Microsoft is set to make Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) available as an update rollup for Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) from August 25.

The move means that IT departments using WSUS to control deployment of updates across their network need to be ready ahead of this date.

Microsoft announced the move in a recent posting on its IEBlog site, explaining that organisations which have configured WSUS to auto-approve update rollup packages will have IE8 automatically installed onto all compatible systems unless they take action to forestall this.

IE8 is generally regarded as a great improvement over earlier releases of the browser, offering better security and greater compliance with published web standards. It also comes with a slew of new group policy settings to allow administrators to control settings and behaviour via Active Directory.

However, it is possible that IE8 may prove incompatible with some web-based enterprise applications, or that IT departments may not yet be ready to roll out the new browser.

Microsoft's IEBlog site has instructions for companies that use WSUS, but who wish to have control over when IE8 gets deployed on their network.

IE8 is compatible with Windows XP systems with Service Pack 2, XP Professional x64 Edition, 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here are some images of the new PCs on show by Packard Bell at its big re-launch event today. These were snapped by camera phone, so apologies for the blurry quality of some of the images.

First up are the new netbooks, with two examples of the dot s model with a 10.6in display nearest to the camera, while the third is the dot m with a larger 11.6in screen.

The dot s is available in both black and red colour schemes, the latter shown in the second shot.

White is also a colour that Packard Bell is keen on, with a nod to Apple's influential MacBook models. This shot shows one of the new EasyNote models, while the shot alongside shows three more on display at the event.

This rather indistinct shot of a desktop shows Packard Bell's compact iMedia chassis design, which brings out many of the ports users will need to access to the top front of the case. There is also a recess on top to hold external drives, as you can see.

The final image is of Packard Bell's iPower system aimed at gamers.

These systems will be available from June in retail outlets only.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on May 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Windows XP Mode that Microsoft is planning for Windows 7 does allow you to access applications straight from the Start menu as promised, and it also enables you to save files straight to the hard drive of the Windows 7 host, I can confirm.

However, in my tests at least, performance was not entirely impressive, with a distinct lag between keys being pressed and the application inside the virtual machine responding.

Windows XP Mode, for those that don't know, is a tool designed to help users moving to Windows 7 if they have any compatibility issues with applications they are currently running.

Still currently in beta, it sets up a virtual Windows XP environment using Microsoft's Virtual PC software.

Users can then install applications inside the virtual machine, which will be available from the  Start menu of Windows 7 afterwards.

The first hurdle a prospective user faces is hardware requirements. Not only does Windows XP Mode require at least 1.25GB of memory (2GB preferred), but it will only run on systems with hardware acceleration for virtualisation. This means you must have an Intel processor with VT-x extensions or AMD processor with AMD-V technology. These must also be enabled in the system's Bios firmware.

I tested Windows XP Mode on a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which was already being used as a testbed for the Windows 7 Beta. This has a Core 2 Duo L7100 processor that supports Intel's VT-x, but I had to enable this in the Bios.

After installing the new Windows 7 Release Candidate, I downloaded and installed the Windows XP Mode installer, which turned out to be about 445MB in size. Users can also now download it here.

After installation, a new Virtual PC folder appeared in the Start menu, but clicking on the 'Virtual Windows XP' option revealed that Virtual PC itself had yet to be installed. Fortunately, this was automatically downloaded, and a short while later I was fixed up with a pre-configured XP environment.

At this stage, the virtual machine has no applications other than those that come with Windows XP. To install applications, you need to fire up the virtual machine in its normal mode, where the XP screen appears as a window on the Windows 7 desktop (see screenshot).

As you can see, the XP machine automatically maps to the drives available on the Windows 7 machine, allowing you to install software by DVD or hard disk, or by downloading from the Internet.

For test purposes, I downloaded and installed the latest version of the OpenOffice.org suite in my virtual machine, then closed it down. As you can see from the screenshot alongside, the applications now appear in a sub menu on the Windows 7 Start menu.

Clicking an application name starts the virtual machine in the background, but all you will see is the application itself, as if it was running natively on Windows 7. The giveaway is that the application window retains the look and feel of XP, as you can see in the final screenshot below.

The good part about Windows XP Mode is that you can create a document, as I did in OpenOffice Writer, and save it to the My Documents folder on the Windows 7 machine along with all my other files.

The downside is the virtual machine's performance. I found that as I typed text into Writer, nothing would happen for several seconds, whereupon all the characters I had typed suddenly splurged across the screen in one go. This is quite off-putting, and I would hope that Microsoft will address this before the final release is made available.

If you have an application that just won't run under Windows 7, then this solution will get you by, although I personally have found very few applications that don't work with the new platform. However, it remains to be seen whether end users will be satisfied with this. Waiting for an updated version of your application is still likely to be the best option.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on May 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Will the Windows XP Mode compatibility tool Microsoft plans to provide for Windows 7 prove a boon to those worried about application compatibility, or is it just a half-hearted kludge to try and convince XP die-hards to upgrade, as some observers believe?

For those not up to speed, Windows XP Mode will be a tool that users can download for Windows 7 that basically provides a pre-configured instance of XP inside a virtual machine. Any software not compatible with Windows 7 can instead be run in this.

A lot will depend upon how XP Mode is implemented, but getting a straight answer from Microsoft is not always an easy matter, as it turns out in this case.

When I met with the company, one question I wanted to know is where document files ended up if you hit the save button in an application running in XP Mode. Would it just go onto the hard drive inside the virtual machine, or has Microsoft been clever and allowed XP Mode applications to map to folders on the host machine?

This is something that Parallels has already implemented in its Desktop for Mac product, which lets Mac users run Windows applications. It means that users don't have to worry about moving documents into the virtual machine in order to edit them with Windows applications.

Has Microsoft done the same with XP Mode? Here is the response I finally got from the company;

"Windows XP Mode is the combination of two features. The first part is a pre-packaged virtual Windows XP environment. The second is Windows Virtual PC, which is used to run the virtual Windows XP environment. Customers can install their applications into Windows XP Mode using typical installation processes such as downloading from the Web or using the product CD. Once installed, the applications are automatically available on the Windows 7 Start Menu and can be launched just like any Windows 7 program. Optionally, these Windows XP applications can be pinned to the Windows 7 Task Bar and launched using just a single click from the Windows 7 desktop."

Like a response during Prime Minister's Question Time in Parliament, this carefully avoids addressing the issue in hand. However, other sources on the web seem to suggest that Microsoft hasn't gone this far, meaning that XP Mode is likely to have a separate file system from the host system. If so, this would be a shame and renders it much less useful than it otherwise would be as a compatibility tool.

I hope to soon have the answer - either by clarification from Microsoft, or by testing the beta of Windows XP Mode and finding out for myself.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Intel executives started a lively debate on netbooks during a briefing for press and analysts this week.

Firstly, EMEA vice president Gordon Graylish stated that netbooks - the mini laptops popularised by Asus with its Eee PC range - have not dented sales of other types of laptops, and are in fact additional sales making up a new sector of the market.

This might come as a surprise to readers who have seen various headlines recently proclaiming that netbooks are "cannibalising" or "gouging" sales of more traditional laptop designs.

In Intel's view, netbooks are a new category of device used for simple tasks such as web browsing and messaging, rather than running any serious applications. This was despite the fact that several of the journalists covering the event were in fact using netbooks.

The subject of netbooks caused an esteemed colleague of mine to treat one of the Intel executives to a rant. The sudden rise of netbooks took the chipmaker by surprise, he opined, because Intel spends too much time listening to executives in large corporations and so it had been blind to the demand elsewhere for low-cost, lightweight laptops.

Rob Sheppard, Intel's Business Client marketing manager, said that netbooks are not suitable for business use because they have no support for Intel's vPro technology, are not validated for operating systems used in business, and are not part of Intel's Stable Image Platform Programme.

These, however, are largely marketing issues. I put it to Sheppard that Intel could build vPro into netbooks if it chose to. His response is too lengthy to be repeated in full, but seemed to boil down to the fact that netbooks do not have vPro because Intel does not regard them as a business platform.

Likewise, netbooks typically have at least 1GB memory and can easily run Windows XP Professional rather than the Home edition of the platform they almost all ship with.

Of course, many business professionals are likely to prefer a laptop with a larger display than the 10in screen of a typical netbook for everyday use, but given the choice between embarking on a business trip with a bulky corporate laptop or a netbook, which would you choose?

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

ThinkGrid is a company offering IT-as-a-service to business customers, including hosted Windows desktops accessed via an internet connection.

The idea behind this service is that companies can outsource the provision and management of a Windows desktop environment for their workers, complete with applications, to ThinkGrid. It could prove especially useful for smaller companies that do not have a dedicated IT staff.

I tried the service using a sample account provided by ThinkGrid, and found it pretty much like using a thin client session, except you have your own desktop that can be customised (within limits) to appear how you want it.

Access is via a login from ThinkGrid's web site, which requires you to enter a username and password. All being well, you gain entry to a full-screen session on your own virtual PC running in ThinkGrid's datacentre.

The virtual desktop looks and feels exactly as if it was running on the computer in front of you. I perceived no lag in either mouse movements or keystrokes when accessing the desktop, but for this hands-on I was using the corporate network in our central London office.

Each user has their own 5GB of disk space with their remote desktop, and it automatically maps to the local drives on the computer you are using so you can easily transfer files if necessary.

ThinkGrid costs £49 per user per month, or £490 for an annual contract. Applications are an extra charge, with Microsoft Office Pro costing £17 per user per month.

A full review of the ThinkGrid service will be posted to our web site at a later date.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is now available to download, and I've been taking a look at the newly released browser.

Overall, IE8 is a welcome improvement over previous Microsoft browsers, and I believe it is on a par with rivals such as FireFox and Safari in terms of features, performance and ease of use. This may not be enough to tempt back users who have defected to FireFox over the last few years, but it is definitely worth the upgrade for those still using older versions of IE.

The major feature of IE8 is its greater adherence to standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The upside of this is that it drives greater Web interoperability, but it may cause problems with web content designed around the quirks found in earlier versions of IE.

Unlike an earlier review of an IE8 beta release, I had few problems with content not displaying in IE8. In fact, I found it difficult to locate any sites that showed any problems at all. Of those that showed issues, almost all were web-based applications rather than public-facing web sites, suggesting that businesses are the most likely to require IE8's Compatibility View that displays pages as they would appear in IE7. Pages that did have problems with IE8 seemed to work fine when Compatibility View was activated.

IE8 is also not lacking in terms of performance, with no perceptible difference in page load times between it and FireFox. Microsoft itself disclosed figures last week that showed any differences between the three top browsers are measured in fractions of a second.

New in IE8 are Accelerators and Web Slices, both of which are useful but not must-have features.

Accelerators provide links to functions when you highlight text on a page. By default, IE includes Accelerators to show a pop-up map from an address, or a translation (see screenshot), or to create an email or blog entry. Others are available online from the "Get More Add-ons" button on the toolbar.

Web Slices provide a direct link to web content from the Favourites bar, akin to the way RSS feeds work. Examples include an eBay web slice that shows auctions you are interested in and alerts you to changes in bids. However, many of the currently available slices are very US-centric, such as those providing weather or traffic alerts, but only for US cities.

Like Safari and Firefox, IE8 now provides a "private" browsing mode, InPrivate Browsing. Selecting this from the Safety button launches a new browser window with InPrivate mode enabled, to avoid confusion with any pages you might already have open. IE does not retain any browsing history for sites visited in this mode, which ends when the user closes the new window.

This will be useful for hiding login information if you need to access your email via a publicly access computer, for example, but users should be aware that it does not ensure complete privacy. In a corporate environment, the internet gateway will likely have a record of all web sites visited, for example.

IE8 also helps privacy through InPrivate Filtering (called InPrivate Blocking in the beta releases), which gives users some control over third-party content such as adverts that might be used to track them. IE examines such content as the user browses sites, and if ten or more sites load the same resource, it appears on a list from which users can block it, should they choose.

Perhaps the most useful security features are the SmartScreen Filter and Cross-Site Scripting Filter. The first is an enhanced anti-phishing filter that analyses pages for suspected malicious content, as well as checking the web address against a blacklist.

The Cross-Site Scripting Filter is designed to detect code that has been inserted into a genuine web site in order to steal information such as credentials, and disable it. Microsoft has a demo that shows how this works, but whether it will work as well in a real situation remains to be seen.

The size of the install file you need to download for IE8 depends upon the platform, with the Windows XP version weighing in at 16MB. The installer checks for any new patches or updates, and a reboot is required after installation is complete.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on March 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9)

Microsoft's recently unveiled My Phone service for synchronising smartphone content with a web-based storage site is still officially in beta, but the company has allowed me access to test it out.

Generally, I'm quite pleased with the service, but there is definitely room for lots of improvement. As Microsoft is garnering feedback during the beta phase, it is quite possible that many issues will be ironed out before it is opened up for broader use.

As reported in the news here, My Phone lets you synchronise various types of content from your phone up to the web site. This includes contacts, calendar and task entries, but also text messages, documents, photos, videos and music.

Each of these categories can be selected individually by checking a box. You can also synchronise content from Flash storage cards.

Synchronisation is also bi-directional, so you can upload a file to the web site from your PC, and it will be sent to your phone the next time you synchronise - handy for sending across Word documents and such for viewing while on the move later.

This should also allow you to re-load all the content you want if you get a new handset - providing it is also Windows Mobile - but I haven't tested this out.

On the downside, synchronisation seems to take a long time, not just on the first run when all your selected content gets uploaded, but also on subsequent runs when very little has changed. One synchronisation session took close to ten minutes, even when I switched to using the Wi-Fi interface of my handset instead of the cellular HSDPA connection.

You can continue to make calls and use your handset for other purposes while synchronisation takes place in the background, but if you lose the wireless signal for any reason, My Phone simply stops and does not appear to retry without manual intervention.

You can set synchronisation to happen on a daily or weekly schedule, or keep it on manual. Unless you have a generous bandwidth allowance from your mobile operator, manual synchronisation is generally recommended.

I would also like to see more fine-grained selection of content to synchronise. For example, all my photos are stored on a Micro SD Flash card, but I can't set My Phone to synchronise photos only from there. This means that the entire set of sample images that came pre-loaded on the handset also got synchronised up to the web site, even though I don't want these.

Another drawback is that when you choose to synchronise contacts, My Phone only includes names from the Outlook contact list and not any of those stored on the phone SIM itself. This means you are likely to lose some contacts if your phone should go missing, unless you use another method of backing these up.

Access to the online content from a PC browser is also fairly basic at present. For example, while you can view a slide show of all uploaded photos, there is no facility to rotate images you might have captured by rotating the handset sideways to get a landscape shot.  There does not seem to be a way to select more than one image at a time to download to your PC, either, which makes this a laborious process.

However, I should point out the My Phone is still in beta, and is not expected to be broadly available until early Q4 2009, according to Microsoft, so much could change between now and then.

My Phone will eventually come pre-installed in Windows Mobile 6.5, but users with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 handsets can download and install it. I am currently trying it out on an HTC S730 handset, which is based on Windows Mobile 6.

The client itself is a 560kB download and unpacks several files, one of which is a runtime of just over 700kB in size. Microsoft recently pushed out an updated version, which was a download of  exactly the same size.

You need a Windows Live ID in order to login to use My Phone. If you have a Hotmail account, then this is your email address.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on March 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

What does it mean if Windows 7 Starter edition will only run three applications?

I was puzzling over this following Microsoft's announcement last week of the Windows 7 SKUs (editions to you and I) that will be available when the new platform finally ships.

Windows 7 Starter will be the lowest cost option and will only be available pre-installed on systems. Because of this, it is the version most likely to supplant Windows XP on mini laptops, aka netbooks.

This is obviously Microsoft's intention, as the official release hints: "Starter is a limited functionality SKU with an application limit designed for small notebook PCs in all markets."

However, Starter edition will also only be able to support "up to 3 concurrent applications", which sounds fair enough, as netbooks are clearly not suited to intensive use.

The question is: how do you define an application? When my laptop boots up, it loads up antivirus software and other stuff such as the GoogleTalk instant messaging tool. Do these count as applications or services? In other words, would running a security tool and an IM client mean you could only open a single application on a netbook?

I put this question to Microsoft, and soon got an answer from Laurence Painell, UK Windows marketing manager.

"Anything in the notification area of the Windows taskbar doesn't constitute an application," he told me. Furthermore, having multiple document windows open in software such as Word or Excel will not count as more than one application.

However, there is a proviso. With tools such as antivirus, if the user then clicks on the icon in the notification area, this typically opens a new window to let you set options or commence a scan of the hard drive. This would then count as a running application, according to Painell.

Much has already been made about these limitations and the effect that it may have on the cost of netbooks. Various newswires have claimed that Windows 7 will bump up the purchase price of netbooks, because nobody will want the Starter edition.

However, Painell said that Windows 7 will have an "in-place upgrade" feature that will allow users to effectively move to another edition without having to install anything extra. Customers will be able to purchase a key code to upgrade at retail outlets, over the web, or via the phone, he said.

"The key lets the user unlock the features of the Home Premium edition without requiring a re-install," he said.

My guess is that this will lead to most netbooks being shipped with Windows 7 Starter edition, in order to keep to a low price point (£200 - £300), but with the option to upgrade to full functionality for an extra fee.

OK, so users may have to pay more to get a mini laptop capable of running more than three applications, but it looks like Microsoft has taken the pain out of the upgrade decision.

If it is as easy as the company suggests (and we'll have to wait and see for the proof), then Windows 7 Starter edition doesn't look like being quite the white elephant it is currently being portrayed as. More a Trojan horse, perhaps....

Posted by Daniel Robinson on February 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2)

This photo shows Lenovo's compact IdeaPad S10e netbook against another Lenovo model, the ThinkPad X300.

The X300 itself is a thin-and-light model, but the picture clearly shows how small the IdeaPad is. It shares some of the styling of the ThinkPad, and seems to have quite a decent keyboard compared with other netbooks.

The S10e has a 10.2in display, Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive runs WIndows XP.

A full review of the IdeaPad S10e will appear on VNUnet in the near future.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on January 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)