The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.

Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.

We’re sorry to have to break it to you, but if you thought it was too good to be true you were right. Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser.

We haven’t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it’s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, without a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory abusage is that in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use).

This is a screenshot of Firefox’s memory usage after just a half hour or so with only a couple of HTML-only tabs open. This particular screenshot was taken on Linux where Firefox is using the shared GTK libraries – on our Windows PCs, it’s normal to find Firefox 3 taking up ~350MiB or so on both XP and Vista.

The sad thing is that isn’t caused by one of the memory leaks that plagued previous versions of Firefox. It’s Firefox 3 is supposed to take up that much memory – at least, that’s our assumption given how we’ve never seen it take up less.

Firefox 3 has a number of memory-hogging features added to the mix that are probably at least partially responsible for the absolutely gargantuan memory footprint. For example, Firefox now uses an SQL engine to keep track of your history and bookmarks, amongst other things. While that particular feature is powered by SQL-lite, which should – in theory – not take up too much memory, we’re at a loss to explain what else is wasting memory left, right, and center in the world’s most-popular open source web browser.

Things like full-text on-the-fly searching of the web cache for when you type text in the address bar certainly have an impact as well – that’s a lot of stuff to keep in memory at one time. But Opera 9.5 does the same with a lot less memory, so obviously Firefox 3 is doing something wrong.

It’s a shame that Firefox 3 is on the verge of a release and is so terribly unfit to run on any machine – Windows, Linux, or OS X – with less than at least a couple of gigabytes of memory.

We’ve long felt that Gmail’s approach was not befitting of the Web 2.0 service with all its sky-blue shades and flashy appearance – and now it seems that Google’s felt that way too.

Here’s the new loading interface… Subtle, simple, and effective:

(Click image to see more changes)
  

After all, first impressions are everything!

New Coverage

We’re pleased to welcome Kristan M. Kenney to the NeoSmart blogging team – most of our readers are probably already familiar with his previous contributions to the online community. Kristan will be providing a “different” perspective on tech happenings and further insight into certain aspects of the computer industry that we haven’t “delved deeply enough into,” for lack of a better expression.

New Content

It’s taken us a while, but both the Guides section and the Reviews section of NST are finally up and running. At the moment, the reviews is pretty empty (read: void of any and all content); but we’ve been working hard (thanks to our contributors) on some all-new guides:

• Installing Windows Vista
• Installing Windows XP
• Burning ISO Images
• Web Browser Guides for Beginners

The guides are intended to cover as wide a range of content and readers as possible – from the beginner to the expert. Where possible, each guide will have dedicated sections for the varying levels of involvement and/or difficulty (for instance, tweaking Firefox’s options via the available settings’ dialogs verses making advanced changes in about:config)

New Programs

At the end of the day, it seems that its our software that brings in the biggest share of attention, and here’s what we’re currently working on:

• Vista Hide ‘n Seek, a (free, of course) application that protects your Windows Vista System Restore points from corruption by Windows XP. Obligatory links: Screenshots, Beta download links.
• iReboot 1.1: an update to iReboot that works around Windows Vista’s non-negotiable blocking of all apps that require UAC elevation from running at startup. Download the beta.
• EasyBCD 2.0: it’s been a long time in the works, but rest assured, it’s coming along. No download links or screenshots for now…

Facebook

Last but not least, you’re all invited to join us on Facebook: NeoSmart Technologies Facebook Group.

Flickr is for photos. Scribd is for documents. Period… Or at least that’s the way it should be – theoretically.

So why is that so hard for people to get? Something about Scribd’s ease-of-use and flexibility has made people forget – and it looks like the people up top don’t seem to mind much, either. For instance, “i LOVE Milla Jovovich,” a group with over 1500 photos pretending to be documents was one of today’s “Featured Groups” on the Scribd homepage.

But the thing is, Scribd isn’t only not intended for photos, it’s not optimized for photos either. Users are uploading photos as PDF documents – unnecessarily increasing their size and limiting the photos’ usages. It has limited tagging options, doesn’t support any form of EXIF implementations, and offers all the wrong tools.

What Scribd is good for is full-text searching of documents and essays, downloading a file uploaded in multiple formats – regardless of the initial implementation, playing back text as audio, and more. It makes it easy to view documents quickly and easily with their Flash-based reader instead of forcing the users to double-check that they have Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat installed on the PC they’re currently using. In short, it web-enables content that isn’t already natively supported by browsers – and that’s not something that photos need.

Photos are already natively supported by just about every browser on the planet. You embed them, you play them, you save them, and you share them. You don’t need a special program to view them, nor do you need to worry about different proprietary formats and codecs. They just work.

So what is it about Scribd that makes people flock to it instead of Flicrk, even when the latter is so much more enticing when it comes to photo-based options and features? Well, it’s not too difficult to find out.

• Scribd is 100% free. No limits on file size and no “Pro” accounts.
• Scribd doesn’t require you to register. This may sound stupid since it’s just a click away and doesn’t cost a thing, but a lot of people hate to have to go through the whole process of signing up for an @yahoo.com email just to get access to Flickr. Scribd doesn’t even block you from doing things just because you’re not registered – you can do anything real users can!
• Scribd has the sexiest uploader(s) on the planet. With a Flash, Java, HTML, and ActiveX interfaces to make uploading multiple files simultaneously straight-forward and oh so easy, that’s another reason to snub Flickr and its primitive upload interfaces.
• Scribd has great SEO and SEO tracking. Just click in the sidebar to see a map of user visits to your site, search result rankings, and indexing activity.

So what’s a site to do when it’s too popular for its own good? Not that the Scribd admins seem to mind, of course, but seriously?

When Scribd first kicked off, pretty much no one realized what a gold mine sharing text could be. A lot of people wrote it off as something only academics and geeks would use – and they turned out to be quite wrong. People love to read, and they love to share. Combine that with an incredibly flexible system, and you’ve got a killer service.

Our opinion? Give it six months or so, and Scribd will give in to popular demand and provide a more comprehensive & full-range of media options that will do away with all pretense and fully support both text and photos.

The symptoms include incredibly-slow internet access, inability to access certain domains, slow logon times, slow application launch times (under GNOME), and so on and so forth. There hasn’t been any official acknowledgement, but the consensus is that it’s a bug that’s re-surfaced from Ubuntu Edgy Eft (version 6.10).

In short, internet on Ubuntu is useless. There are multiple guides across the net with the solution along with an “explanation” we find to be inadequate and fundamentally flawed. The solution is to disable anything that even smells remotely of IPv6. Remove it from the network settings, remove the definitions from the hosts file, configure your favorite web browser to pretend it doesn’t exist, and you’ll get your internet back.

The explanation, that some will give you, is that Ubuntu 7.10 is configured with IPv6 as the default interface, and if you’re on an IPv4-only network (like 99% of the world’s population) Ubuntu will waste time trying the IPv6 network connection before using the internet-enabled IPv4 connection.

But this is nonsense, because it simply doesn’t explain why it takes so long for Ubuntu to make the switch (from 10 seconds to infinity) and absolutely ignores the fact that Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn worked just fine with IPv6 enabled – as does Windows Vista for that matter.

The problem is that Ubuntu thinks IPv6 has a proper, working internet connection and attempts to use it, even if you’re on an IPv4 network.

If the routing rules were correctly done, Ubuntu shouldn’t have a problem sending IPv4 packets over the IPv4 network, and IPv6 packets over an IPv6 connection. But obviously that is not the case. It shouldn’t matter what is set as the “default” (there is no such thing, really) network connection, Ubuntu should connect ASAP and without all this nonsense.

The bottom line is, Gutsy Gibbon’s TCP-stack is broken and we have yet to see a real fix. Disabling IPv6 is nothing more than a stop-gap solution, and is the completely wrong way to go about doing it. If anything, it makes the general techie wary of IPv6… and that’s not something you want to do, when IPv6 adoption rates are already so absolutely dismal.

All this raises a really important question: what is it with modern operating system releases being RTM’d before they’re really ready? From Vista to Gutsy Gibbon to Leopard, something is definitely wrong. If you haven’t already made the switch to Gutsy Gibbon, stay with Feisty until the next version comes out.

So what’s going on? We’ve downloaded the current release (which, by the way, is not compatible with the old one, you must uninstall then install the new version) and checked the version number on \Windows\System32\inetsrv\fcgiext.dll – it came out to be 6.1.36.1.

By contrast, the version we downloaded and installed a month ago (which seems to have been dubbed the Go Live release) was checked and found to be 7.0.6001.16606.

Obviously the Go Live release was using the numbering from the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 releases, but it’s got us confused.

You can find a timeline of the FastCGI module’s development and milestone cycle  Mike Volodarsky (Microsoft IIS developer)’s blog – but it makes no mention whatsoever of the October 10th 2007 release.

What has most perplexed isn’t the lack of a complete release schedule nor the conflicting version numbers – those are easy. As with most other applications, the latest is greatest – end of story. For us, the problem is that the RTM FastCGI module is less stable than the Go Live release from last month. This is real bad new, because the FastCGI module has been awesome and most invaluable tool when it comes to deploying certain buggy open-source modules on Windows.

Our experience with the RTM FastCGI module has not been all bad – performance has been slightly (as in < 1 req/seq) improved. But upgrading is a PITA and the RTM module wouldn’t abide by the configuration file the first time we installed it – to the extent that it served our PHP files as plain-text, a HUGE security no-no. But then we deleted the configuration file and started from scratch and everything was OK…

But then the FastCGI processes started to balk and quit, requests were timing out too fast (despite using the same configuration file directives), and rapid-fail protection was being engaged far too often.

It seems that the timeout syntax has reverted to the original semantics of the earlier releases prior to the Tech Previews, where the ActivityTimeout will kick in even the RequestTimeout hasn’t yet been reached…. But we’re not certain.

At the moment our problems seem to have been sorted out (by raising all the limits in our configuration file by a lot) but, of course, everything has its price. We’re hoping that raising the timeouts won’t induce and instability or end up with FastCGI module unable to detect a hanged process – but only time will tell.

In the meantime, if you’re running the October 2007 release (which, by the way, we cannot seem to locate any more) you should probably hold off upgrading for a week or two until things get sorted out.

The Microsoft [[MSFT]] FastCGI module for IIS 5.1, 6, and 7 (with Windows Vista and Server 2008) have been in the works for quite a while now, and we’ve been using them since the first beta release – they’re good. While the biggest benefit will be seen in using FastCGI w/ IIS7 to take advantage of the new kernel-mode caching, it’s still a huge improvement over the old way of running scripting engines for languages like PHP on Windows.

The Problem: Most open-source scripting engines like PHP and Ruby on Rails were initially developed on/for the *nix world. On Unix-based platforms, the easiest way of creating multi-threaded applications is just to run the same app twice or more (The CGI model). On Windows, that doesn’t work out so well, because it takes a lot more resources to create another process. So these engines released Windows-specific single-process multi-threaded engines; the only problem was, they weren’t stable. Too many race conditions in some very non-thread-safe code wreaked havoc on many Windows systems, with the PHP developers themselves giving “Stability on IIS” the lowest level of concern.

The Solution: Enter Microsoft’s FastCGI module. It’s a multi-threaded service that creates several processes of the scripting engine and keeps them running thereby eliminating the overhead of creating new processes and also letting you use non-thread-safe binaries without a fear in the world.

Despite all the bad press Microsoft seems to be getting these days from the open source community, even when they do things right, the IIS team has really outdone itself with this project. The benchmarks are quite amazing, and the team seems to genuinely care about pleasing open-source users on the Windows world. While PHP/Zend has released supposedly thread-safe PHP binaries, we’ve been using them here on NeoSmart Technologies for a while, and though they are much better, we’ve still had the occasional access violation error w/ a exit code indicating it was caused by non-thread-safe code.

While most servers running PHP are also running a Unix-based operating system, it’s always good to have a choice. After all, there are quite a few projects out there that require Windows-based servers, have some PHP scripts they’d like to run (the fact that it’s the most popular language for all those highly-used packages should be a clue), and can’t afford another to shell out the cost of another *nix machine. And, as the open-source community would say, it’s all about having as many choices as possible.

[download] [configuration]

While Microsoft’s [[MSFT]] newly-released build and the one leaked a month ago (Build 3180) may share the same name, we can exclusively reveal that they are not identical releases. This release, also shipped as windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe, is 334.2 megabytes and has been made available to tier-one Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 beta testers. Hashes are as follows:

CRC: 56e08837
MD5: c8c24ec004332198c47b9ac2b3d400f7

Along with the standalone installer redistributables (in English, Japanese, and German), Microsoft also provided the usual release notes and a list of all the hotfixes included in this release. Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with all-new features - not just patches and hotfixes, most of them backported from Windows Vista:

• New Windows Product Activation model: no need to enter product key during setup. Thank God for that!
• Network Access Protection modules and policies have been brought to XP after being one of the more-well-received features in Windows Vista. You can read more about NAP here.
• New Microsoft Kernel Mode Cryptographic Module – the Windows XP SP3 kernel now includes an entire module that provides easy access to multiple cryptographic algorithms and is available for use in kernel-mode drivers and services.
• New “Black Hole Router” detection – Windows XP SP3 can detect and protect against rogue routers that are discarding data.

Windows XP SP3 is compatible with all versions of Windows x86, included Embedded, Fundamentals, Start, Professional, Media Center, and Home Editions.

Windows XP SP3 now contains 1,073 patches/hotfixes, not including those in previous service packs. Of the 1,073 included updates, 114 are for security-related issues. The remainder are updates to performance & reliability, bugfixes, improvements to kernel-mode driver modules, and many BSOD fixes.

As with Service Pack 2, these include both previously publicly-available updates (whether through support.microsoft.com or via Windows Update) as well as any and all privately-redistributed updates for select customers or partners with specific problems/scenarios.

The first included update: KB123456 (April 7, 2006). The last: KB942367 (September 29, 2007).

We’re checking with our MS contacts if we can provide you with the actual comprehensive list of updates included in Windows XP SP3, along with their descriptions and KB article links.

When you upload a document to Scribd (which accepts almost all popular formats like OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and more), it’s automatically converted to .doc, .pdf, and .txt – and it comes with a converted-to-audio MP3 version as well. But most importantly – it’s a hell of a lot more convenient for your readers.

While you can embed a self-hosted video in your blog and have it streamed to your readers with little to no effort, inline and all, it’s a lot more complicated (rather, impossible) to embed a binary-encoded text file in a post or article. With Scribd, you can instantly embed a document like this:

That’s (our good friend) Andre Da Costa’s recently-published Windows Vista Quick Start Guide originally uploaded to Scribd as a PDF. Previously, it required having Acrobat Reader (or an alternative) installed, a couple of minutes to download, and a lot of RAM to boot. Not “easy” to say the least. You should read it, it’s quite interesting

Even better, you can just click a button and have it sent to you in the format you choose. Quite handy! You can also click in the textbox at the top of the embedded document and search for text.

Scribd has lots of little nifty features each of which doesn’t seem like much, but in our opinion, at the end of the day all those little features add up and can blow your mind – and reduce your hosting costs, too.

Bottom line: Scrbd is one Web 2.0 services you don’t have to be “on the bandwagon” to use and love; it’s just one of those things that make sense no matter what way you look at it.

For the past couple of months, we’ve focused on more on new products and services, market trends, programming languages, and general tech analysis verses the traditional tried-and-tested in-depth review system that we used in the past. But we’ve got the message, and we’ll start to mix and match. (It’s probably time we got some new bloggers, too).

Operating System Reviews will be one of two kinds covering two types of operating systems: OS in Brief, where we’ll sum up some of the strong and weak points of less-analyzed operating systems, and Full-Blown OS Dissection, like our ReactOS review these will feature in-depth analysis of various OS components, point out all the little details, and tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the operating system.

We’re here for our readers, so make your vote count:

[poll=3] 

Ask.com always sucked. From when Jeeves the butler was still young and had a spring to his step, their results were never on-par with MSN, Yahoo, or fledgeling Google. They preyed on the new-comers to the web, giving them a corny man in a pinstriped suit and coattails bobbing on their screen, pointing them in the direction all the time. Ask claims their new algorithm is awesome – God only knows how much money went into the advertisement campaign alone.

We’re sorry to break it to you though: Ask.com’s search results are just as terrible – if not worse – than they ever were.

We went to Ask.com (now Butler-free!), and were rather surprised. It looks slightly better, that wasn’t it. The problem was, we couldn’t get a single meaningful search result back!

Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and everyone else has the official download location for EasyBCD as the number 1 result. And why shouldn’t they; it’s where all the EasyBCD links point to anyhow! Not only did an Ask.com search for EasyBCD not turn up the official download site in first place, it didn’t turn it up at all! Not only that, but the first result wasn’t even to NeoSmart Technologies – it was a review by Jason Olson (of Microsoft) way back when EasyBCD was first released. He even links to the official download page there! What about second place though?

Nope, not even there! That one is a download link to EasyBCD 1.2 – from ages ago as well. And yes, you guessed it, it links to NeoSmart Technologies as well. 3rd place? NeoSmart Technologies at last! But don’t get your hopes up, it’s a link to the homepage which never – not once – linked to EasyBCD.

The rest of the results are just as ridiculously off-topic or inapplicable – including dozens of spam entries from splogs across the web – the kind that don’t get any incoming links from anywhere!

Ask.com may have done away with the Butler and his moustache, but they haven’t done anything to be worthy of even a fraction of the attention their false advertising got them. Their site is still clunky (who still uses frames in search results nowadays!?) and their algorithm….. it just sucks. 

Programs. They start off in the IDE as nothing more than a blank page, then (with the blood, sweat, and toil of programmers and many sleepless nights) they turn into volumes of monospaced text, a standing testament to the dedication of programmers and the way they work. Then from the myriads of the source code and the magic of the compiler comes the executable file, the fruit of all the efforts. No one really sees the actual work that went into it: all they see is a file that runs and a program that works.

Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to go. But with Java and .NET, it doesn’t really work that way. These frameworks/virtual-machines rely on the concept of virtual machines, compiling to Byte Code (Java) or MSIL (.NET). What looks like an executable file is actually source code being passed on to the framework for translation and execution. So your source code is never safe, and it’s never really compiled.

We’ve been using .NET for our programs at NeoSmart Technologies for years now, and we’ve never really come across this as a problem, simply because our software’s always been and always will be freeware. However, in recent months we’ve seen some of our more popular programs like EasyBCD being decompiled and its source-code stolen left and right by those that don’t know any better. So we set off looking for the best obfuscation tool for the job, and found much more than what we were looking for.

We were originally looking for an obfuscation tool, but then we found {smartassembly} by Cachupa (screenshots!) is much more than that. It’s a relatively name compared to the other “big names” in software obfuscation, but in our testing, it’s the very best tool for the job; designed to impress, easy to use, incredibly powerful, and very intelligent (for lack of a better word) in the way it addresses and overcomes the various issues regarding the complete optimization and protection of .NET Assemblies.

We contacted Cachupa and were given a full license so we could test all of {smartassembly}’s features, and we have to say – we’re very impressed.

{smartassembly} isn’t just the best obfuscator we’ve tested, ((Compared with Pre-Emptive Software’s DotFuscator, Remotesoft’s Salamander, CodeVeil, XenoCode, and more)) but also an all-in-one optimization, deployment, and improvement tool; offering a range of nifty tools and features that contribute to performance enhancements, better error tracking, and most importantly of all: the best obfuscation we’ve come across.

The remainder of this review is broken-up into 3 sections: Optimization, Obfuscation, and Deployment. And of course, there’s a Conclusion as well.

Whether you like Windows or not, at some point or the other, you may find yourself using IIS 6 or even 7, and then you’ll be wondering why the open source technologies you’re using aren’t as stable as ASP or MSSQL on Windows. However, ever since the release of IIS 6, Microsoft has truly remade Internet Information Services as a real contender in the server market, providing a highly secure, stable, fast, and flexible web server for the masses. IIS 7 (due to ship with Longhorn Server sometime in 2007) is currently showing all the signs of being even better, with complete modularization of all components and a highly extensible, XML-based framework.

We’re really happy to be able to finally say with all conviction that it really works! This week, NeoSmart Technologies was featured on the homepages of many link aggregation sites (including Slashdot) for our Desktop vs. Web RIAs article. And we’re glad to say that even with the extreme load, for the entire past week we’ve had 100.00% uptime with respect to network, IIS, MySQL, and everything else!

We can conclude with all certainty that PHP’s extensions and modules for Windows servers aren’t to be trusted and should be avoided at all cost for anyone looking to achieve any sort of uptime. The other changes that we did involved removing MySQL as a service and launching it as a standalone app via Microsoft’s srvany application-service bridge – it seems that a good portion of the Open Source community has a severe problem dealing with load in a Windows-only environment.

However, for those looking for a “no-nonsense” open source approach, we can confidently recommend Perl, Python, and PostgreSQL as being the way to go. Unlike PHP, Perl is highly stable with or without the ISAPI extensions, and works even better in FastCGI mode – though that’s unnecessary given the (minimal) performance hit comparing ISAPI to FastCGI (ISAPI is about 10% faster under load).

Python is similarly very reliable and highly stable extension for IIS, though we haven’t had the chance to test it under (real-user) extreme load as we have with PHP and Perl. However, in our simulated load extended-testing scenarios, both Python’s ISAPI and (Fast)CGI implementations worked great and without a flaw on IIS 6.

In running and maintaining the NeoSmart servers, we’ve come to get a good “feel” for the various companies out there catering to webmasters around cyberspace. Some, like PHP, seem to only focus on their “recommend platforms” when it comes to stability, and don’t really care about any other configuration. However, ActiveState gets 5 out of 5 stars when it comes to producing excellent implementations of open source languages, and we can only hope that PHP and others can someday achieve even 80% of what ActiveState has done with their high-reliability, high-performance packages for Windows. ActivePerl and ActivePython are the only way to go if you’re looking to deploy either scripting language in a Windows environment. And if you want to go with CGI instead of IIS, make sure to use Microsoft’s FastCGI solution as well, since the 3rd party FastCGI implementation for IIS is very buggy and not under active development.

PostgreSQL undoubtedly wins the performance challenge when it’s paired up with the likes of MySQL. PostgreSQL is a fully matured RDBMS solution that works just great out of the box on Windows and Linux alike. We’ve never had any stability or compatibility problems with it on Windows Server 2003, and we highly recommend it for anyone looking to run a minimal-maintenance web server on Windows.

The only problem with this picture is that two most popular open source scripting dependencies are the least reliable out there on Windows. Just why PHP and MySQL don’t focus on what is fast-becoming a decent-sized chunk of the user market isn’t very clear to us. However, MySQL is fairly reliable on the majority of systems we tested it on, with the only issues occurring after upgrading to another version, or when the service becomes corrupted and you’re forced to run it as a standalone application.

We wish we could say the same for PHP, which despite the most popular open source scripting language in use today remains absolutely unreliable and completely indifferent in its attitude towards users of Microsoft’s operating system and web server. Thankfully, Microsoft’s FastCGI solution addresses most of the issues present with regards to stability and reliability on Windows, however, the companies attitude as a whole isn’t what we would consider to be “user-friendly” with respect to this issue.

At the end of the day, if you want to use Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and IIS to power your website, ((And you might as well, since Apache on Windows has its own host of problems to worry about and Apache + Windows (WAMP) isn’t as “successful” of a combination as IIS + Windows (WIMP) 9 times out of 10.)) and are looking to deploy open source products on Windows 2003, then you should look for or write your own platforms that use Python or Perl in combination with PostgreSQL for maximum efficiency, minimum downtime, and least headache.

As the official press release states, Halo 2 for Windows Vista will have superior graphics compared to the Xbox version, and it’ll come with a Map Editor too (that we’ve known for a while now). It’s good to finally have a concrete date set for one of the most anticipated games in PC history.

Halo 2 was the most popular game for the Xbox, taking up where the original Halo for Xbox left off. Halo 2 and Microsoft/Epic’s Gears of War currently top the popular list for Xbox 360. Gears of War is another game PC gamers are looking forward to playing on the PC.

Following the May 8th release of Halo 2 for PC, another FPS game for Windows Vista will be released come June: Shadowrun. Shadowrun will PCs and Xbox 360s at the same time, making it the first true multi-platform experience on Games for Windows LIVE.