In a followup to last weekends fiasco with BitDefender, and their Windows OS destroying update, many users are demanding refunds from the company. I’m not sure how this is going to pan out, but it will take a lot to get back the trust.
Some customers stranded by a flawed BitDefender antivirus update that crippled their computers have demanded refunds and compensation for money spent fixing their PCs, according to messages on the company’s support forum.
Microsoft has released the long awaited 250 GB hard drive for the XBox 360, with a generous price tag to boot: $129. This brings the price per GB down to 52 cents from the previous amount of $1 per GB for the 120 GB hard drive (which was the lowered price!). I’m still running the paltry 20 GB drive, and I’m really seeing limits on it as far as demo downloads, and don’t have enough room to rip most, if not all, XBox games to the hard drive.
Not only is the price surprising, but the fact that Microsoft previously stated that it wouldn
While not directly related to Microsoft, I thought this was incredible. Scientists in Japan have extracted images from the brain. It’s not super high resolution, but it is a strong beginning in understanding how the brain works. It could lead the path to helping the blind see, the deaf hear, and Skynet taking over the world!
The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
I’ve been watching this mess unfold watching various forums, including BitDefenders own support forums, and it doesn’t look like it’s gaining them any new customers. Apparently, the new update marks needed Windows system files as infected and goes ahead and gets rid of them for you. If you don’t mess up too much, you can do a system restore and disable the AV until a new update is available. Ouch. A lot of people are looking at new clean installs of their OS.
“EVERY file that is trying to run is getting quarantined,” one user, identified as lhmathys, reported. “Windows Explorer and even Bitdefender update itself is being quarantined. Someone really screwed this one up.”
Microsoft Feed has the new download links for the newest build of Windows Live Messenger and a patch to get it up and running on your machine. I’m getting decent speeds from the downloads, and I’ll give it a go to see how it improves on the older version… I’ve always just used Pidgin for my IM needs. One program, many IM clients.
Microsoft has limited the use of the applications to certain beta testers, so you can
To help users to use the XP Mode in Windows 7, Microsoft is releasing an update that allows more PC’s to take advantage of the virtualized operating system. XP Mode, for those that don’t know, is basically a PC in a PC. It isn’t emulation, but a fully running, free license, Windows XP machine to run within Windows 7. If it works in XP but not in Windows 7, it will run in XP Mode. The new update allows PC’s without AMD or Intels on chip virtualization technology to run XP Mode.
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What some are calling “The assassination of Windows XP by the coward Internet Explorer” (ok, that was just me in reference to the great movie I recently watched!), Internet Explorer 9 will not work on Windows XP. I don’t really think that it’s going to matter too much. If people are still using Windows XP, they probably aren’t in the habit of upgrading much. Corporations that still use XP still haven’t upgraded from the old Internet Explorer 6. Some people that really want to use IE9 will be forced to upgrade to at least Windows Vista SP2.
Good news is that Firefox, Opera, Safari and others still work great with Windows XP. If you’re really not in the habit of upgrading, Netscape Navigator 3.11 can still be found for your 386SX running Windows 3.11. Ah, memories.
Although Microsoft excluded Windows XP from the list for the IE9 developer preview, it sidestepped the question about which versions of Windows the final browser would support. In an IE9 FAQ, for example, Microsoft responded, “It’s too early to talk about features of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta” to the query, “Will Internet Explorer 9 run on Windows XP?”
If you’re looking for a career in IT, Microsoft has released a free e-book: “Own Your Future“. Personally, the best advice I can give is this: do what you love. If you love working with computers, you’ll never work a day in your career. I love doing anything with computers, be it programming, server admin, fixing desktop issues, or building PC’s, it’s just fun. If you’re in it for the money, you won’t like it and you’ll want out as soon as you can. I’ve seen people who love this stuff go from desktop support to a network admin in charge of a whole corporation just by learning as he went and taking the initiative in moving forward. They’ve asked for tasks that were above what they normally do, done them and learned from mistakes. While others have gotten stuck in tech support because they only do the technical support, they don’t want to learn anything outside of that.
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Microsoft is officially talking about the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The main part is that it mostly is a rollup of all the previous updates that are freely downloadable now. There are a few new additions, mostly for the enterprise sector. Microsoft and analysts are saying that businesses don’t need to wait for the first Service Pack release to upgrade to Windows 7, as it is stable and ready for implementation as it is.
For Windows 7, SP1 includes only minor updates, among which are previous updates that are already delivered through Windows Update. SP1 for Windows 7 will, however, deliver an updated Remote Desktop client that takes advantage of RemoteFX introduced in the server-side with SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2.
With Microsoft being forced to add a ballot choice screen in the EU, Opera downloads have spiked considerably. I really like Opera, with its speed and compatibility. It’s nice to see an alternative browser come up from behind like this. It should hopefully get the major browser developers in high gear to bring out some new and innovative features.
The increase represents more than a doubling from the normal download numbers. At the beginning of this month, Opera touted that browser downloads actually tripled at first, so maybe that growth rate won
