Home & Small Office Computer Guide

… Microsoft to small business - too bad … it’s gone from the beginning of the year.

Well it seems that sales of Windows Vista haven’t been quite as stellar as the hype from Microsoft would have us believe. In fact in some markets, such as the small office/home office market, sales of Vista have been rather dismal as small businesses prefer to stick with an operating system that works with all their software.

Microsoft’s solution? Make sure there’s no other operating system the small office/home office people can buy. Windows XP in the OEM version will be withdrawn from sale by the end of the year.

There’s nothing quite like bludgeoning your clients into submission.

You can read the full story here

Microsoft has not yet officially released its pricing for the new operating system but someone in Microsoft’s Canadian office managed to let the cat out of the bag.

For a short period of time the prices for Vista were displayed on Microsoft’s Canadian website and it now seems that the basic Vista operating system is likely to retail for around $US233 (that’s $A305 as I write this).

For the top of the range Vista product you can expect to pay around $US449 ($A$588) and for Vista Business the price will be $US379 ($A497).

You can read the full story here

CNET news is suggesting that Microsoft will release 12 security patches next Tuesday for Windows and Office. It’s suggested that at least one patch will require a reboot and another is a patch of a patch.

Hmmmm

You can read the full story here

If you are in any way involved in placing images on websites then this will be of great interest to you.

Microsoft has announced the release of a new image format that will be supported in its upcoming Vista operating system. It will also be supported in XP.

Windows Media Photo is said to allow great compression of file sizes while maintaining a clear image. Microsoft suggests that their new format will replace the Jpeg - the current Internet standard.

You can read the full story here

Previous reports that Windows Vista would have a blackdoor that police and security forces could use to access encrypted files on any computer running the operating system has now been discounted by Microsoft.

In fact it has been described as “nonsense” by a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft. You can read the full story here

Microsoft have unveiled the latest version of the Office suite of programs. The first releases will come later this year but you can find out more here

Microsoft recently announced that Vista would not be as secure as everyone first thought. In fact Microsoft was intentionally leaving a back door in their otherwise secure system to allow various law enforcement agencies to be able to access files in the interests of national security.

Now that sounds all very noble and patriotic doesn’t it?

But there’s one slight problem. If there’s a back door there for the security agencies how long will it be before hackers find it and exploit it?

It seems that a huge proportion of people online use at least one of the three major Instant Messaging systems. And if you’re in a business that focuses on the online market place then you probably find that you need to have two and possibly all three of those systems running on your desktop.

That can be a pain if people on all three networks start talking to you at the same time and it gets even worse if there are a lot of people talking to you at the same time.

If that’s the case then a joint announcement by Mirosoft and Yahoo could be very good news for you. Starting some time after March next year people will be able to combine their buddy lists in MSN and Yahoo

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft but just lately I have been slowly moving towards appreciating Microsoft more and more.
This strange transition started not long after I downloaded and installed Firefox as my browser of choice. I have to say that at first I loved Firefox - it has some fantastic features that make life very easy for someone who makes his living from working on the Internet. And those features were missing from IE.

However, it also had one or two quirky little problems that I was learning to live with. For example, if you went to a site to stream a movie Firefox could not do it. The best you could hope for was to download the movie to your own machine and watch it from there.

But that was ok until just recently when I, and others, began to notice that Firefox was becoming even more buggy with each update. For example, when you are looking at this page in IE it will look very different to what you would see in Firefox. In Firefox the text would be bigger and the link colors would be darker.

If I try to make the text bigger for IE viewers then it becomes so big in Firefox that it can display in very bizarre ways that I won’t bore you with here.

And then came this morning. I went to a blog to download a podcast and found that the blog owner had provided several links so that I could either stream the podcast direct from his site or download it - as I wanted to do. So in Firefox I clicked on the download link … and found that it began streaming. And when I clicked on the streaming link … you guessed it. It began to download.

Ok, maybe the blog owner got the links wrong so I checked it in IE and in IE the download link downloaded and the streaming link streamed.

That may not seem like such a big problem but when you have a tool that you use for business then you want that tool to work the way it is supposed to do. It’s a productivity thing - time is money etc. etc.

Internet Explorer may not have all the bells and whistles that Firefox has but at least it works the way it’s supposed to work so maybe it’s time to go back to the tried and tested tools. Just because they carry the Microsoft brand doesn’t mean they don’t work.