more-glaring factual errors in the post that completely strip Shipping Seven of any authenticity or authority it may have on the topic of Windows 7:

How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?

Correction: OS X is powered by a rewrite of the XNU kernel which is a modified version of the Mach kernel which, in turn, is a complete rewrite of the original BSD kernel. And, of course, Ubuntu isn’t an OS in and of itself, rather it’s just a distribution of Linux.

While it can be argued that not every developer at Microsoft is expected to have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of other operating systems, no one in their right mind would believe that the Windows kernel programmers don’t even know what kernels their strongest competitors are currently using.

We spent a boatload of time during Windows Vista making everything ‘componentizable’ – So that we could (by creating some xml files that our build process uses) create a boatload of different versions of Vista (and Server 2008).

….

You already have MinWin – It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose – you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don’t know what the hell you’d do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though.

Assuming you can get past the way that the post was written (with references like “using the command line” which indicate a general lack of knowledge about computers in general; treating the command line as if it were a “god mode” that can be used to do just about anything), there’s still the matter of factual inaccuracies – and inconsistencies in the article itself.

You can’t change/modify/revert pre-build settings by running commands in the command line. Components that are integrated at compile time simply cannot be removed by running a bunch of commands afterwards – especially not from within the resulting OS itself.

Anyone that’s ever manually compiled a Linux kernel knows this. You can’t strip ext3 support from the kernel after it’s already built any more than you can add Reiser4 support to the kernel without re-building it. As a matter of fact, anyone who’s built anything at all should know this – the same rules apply to any other program as well. For example, you can’t remove PHP support from Apache if you’ve compiled mod_php directly into the binaries.

Shipping Seven is a big, fat fraud. It’s written by someone with only the most basic knowledge of computers, zero knowledge of coding concepts, and absolutely no experience with kernels and operating systems. Shipping Seven is most likely written by the equivalent of script kiddy, eagerly awaiting the first leaked builds of Windows 7 to appease an inner itch – most likely all the while lamenting his lack of involvement in the Longhorn beta. It isn’t worth the time it takes to read, and definitely doesn’t deserve even the questionable authority it now has on the topic.

iReboot isn’t by any means a major application, but it’s gathered a pretty strong following over the months, mostly by people interested in boosting productivity (or increasing laziness) to the max. But there was one flaw in iReboot that made all the hard work we put into making it as unobtrusive and minimalistic as possible almost meaningless: if you had UAC enabled, iReboot will not run automatically at startup, no matter what you do.

This behavior comes as a result of the architecture that Microsoft used to secure Windows Vista, which doesn’t allow for applications requiring admin approval to run at startup. It doesn’t matter what your application does or if you absolutely trust it beyond the shadow of the doubt, Windows Vista simply won’t let an application that runs in elevated privileges mode to launch at startup – end of story.

Users of iReboot were quick to point out that this is a major drawback that made it almost useless – after all, it’s far less productive to have to manually run an application when you want to reboot than it is to wait for that startup screen to appear and select the OS you want. So we set about finding a solution.

We’ve just released iReboot 1.1, a UAC-free implementation that doesn’t require admin approval, elevation, etc. past the initial installation. And, yes, it does run automatically at startup too!

The Gory Details (feel free to skip below to the download links!)

In order for iReboot to be of any use, we had to get around Microsoft’s UAC limitations. For iReboot, it was of the absolute importance that it run at startup, and that it be allowed system access from normal user accounts. On Windows XP – where everyone runs as an Administrator and there are no annoying UAC prompts – it was a non-issue. But on Windows Vista, the new architectural requirements for running applications in elevated privilege modes made it near impossible.

While digging around for possible solutions, it became clear that the only possible fix would be to split iReboot into two parts. One would run in the background as a service, running under the SYSTEM or LOCAL SERVICE accounts and having privileged access to the OS without requiring admin approval or UAC elevation, and with the second half running as an unprivileged userspace client program which interacts with the service backend to get stuff done.

The resulting application has an installer – which requires admin privileges, of course – which installs and launches the background service. The background service has full permission to do what we need to get operating system XXXX to be the default option for the next boot, but – in line with the Windows Service Model – cannot be interacted with by end users.

The installer also adds a normal UI application which sits in the taskbar (from where end-users may interact with and use iReboot) and communicates with the backend service via a custom API which must not require the execution of any privileged code. The service can do whatever it wants (well, whatever we want it to do, but lets not get picky here!), but the client program must only perform actions which normal, unprivileged users have permission to execute.

By using a standard inter-process communication API we avoided the need for any special actions on behalf of the client application, effectively separating logic (residing and executing on the backend service, free from the many limitations of UAC) and presentation/design (the client application, bound to obey UAC’s every wish).

The Bottom Line

Anyone running Windows XP or Windows Vista – with or without UAC and/or admin approval mode enabled – can now run iReboot at startup and use it to boot into whatever OS they like (in conjunction with EasyBCD, of course!).

But getting this far wasn’t easy. With Windows Vista, what should have been 100 lines of code maximum ended up being a dozen times longer, split across two different processes, and requiring way too much man-hours to write the most minimalist and to-the-point piece of software we’ve released to date.

Perhaps most importantly though, is the fact that Windows Vista’s newly-implemented security limitations are artificial at best, easy to code around, and only there to give the impression of security. Any program that UAC blocks from starting up "for good security reasons" can be coded to work around these limitations with (relative) ease. The "architectural redesign" of Vista’s security framework isn’t so much a rebuilt system as much as it is a makeover, intended to give the false impression of a more secure OS.

With the current Windows Vista security models, Microsoft can claim that Vista blocks system-modification tools from running at startup; but the truth is, there are still many ways to get them to run. At the end of day, our experience with iReboot and Vista’s security implementations brings us to the sad conclusion that with Windows Vista, Microsoft has made ISVs’ jobs more complicated without actually providing any any further protection for end users from malware authors – which certainly isn’t the best way of going about this task.

Anyway, the fruits of our efforts:

Download iReboot 1.1 (248 KiB)

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As always, NeoSmart Technologies remains committed to providing accurate and verifiable information from trustworthy sources. We’re also dedicated to providing reports/articles regarding content that our readers deem important and newsworthy; so you’ll always be able to find the latest accurate information regarding the Microsoft’s next OS at The NeoSmart Files.

The screenshots: http://neosmart.net/gallery/v/apps/IE8/

We’re still working on an in-depth review and analysis of what IE8 brings to the proverbial web browser table.

• Windows Vista and Server 2008 x86
• Windows Vista and Server 2008 x64
• Windows XP SP2 x86
• Windows Server 2003 SP2 x86
• Windows XP SP2 and Server 2003 SP2 x64

We’re working on screenshots and an early review, but in the meantime: Happy bug hunting!

Don’t get this wrong: we’ve got our own reservations about SP1 (between performance and usability – or, more accurately, the lack thereof). But Microsoft is not to blame because certain system tools and utilities won’t run on Windows Vista SP1 when it’s released in March.

According to The Register, "Vista SP1 kills and maims security apps, utilities" and that it’s somehow Microsoft’s fault that antivirus/firewall software by BitDefender, Jiangmin, Trend Micro, and Zone Alarm no longer works on SP1 – but it seems they forgot to mention two facts:

1. It’s bad coding habits that breaks these utilities.
2. Thanks to pre-release builds of Vista SP1, all 5 malware-protection programs have updated versions available that are Vista SP1 compatible and shouldn’t give their users any problems come mid-March and SP1.

Microsoft may have many faults and may have made many mistakes starting with Windows Vista’s initial release, but one thing they have done right is give developers (software and hardware alike) plenty of time to test their products against SP1 builds and plenty of opportunity to find out why they no longer work.

We’ve studied (and indeed, ran into) some of the issues that these programs experience under SP1 in our own code. In our testing, it seems that these incompatibilities only occur when developers attempt to use undocumented/unofficial workarounds to gain access to system operations, work around UAC limitations, and interface with the desktop & other running applications.

Following the guidelines published on MSDN (at least those marked as "Vista-compatible"), software can be written that correctly provides an interface between services, desktop applications, UAC, the internet, and low-level subsystems including drivers and raw access to disks and files – albeit with a lot of extra work and with some monetary expenses (namely, signed drivers).

At the end of the day, Vista SP1 may be many things but one thing it’s not is a compatibility sinkhole. Especially when compared to the problems experienced back in the days of Windows XP SP2’s release, the list of broken applications on Windows Vista is appreciably short – and moot, seeing as new versions of the software have already addressed the issues satisfactorily.

Microsoft isn’t new to the whole “virtual” monopoly business (where a single company holds the entire market thanks to “superior technology” and “better business sense”) – it’s just not too often that they’re on the wrong side of this particular proverbial fence.

When Silverlight was first announced and PopFly, Microsoft’s social network built to demonstrate and hopefully kickoff Silverlight, were simultaneously launched; we were quick to appreciate the technical aspects of .NET and WPF taken online, but were careful to make it clear that we didn’t think it stood much of a chance.

But things might be on the verge of a big change. Large portions Microsoft’s website are in the middle of a redesign that will feature a fully Silverlight-powered interface – doing away with HTML and everything else. We’ve had a chance to test the new interface (currently in beta), and here’s what we think:

1. According to Compete, Microsoft.com is the 8th most popular site on the internet, with around 60 million unique visitors a month. Put another way, if Microsoft successfully pulls this off, that’s 60 million new Silverlight users in the first month alone!
2. The new, Silverlight-powered interface is a pretty big step up from the old design, making it easy to access information about individual downloads and view overall info and lists.
3. The Silverlight part of the interface is almost wholly unnecessary. It’s really nice to use, it’s smooth, it’s easy, and it’s beautiful – but it’s nothing that requires a RIA in the first place. Microsoft could have easily implemented the same user experience (give or take) with HTML + JavaScript/AJAX; with a lot less effort and greater compatibility.
4. At the moment, very few non-Microsoft-owned sites are using Silverlight at all; let alone for the entire UI. And of those that do, none have anywhere the amount of exposure that Microsoft.com gets.

Keeping these facts in mind, there’s only one logical conclusion to be drawn: Microsoft realizes (as has the rest of the geek community) that Silverlight is on the verge of being forgotten. Claims of superiority aside (true or otherwise), Microsoft has realized that if Silverlight is to stand a chance, it’s going to take more than a failed attempt at making a Silverlight-powered social community to get developers and consumers alike to adopt Silverlight.

It’s a desperate move, there’s no doubt about it. While Microsoft will no doubt be making an alternative HTML interface available for a mixture of legal and practical purposes, switching Microsoft.com over to Silverlight is a sure-fire way to get that attention…. and depending on how it’s both marketed and carried out, it could be what it takes to make developers start taking Silverlight seriously.

Whether this’ll work out or not, only time can tell. We don’t know when the new Silverlight-interface will be going mainstream, but it’s probably not for a couple more months at the very least. The current interface still links to many as-of-yet not updated pages, and portions of the Silverlight section still appear to be missing some features here and there. Overall, the new interface is very user-friendly and well-developed, though.

You can either view NeoSmart Technologies screenshot gallery of the upcoming Microsoft.com re-design or attempt to access the beta link directly (working as of 01/03/08); but still pictures don’t really do the interface justice. Where the new UI really shines is the overall grace and fluidity of the interface, with gentle hover effects and fade in/out transitions that are done just right.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clear up some references to a full-site redesign of Microsoft.com. We do not have any evidence that all of Microsoft.com is being redesigned to take advantage of Silverlight, just large portions of it. Sorry for any confusion.

Windows Live Writer has a huge range of options and takes advantage of almost all the features and functionality available via remote blogging/XMLRPC that make it almost pointless to even enter your blog’s administration center. You can upload images and movies, set categories and keywords, specify the slug/permalink to posts, modify the post date, set passwords on posts, send trackbacks, manually create an excerpt, and even specify whether comments are or aren’t allowed on any given post – all this without leaving your desktop client.

But what most don’t know about Windows Live Writer is more what it represents than what it does: Windows Live Writer is the first full-scale consumer product to ship out of Microsoft’s camp built on the .NET Framework.

Ever since the release of the Microsoft .NET 1.0 Framework back in January 2002, one of the biggest questions asked by .NET-skeptics has been why Microsoft doesn’t use the .NET Framework for its own desktop products and services – especially when companies like Sun take every opportunity to use their own frameworks in the all their products and applications.

And, truth be told, that’s a pretty tough question to answer. On one hand, you have Microsoft selling the .NET Framework as the next stage in software development, complete with the RAD framework that is .NET backed by powerful languages of the likes of C# – perfect ingredients to make highly-productive code that does what you need it do in easy time and damn decent performance.

But at the same time, you have the huge range and sheer number of products shipping out of Microsoft’s camp that aren’t feeling the .NET-love. From Microsoft’s Office Suite to their assortment of small programs and utilities, the question remained: if C# + the .NET Framework are such a great innovation/revolution/foundation, why weren’t they being used to develop Microsoft’s own software?

We’re not in a position to know beyond the shadow of the doubt what Microsoft’s line of reasoning on this subject was, but there are several likely answers. For one, there’s the fact that a large percentage of Microsoft’s bigger offerings pre-date the .NET Framework – and backwards compatibility, one of Microsoft’s biggest focal points, is easier to maintain with the existing codebase. And, of course, the cost and effort of porting a complex system or suite from one language (C/C++) to another (C# + the .NET Framework) is nothing short of a Herculean task.

But Windows Live Writer is a fresh start, and it seems the Windows Live team has chosen to use the .NET Framework as their tool of choice. Perhaps it was a trial run: use the .NET Framework for a non-enterprise/non-business application and see how well it fairs with regards to performance, reliability, and maintenance. If so, then perhaps this is the straw that will break the proverbial camel’s back – and an indication of more .NET-powered programs to come?

There is nothing more important than having the people behind the .NET Framework using the .NET Framework – and it’s especially ironic since it was Microsoft that made “eating one’s own dog food” popular in the first place (as a concept, if not a reality). There is no need to point out the benefits that this would bring, and, more importantly, the stuff developers would not have to deal with any more.

Back when Microsoft was still making Longhorn, one of things that had developers so excited was the expected prevalence of the .NET Framework throughout the entire operating system. That would have meant the death of COM and DLL hell thanks to the .NET GAC and much nicer interfacing/import options available. And sure enough, that was one of the biggest disappoints in the series of what Vista turned out not to be.

If WLW is any indication, this could be the start of a new era for .NET developers around the globe. Windows Live Writer has come off to quite a promising start, and hopefully the people in charge realize the benefits such a shift in policy could bring.

This is the third SP1 release made “available” to the public, starting with the leaked build back in August, followed closely by the first official release of Windows Vista SP1 beta in September.

Vista SP1 RC1 (build tag: 6001-17042-071107-1618) has been available as both an slip-streamed ISO image and a standalone upgrade utility. The slip-streamed ISO image is available in either English or Japanese, while the upgrade utility supports the five main Windows Vista localizations (Arabic, English, French, German, and Japanese).

The Windows Server 2008 November CTP (build tag: 6001-17042-071107-1618) is only available as an ISO in English in multiple flavors (Web Server & Standard Edition) for multiple platforms (x86, x64, and IA64).

Neither of these releases are available to the general public at the moment (Windows Server 2008 RC1 is available here though), but the Vista SP1 beta program has been expanded to 15000 beta testers – the most yet.

We expect the Windows Vista SP1 beta to be made available to the general public pretty soon, going by previous trends like Windows XP SP2 (made available at around this same stage of development).

The Windows Vista SP1 RC1 upgrade weighs in at 434.8MB and 734.3MB for the x86 and x64 builds respectively.

The big question that’s no doubt on everyone’s mind right now: Is Windows Vista SP1 being rushed?

Our honest opinion: most definitely not. Microsoft knows what’s at stake here, and while they’ve made their fair share (and then some) of “buggy” initial releases of software and operating systems, Microsoft always done a pretty good job with Service Packs – we don’t think Windows Vista SP1 is any different.

While it’s true that there’s only been one beta build made available to testers before this RC release, it’s important to note that most (if not all) the patches and updates in Windows Vista SP1 have been in development and testing for a long time now, released as hotfixes (private or otherwise) on Microsoft Support.

Microsoft met the investor’s needs with the much-delayed and quite-buggy Windows Vista RTM a year ago (almost to the very day now), and now it’s time for the business users to get their turn. Most businesses are holding off on upgrading until at least SP1, and it’s Microsoft’s last chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of their more technical users.

More importantly, the earlier beta release of Windows Vista SP1 has not disappointed testers. While it may not have addressed all the issues (performance- and stability-wise) in Vista RTM, it didn’t introduce too many new glitches or incompatibilities – and that’s most of what the game is about.

Service packs generally have two goals: The first is to fix what’s broken, and the second is to make sure nothing that used to work breaks as a result. And as any software engineer will tell you, the second is infinitely harder to gage and ensure. It’s easy to fix most bugs once they’re identified; the trick is in extensive regression testing and constant compatibility test suites.

The bottom line is, we don’t believe Windows Vista SP1 is being rushed. Nor do we believe that it will be perfect – but it doesn’t have to be; all it needs to be is good enough for businesses and other power users to finally make the switch and be more-or-less happy with it, until the next updates come out.

Discuss this release in our tech-lounge/forums with fellow geeks and testers.