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Seriously, to remove WGA you can use Windows restore points to go back to where you were before installing those "so important" security updates. You can still install SP3 as a standalone version.. Then disable automatic installation of updates and you are done with this WGA crap.

• Windows product key
• PC manufacturer
• Operating System version
• PID/SID
• BIOS information (make, version, date)
• BIOS MD5 Checksum
• User locale (language setting for displaying Windows)
• System locale (language version of the operating system)
• Office product key (if validating Office)
• Hard drive serial number

It may be a tad bit disturbing to have all that information being broadcast, but some of it makes sense. Windows Activation is tied to a computer and its hardware, and what WGA is supposed to do is verify that the activation is legit, they'd (presumably) need to broadcast the same information to the WGA servers to verify that activation (since we all know activation can be faked/bypassed).

Microsoft also needs to create a disincentive for people who pirate their software. WGA, besides nagging the user that they have an illegal copy, also prevents optional and recommended updates from being installed, prevents Office users from downloading templates, and prevents the download of certain products/services that would be free to paying customers.

So why is "phoning home" okay? Why not do it once and be done with it? Every day crackers find ways to get around Windows' copy protection. As a developer, Microsoft needs to stay ahead of that and tailor their systems to counter-act innovation on the crackers' part. The opposite is also true: falsely-flagged copies need to be unflagged, or customers will suffer due to them being marked as a false positive. Either way, Microsoft has not kept this a secret, and even promised to reduce checking to once every two weeks (and that was way back in 2006).

I know a lot (probably most) of you guys on here will disagree with me, but I see this as a necessary evil that Microsoft has to perform, and if I were in their shoes, I'd go about it similarly (perhaps be a bit less intrusive). The fact of the matter is, WGA only negatively affects people who either pirated software, or were the victims of software piracy. The privacy argument, in my opinion, is a strawman. If you buy a PC from Dell, it's most likely they already have all that information (save for BIOS MD5 checksum, probably) linked to your customer account. If you buy a PC from Best Buy with a credit card, that purchase information is already linked with the product serial number, which is probably linked with all the serial numbers of the hardware that went into the thing. I don't see how this can be any different than that, other than the fact that Microsoft has it instead of Dell or Best Buy.

The same is pretty much true of .Net's Windows.Forms. It's a bit faster than Swing, although not by much (some parts are actually slower - System.Drawing vs Java2D, for example), so it's a little more forgiving of doing work in the UI thread. It will still bite you in a non-trivial application. Of course, the framework provides absolutely no help in writing a multithreaded application, and all of the tools, examples and documentation make writing a multi-threaded application far more difficult than it should be.

Yes, and things like Control.Invoke to marshal invocations from background threads to UI, and especially BackgroundWorker, which are there specifically to provide a high-level (i.e. without locks) API for worker threads, with progress reporting and cancellation, must be just figments of my imagination?

Have you actually written any WinForms code in .NET 2.0+?

The same is pretty much true of .Net's Windows.Forms. It's a bit faster than Swing, although not by much (some parts are actually slower - System.Drawing vs Java2D, for example), so it's a little more forgiving of doing work in the UI thread. It will still bite you in a non-trivial application. Of course, the framework provides absolutely no help in writing a multithreaded application, and all of the tools, examples and documentation make writing a multi-threaded application far more difficult than it should be.

Yes, and things like Control.Invoke to marshal invocations from background threads to UI, and especially BackgroundWorker, which are there specifically to provide a high-level (i.e. without locks) API for worker threads, with progress reporting and cancellation, must be just figments of my imagination?

Have you actually written any WinForms code in .NET 2.0+?

It's nothing like Superfetch. Superfetch preloads applications into system memory and this shared cache doesn't do that instead from what I understand it preforms some of the work the linker would do on load in advance.

The official Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client on OS X is published by Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_RDC&fid=CD9EC77E-5B07-4332-849F-046611458871

Apple uses a VNC protocol for its own remote desktop clients/servers.

Nope.

A TS gateway sits in a DMZ zone to allow connections from outside a firewall. It also provides several other advancements, like enforcing only clients with up-to-date virus software can connect. VPN in might work unless the TS gateway is required for internal machines as well, which is the case at some companies.

"I'll take the damn course if it'll get me a $10 copy of Win 7."

should have signed up for the Live Launch event and got a free copy.

At any rate, does anyone think Microsoft is giving Linux too much publicity? There's people out there that wouldn't dream of running linux, and when they're asking questions wouldn't it be easier to say "I don't know, never heard of it" then have some tech person jump all over them with a barrage of answers?

I'm just thinking, if there was this product I heard of and I asked a Best Buy employee about it and they suddenly go on this huge tirade about how horrible it is and how I should stay away from it, that'd make me more curious than anything. But if they replied "don't know, never heard of it" I'd figure it must be nothing.

I think this is the wrong approach M$. Don't worry about mom & dad getting Linux, you need to worry about the businesses. Long as their job uses M$ they're not going to switch at home, but if they go to work and they're trained on this wonderful OS and they enjoy it then you'll be in trouble.

If I was M$ I would make sure every business, from 3 people up to thousands, switched to Windows 7 ASAP and give them free training (very important!). Once employees have it at work and they're properly trained on it they'll never look at XP or Vista at home the same way, and most people would probably plop down $400+ and get a new laptop or PC rather than spend $200-$300 just to buy the OS.

Hey Dell, get in on this, it'll help you sell computers and laptops too.

I'm talking about sustained FPS, and you obviously have either never done the comparison or have severe vision problems.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx

"Whatever temporal sampling rate you choose, it's unlikely to be fast enough
There is no practical frame rate high enough to properly portray all the motion typically encountered."

In practice you get diminishing returns as you increase the frame rate, but there'd have to be something very wrong with you to not see the difference between 30fps and 60fps.

the most expensive is 319.00. Which is the one they are giving away, so he was accurate.

Yes, the most expensive UPGRADE price is 219.00 but so what?

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-7-Ultimate/product/5A4B95F4

And it's not an extensive UI revision" that would mean the rewrote most of the underlying code for graphics; which to the best of my knowledge, they did not. Some tweaks and pretty graphics.

If I am wrong there, please link to relevant information, I would love to read about extensive changes to their graphics engine.

with a DDoS party directed at http://www.microsoft.com"

Yours Encryptedly,
Kilgore Trout

I'm seeing a few posts here complaining that Microsoft won't implement the SVG 1.1 standard in Internet Explorer.

I would argue that as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight (which is just browser-safe WPF) as their form of a vector graphics applet for their web browser, any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate. Silverlight is their attempt to build a Flash-alternative with a SVG programming framework, which is (to Microsoft) a "best" of both worlds. To the rest of us coming from the WinForms world, it's a so-so product that's really awkward to use. I known that MS is pushing Expression Blend as an alternative to Adobe CS3's UI, but really, why didn't they just integrate it into Visual Studio for native editing instead of all this back-and-forth multiwindow crap.

For example, SVG Shapes vs WPF Shapes. It's no accident that the syntax is almost exact. But why would Microsoft embrace SVG directly, with its Javascript code triggers, when they can go the Silverlight route with .Net triggers.. it's basic product bundling, to get you to use Microsoft's approach to everything.

The biggest reason it has been slow in adoption is the lack of support in IE, which is mostly due to Microsoft's former stagnation between the releases of IE 6.0 and IE 7.

Microsoft was one of the original working partners of the SVG specification. They were in a position to support it at the outset, and even published an article about SVG in their premiere magazine. I remember going to a Microsoft conference back around 2000 and, when asked about the long-term viability of ActiveX, the Microsoft reps (who were actual developers and not just talking heads) spoke enthusiastically about how they were working with Corel (another SVG author) on a fabulous new vector graphics technology.. ..and then it got iced. If I had to guess at a reason, I would point to the ascension of internal "vector" technologies like XAML, and of course they already had VML.

There's something REALLY important you are missing. Countries other than the US don't have a "first to invent" system, they have a "first to file" system. First to file is what Microsoft supports. What this means is that the first "person" who files for a patent, gets it, regardless of who actually invented the item. So, your theory only works in the US right now. Anywhere else in the world, a corporation, including patent trolls, can see your invention, find that you do not yet have a patent on it, patent it and then sue you for patent infringement.

This also makes public domain all but impossible outside the US.

OS X does have UI standards and it somehow pushes them to developers, on Windows, it is not the same deal.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

Windows does have UI standards readily available for developers in the place a Windows developer would be most likely to look for them. They can also be downloaded in PDF format, and they used to publish it as a book, too.

Of course, there are a lot of guidelines that a lot of people ignore, and a few that are in direct conflict with Apple's guidelines for OS X. The conflicts especially are where Apple either ignores the guidelines for Windows applications or simply falls back on consistency across platforms, rather than consistency on the current platform (something MS got bashed for with one of the 9x versions of Office for Mac OS).

However, if you want to use VS2008, you need professional edition which is considerably more expensive than $200.

You are absolutely correct, and it's a very good point. "Upgrade" price for Professional (same trick applies here) is $550.

In order to develop Windows Mobile powered applications, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition or above is required. Visual Studio Express Editions are not supported.

Or, you just sign up for BizSpark and get it all for free!

Minimum price for the ability to do it with supported compilers is whatever Visual Studio standard costs. Like $300.00 but you can get it free if you give up a weekday and attend the exact right launch party like I did.

There is a little known (I guess not anymore, now that I post it on /.) marketing twist that is presently in force with regard to Visual Studio: you can "upgrade" to VS Standard or Professional from any of the Express editions (which are of course downloadable for free), or from any "competing product" - e.g. Eclipse or NetBeans counts. This effectively means that you get to buy full license for upgrade price. For Standard, this is $200 - still not cheap, but I thought it's worth clarifying the number as it stands today.

Also, if you're going to write and sell applications - i.e. you're going to run a startup - you could apply for BizSpark (technically this is on a case-by-case basis, but I haven't heard of anyone turned away) and get VS and most other Microsoft developer offerings kinda free - the only caveat that you'll have to pay $100 when quitting the program, either in 3 years, or when you make $1M in profit - whichever one happens sooner.

Minimum price for the ability to do it with supported compilers is whatever Visual Studio standard costs. Like $300.00 but you can get it free if you give up a weekday and attend the exact right launch party like I did.

There is a little known (I guess not anymore, now that I post it on /.) marketing twist that is presently in force with regard to Visual Studio: you can "upgrade" to VS Standard or Professional from any of the Express editions (which are of course downloadable for free), or from any "competing product" - e.g. Eclipse or NetBeans counts. This effectively means that you get to buy full license for upgrade price. For Standard, this is $200 - still not cheap, but I thought it's worth clarifying the number as it stands today.

Also, if you're going to write and sell applications - i.e. you're going to run a startup - you could apply for BizSpark (technically this is on a case-by-case basis, but I haven't heard of anyone turned away) and get VS and most other Microsoft developer offerings kinda free - the only caveat that you'll have to pay $100 when quitting the program, either in 3 years, or when you make $1M in profit - whichever one happens sooner.

The link is there. Go, read, educate yourself.

Anyway, you asked for one thing that's new (and, judging by your comparison, you want it new compared to Linux) - alright. Find me a true transacted filesystem in Linux or OS X, for starters - and note that this is Vista feature, not even Win7.

Also, this bit:

loopback-mounted partition images (which you can't even use outside the installer)

You mean mounting .vhd files? Of course you can use it outside the installer, it's in Disk Management in the main menu as "Attach VHD" - where any sane Windows admin would look for it.

Then again, judging by your sig, I'm just wasting time. But it doesn't hurt to try.

You can get a copy of Visual Studio Express here (it's free): http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/default.aspx

And you'll also need this WinMo 6.5 SDK (it's free also): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=20686a1d-97a8-4f80-bc6a-ae010e085a6e.

FWIW, I developed for Windows Mobile / Smartphone for several years. The tools were all free. Back then they had something called Visual Studio Embedded (free of course). The best thing was I was able to write a single version of the application (a non-trivial multi-threaded, multimedia application with network connectivity) which ran on my Windows desktop as well as on Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) and Windows Smartphone. I did the vast majority of my debugging and testing on the desktop. Very rarely did I have to do any mobile-specific debugging, other than wrestling with the &*%^$# cell network (this was from 2001 through 2005, when pushing data through the cell network was barely functional).

Oh, and by the way, deploying to phones is free also. I don't need Microsoft's permission, nor do I have to pay them a fee.

You can get a copy of Visual Studio Express here (it's free): http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/default.aspx

And you'll also need this WinMo 6.5 SDK (it's free also): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=20686a1d-97a8-4f80-bc6a-ae010e085a6e.

FWIW, I developed for Windows Mobile / Smartphone for several years. The tools were all free. Back then they had something called Visual Studio Embedded (free of course). The best thing was I was able to write a single version of the application (a non-trivial multi-threaded, multimedia application with network connectivity) which ran on my Windows desktop as well as on Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) and Windows Smartphone. I did the vast majority of my debugging and testing on the desktop. Very rarely did I have to do any mobile-specific debugging, other than wrestling with the &*%^$# cell network (this was from 2001 through 2005, when pushing data through the cell network was barely functional).

Oh, and by the way, deploying to phones is free also. I don't need Microsoft's permission, nor do I have to pay them a fee.

Per-user installation is a well-documented feature of Windows Installer, and is one of the "proscribed methods". It's not a hack or a workaround for anything.

From the Free Dictionary online
Proscribe:
1. to denounce or condemn
2. to prohibit; forbid
From Meriam Webster online
Proscibe:
1. to publish the name of as condemned to death with the property of the condemned forfeited to the state
2. to condemn or forbid as harmful or unlawful
So, what definition of "proscribed method" are you using to say that it is not a hack or workaround?

In Windows, Chrome installs itself into the user's profile folder under the Local Settings folder, rather than into the traditional Program Files folder location.

This appears to be done to try to circumvent user restrictions, often imposed by network administrators to prevent users from installing unauthorized software. While this may work in some settings, any well crafted software restriction policy will prevent this attempt to bypass security restrictions.

As well, by failing to follow proscribed methods for installing software on Windows, Google is actually making it difficult for enterprises that might choose to distribute Chrome on their networks.

Per-user installation is a well-documented feature of Windows Installer, and is one of the "proscribed methods". It's not a hack or a workaround for anything.

Orly? You DO know that the it was called the "system tray" up until Windows XP, don't you? It was even instantiated by a process called systray.exe. Even MSDN is littered with its own references to it being the "system tray", like here.

Raymond Chen says:

Why do some people call the taskbar the "tray"? Short answer: Because they're wrong.

And so are you.

Then there is this shiny bit:

  The common response is to use the notification area (often incorrectly called the "system tray") to provide ready access to these running-but-windowless applications.

Orly? You DO know that the it was called the "system tray" up until Windows XP, don't you? It was even instantiated by a process called systray.exe. Even MSDN is littered with its own references to it being the "system tray", like here.

That's wrong.

The most thoughtful article I read that truly explains what the technical tradeoffs are with dock/taskbar design: here.

While it startd off as a nice read, it is flat out wrong in a lot of places (at least for Windows). For instance:

Windows needs a window for each application, and this need doesn't go away just because there are no documents open. So, Word has little choice but to display this ugly application window. There's simply nowhere for the application to exist without having a window--the window is the application.

and ...

The other kind of application that suffers from Windows' design is software that runs mostly in the background, but which needs to provide alerts or messages periodically. Instant messaging applications typically fall into this category. Most of the time an IM app is running, you don't want any window visible at all. But you don't want closing the window to close the application; you want it to run in the background. Windows has no good way of doing this; if an application has no windows, that normally means it isn't running, after all.

Seriously? Someone actually believes this? An application doesn't need a window AT ALL. For ANY REASON. Windows are used for GUI I/O, and occasionally, message passing. But you absolutely don't need one at all.

Then there is this shiny bit:

The common response is to use the notification area (often incorrectly called the "system tray") to provide ready access to these running-but-windowless applications.

Orly? You DO know that the it was called the "system tray" up until Windows XP, don't you? It was even instantiated by a process called systray.exe. Even MSDN is littered with its own references to it being the "system tray", like here.

Then I quit reading when I came to this:

The addition of the Quick Launch toolbar meant that the Taskbar contained not only running applications, but also non-running applications. It thus includes three main kinds of content; icons representing non-running programs, icons representing running applications, and icons representing documents.

Um, what? At this point the guy is a total idiot, or he is intentionally muddying the waters to invent a WTF.

In the Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 article, I ran across this gem:

By way of contrast, Microsoft has made the decision in Windows 7 to strip out many of the extras in Windows. For example, Windows Movie Maker and Windows Mail -- both very good programs -- shipped with Windows Vista, but will not ship with Windows 7.

That's because they're in the Optional section of Windows Updates on Windows 7, bundled as "Windows Live Essentials."

It's not hard to miss, seeing as it's the only entry in the Optional section (because although Virtual PC and XP Mode are also optional, but they're still release candidates).

Windows 7 does include a usable backup program -- finally -- but it's not up to the standards of Time Machine.

Also, why is Previous Versions not mentioned here? It's not new either, Windows Vista had the Previous Versions functionality.

Yes, that was a problem with windows ME. Have you tried anything recent? (Including new fanboy arguments?)

Like this fanboy argument?

As a matter of fact, the first tyme I used XP it froze while booting up. After about 5 minutes I had to do a hard shutdown, I pressed and held in the power button until it shut down. Now Vista may be more stable, and I've heard Windows 7 rocks, but that does not change the fact there have been problems with Windows.

And to make full use of Vista requires high hardware requirements. The requirements for OS X 10.5 Leopard is:

• A Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or Power PC G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor
• 512 MB memory or more
• A DVD drive for installation
• 9 GB of available disk space or more

And the basic requirements for Vista are:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 512 MB of system memory
• 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
• DVD-ROM drive

Vista's hardware requirements are higher than Leopard's.

Falcon

Yeah, you can get it here. Basically it's Expression Web 1.0 but with some SharePoint stuff added in. Though, SharePoint designer doesn't seem to have syntax highlighting support for PHP.

ummm... there is one place to disable autorun on removable media although there are multiple methods available for accomplishing this task. Are you referring to auto-execution of other vectors? Like emails? Here's a reference for you to help you out. Windows XP or above you just modify it in the local security policy and you're done. Of course with Vista and Win7 they ask you if you want to run autorun so you don't really have to do anything.

Slightly off-topic, but I am sure that W7 and IE Browsers are "tightly woven" with the Sharepoint portal. You can hardly use the portal without the IE Browsers and Office200x.

You don't need Office installed to use SharePoint. Of course, this kinda defeats the point, since SharePoint is most useful as a versioned library for Office documents.

Regarding browsers - you can browse SharePoint sites with Firefox or Safari, they are officially supported - you will miss some features (often useless stuff, like drag and drop of files from Explorer into SharePoint browser window), but all content is accessible.

For future release, this will improve in two ways. First, they are dropping IE6 support altogether with all the hacks it required, making the markup much closer to standards. Second, they're apparently going to use Silverlight if available to provide those "advanced features" in all browsers with the plugin installed, not just IE. Overall, the changelog promises "improved Firefox and Safari support", though it's hard to say how much it is actually improved yet. We'll have to see.

The second part actually has to do with working with Office documents without Office - this is called Office Web Applications. It seems that they also use Silverlight when available to enable full support for everything desktop Office can do, and otherwise fall back to plain HTML+CSS+JS mode, which would probably be roughly comparable to Google Docs feature-wise.

Nope.

Windows 2000 receives security updates through 7/31/2010.

And look: I can pull a given security bulletin, say MS09-010: Vulnerabilities in WordPad and Office Text Converters Could Allow Remote Code Execution (960477), and find that it has a patch in for Windows 2000 SP4.

Or you could download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats which is free, doesn't require genuine software validation, and will patch anything back to Office 2000, which was released in 1999. It's a quick download and takes very little time to install.

The claim that Microsoft forces you to upgrade Office to maintain file format compatibility is simply incorrect. Arguing that you must upgrade to continue receiving support is disingenuous, because almost every software vendor does this -- including the F/OSS ones.

Since your entire post is in italics I'm not sure what is the part you are replying to and what part is your reply,

My bad. I should have previewed. Still, there was only one line from your post, the rest was reply.

Apparently you did not read much and click on links. In the "All Downloads" catagory I clicked on 1 link, Apple, which lists Apple's own downloads including Safari and iTunes both of which are available for Windows as well as Macs, and updates to Apple software. It has 758 downloads

Yes, 758 downloads. Almost all of which are patches and firmware updates. And many of those updates are just that -updates- you need the previous version that was bundled with your OS. If it was bundled with OSX 10.4 and you have OSX 10.3, the 'update' is in the majority of cases worthless.

Other than itunes, and safari, there is practically no real software. And I already specifically talked about those 2. Microsoft offers windows media player and Internet explorer which offsets those two. And then it offers a shit-ton of utilities, power toys, honest to goodness applications -- everything from ProcessExplorer, to VirtualPC, to SharedView, to Windows Search.

My point was that Apple develops and releases this class of features as part of the "OSX upgrade package", whereas Microsoft has been building thme, but making them available separately (and for free). So when you look at a list of OSX features and compare that to an XP service pack, yeah, the OSX upgrade has more headliners -- but a lot of that stuff that OSX upgrades headline is available for XP, from Microsoft, for no additional fee. Apple's download site has nothing on what Microsoft gives away above and beyond what is bundled with the OS.

I'm just underscoring the different distribution and marketing approach. I'm not saying apple doesn't build cool new apps and features. I'm saying with Apple you get all the cool new stuff when you buy the next point release. With Microsft, the service packs contained boring critical stuff making them a poor comparison to apple's releases, but the cool features were still coming out... but as separate downloads.

Microsoft on the other hand stopped offering downloadable updates to Windows NT4 less than 5 years after it was released. I know because I have an NT4 PC I bought new I was unable to download an update for 3 years after I bought it. To get the latest update for it I had to order, and pay for, a CD with them.

The service packs and hotfixes are readily available via download. I have an NT4 VM I still occasionally fire up myself. They've been moved around a few times, but I can't recall them ever not being available.

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/

They even have the service packs for 3.5 and 3.51 if you'd like them, including stuff for the mips and alpha chips... you are correct that they aren't up front an center, but come on, NT has been obsolete for nearly a decade now.

1) yes, the /3g switch can enable a 3x1 use instead of 2x2, but it's not universal across all versions of windows 32bit OS. the /3g switch is not a PAE function, it's seperate, and in most practiced cases, unless the OS is doing little more than beig a host platform for an app, the whole machine will run slower even though a single app might be able to perform better making use of additional RAM.
2)PAE is disabled in all the Microsoft 32bit client OS. It can be ENABLED though boot.ini hacks (or in Vista though a comand utility, as it has no boot.ini file). I'm also not disputing on any level that PAE is not as efficient as swap files, I'm saying it's not as efficinet as native RAM addressing above 4GB as a 64bit OS can do...
3) AWE can not be used on client OS, it can be on servers only. it actually can allow a single app to exceed 4GB of used memory. This is reserved RAM, and not part of the active memory pool for the app, but yes, it is more efficient than using a swap. Again, i did not contest that, but why not just use 64bit???
4) Apparently AWE support is available in XP SP2+, but it still limited to 4GB total RAM allocation. I can't find references to AWE in Vista at all. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/pae_os.mspx

I'm not arguing you can't get an app to see 4GB in a client OS, and not arguing you can't use more than 4GB total, I'm just saying, WHY BOTHER, use 64 bit if you need to do that, nearly every app that really takes advantage of this supports 64 bit OS...

MS Poland's site now shows the same photo as the US one.

Either MS have changed the photo to the original or the one on the link in TFS is a fake (e.g. not produced by MS).

Since 99.99[ad nauseum]% of the users wouldn't know a hardened secure computer (I'm pretty sure Windows is categorically eliminated)

Not true, actually. You most certainly can lock down Windows fairly heavily - in fact, Microsoft provide a tool to help you do it.

Though to be perfectly honest I'd still stick the computer in it's own little /29 subnet with a firewall blocking all traffic in both directions except that which is explicitly allowed.

they fixed it... http://www.microsoft.com/poland/businessproductivity/default.mspx lol

the black guy is back http://www.microsoft.com/poland/businessproductivity/default.mspx

May be they were trying to save a few bucks and cheaply localizing the picture? Can't find anything racist in it.
Anyway, they have now changed it back which is actually funny. There are only about 4,500 African people in Poland whom wiki funnily enough calls African Americans . Reading the wiki text seems to indicate that 4,500 is indeed the total Black people count in Poland and not African Americans.

if you mean it copied files slow
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920739

You can install Virtual PC just fine on Home editions, you just don't get the free XP license.

You sneer only because you've never faced the evil of a Windows barrow white. Without the help of Tom Bomb-the-bad-DLL you'll never escape his clutches alive!

I RTFA and I have to say, I think the author is attempting to find a conspiracy where none exists. If the author had searched MS's website for information on PAE, he would have soon learned why MS decided to remove PAE, and thus support for more than 4 GB of physical memory, from XP SP2.

Why this is a non-story:

1) MS removed PAE in XP SP2 because of incompatibility with 32 bit drivers and resulting instability issues.

XP did support PAE before SP2. However, Microsoft received complaints from users regarding compatibility and instability issues resulting from the use of 3rd party 32 bit drivers. Many users were getting BSODs. It was only then that MS chose to remove PAE from XP SP2.

This decision makes quite a bit of sense. Manufacturers were unlikely to update drivers to include PAE support because, at the time, 4GB+ of memory was very uncommon, and relegated to power users who had a specific need for large amounts of RAM. The situation has since changed due to the plummeting cost of RAM, Vista's need for greater memory resources, more demanding applications, and Superfetch, which allows users to make use of idle memory to preload commonly used applications. My own experiences on Vista x64 show that programs start up significantly faster than in XP due with Superfetch enabled.

Now that 64 bit drivers can be had for pretty much all modern hardware, there is no reason to use a hack like PAE to support more than 4 GB of RAM. Most machines sold by Dell, HP etc. now include 64 bit Vista if the machine has 4 GB of RAM, which is now becoming standard.

See below for MS's explanation of the removal of PAE from SP2.

Source: MS Website, "Operating Systems and PAE Support", June 14 2006 - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/pae_os.mspx

Driver Issues Typically, device drivers must be modified in a number of small ways. Although the actual code changes may be small, they can be difficult. This is because when not using PAE memory addressing, it is possible for a device driver to assume that physical addresses and 32-bit virtual address limits are identical. PAE memory makes this assumption untrue.

Several assumptions and shortcuts that could previously be used safely do not apply. In general, these fall in to three categories:

Buffer alignment in code that allocates and aligns shared memory buffers must be modified so that it does not ignore the upper 32 bits of the physical address. Truncation of addresses information in the many locations this might be kept must be avoided. It is necessary to strictly segregate virtual and physical address references so DMA operations do not transfer information to or from random memory locations.

PAE mode can be enabled on Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and later versions of Windows to support hardware-enforced DEP. However, many device drivers designed for these systems may not have been tested on system configurations with PAE enabled. In order to limit the impact to device driver compatibility, changes to the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) were made to Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 Standard Edition to limit physical address space to 4 GB. Driver developers are encouraged to read about DEP.

2. Windows isn't trying to screw users over by purchasing a higher priced 64 bit version. Any retail version of Vista or Windows 7 comes with both the 32 and 64 bit installers. As others have mentioned, it's also possible to activate 64 bit Windows with a 32 bit OEM key.

3. PAE will not allow a single process to use more than 4 GB of RAM so a true 64 bit OS is still superior for programs that need large amounts of memory such as HD Video editing, editing of large images in Photoshop etc.

For it to be signed by MS, it has to pass the Windows Logo Program

Surprised at the XP64 hating out there. When it was first released, drivers were in rough shape. Today, I've found most of the motherboards and video cards I buy have Server 2003/XP64 support - that covers 99% of the drivers I normally bump into. Heck, I even got my laptop running XP64. That was a bit of a treasure hunt compared to the typical build, but still.

Anyhow, had a different point to bring up... There are a few games and apps that don't - but for the most part it just works. For those that don't, many cases it is just a brain dead installer. (Hey Apple iTunes developers, I'm looking at you!) Turns out you can fix an installer where the people did not think to test/support XP64 by modifying the MSI installer to not rule out a properly patched version of XP64.

Download Microsoft's Orca MSI editor. (Find it in this CAB, or google for it) Look for a "LaunchCondition" property, probably set to "VersionNT64>=600" and modify it to "VersionNT64>=501". Shazam! Very good chance it will just work - at least the installer will not stop you from trying to run it.

Some people (Apple) still need to update drivers, etc... but more often then not it works.
   

Microsoft and Apple have versions of their OS that you should never install on a laptop. Linux has distros you should not install on a laptop, as well as some you should.

Even 4GB is too much for 32 bit WinXP. The OS will only let any app. use a maximum of 2 GB.

Unless you enable the /3GB switch in boot.ini, which leads to other problems: your registry system hive must now remain smaller than 12 MB.