~TECH-BYTES~

Finally Microsoft has released SP3 for your Windows Xp and this time just run your windows update
to get this sp3 update which promises speed boost and various other security features found in Vista.

If you’re a Vista user you’re also in luck, since Microsoft has restarted its Vista SP1 distribution after some compatibility problems with Microsoft Dynamics RMS.

You know, we should have paid a little closer attention to Microsoft’s decision yesterday to extend Windows XP sales to “June 2010 or one year after the general availability of Windows 7″ — if the company was really planning on shipping Windows 7 in 2010, that first date doesn’t make a lot of sense unless the plan is to ship Windows 7 much, much earlier. And hey — what’s Bill Gates doing telling investors this afternoon that Windows 7 will come “in the next year” and that he’s “super-enthused” about it? As far as we know, the official Windows 7 timeline hasn’t changed, so Bill might just talking about beta versions, but something’s clearly up Windows-wise in Redmond — perhaps Vista’s wow is not long for this now.

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After a week full of Red Bulls, Fruit by the Foot and dreams of In-N-Out, the mighty Sony VAIO loaded with Linux stood as the only machine unhacked by the end of the PWN 2 OWN hacking contest at CanSecWest.

In this competition there were 3 laptops, with different OS’s offered for being hacked into. These included an Apple Macbook Air running OS X 10.5.2, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10 and a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1. Anyone who could successfully hack or exploit these machines would win a $10,000 price from famous security company Tipping Point.

the MacBook Air on display was seized in two minutes by the presumably well prepared Charlie Miller, and after two full days of work, Shane Macaulay and a few of his 1337 associates managed to crack the Vista rig on Friday. Reportedly, Shane and his pals weren’t expecting to do battle with the extra protected SP1 version of Vista, and while the exact loophole won’t be divulged, we are told that it was a cross-platform bug that “took advantage of Java to circumvent Vista’s security.” In the end, it was reported that some folks on hand had discovered bugs in the Linux OS, but many of them “didn’t want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest.”

Some of us now have computers with hard disk space in Terabytes, which implies you probably have a lot of content to store on the computer — like movies, music, images, documents, presentations, and what not. With so much on your hard disk, to be able to track what you want quickly, installing Desktop Search on your computer only makes sense.

If you happen to use the Windows operating system, you’d be familiar with Windows Desktop Search (WDS), the operating system’s indexed desktop search platform. Microsoft yesterday announced the release of an updated “preview version” of Windows Search 4.0, which is the next big thing to happen to the Windows Search platform. This first beta of Windows Search 4.0 is meant to help users find and preview any kind of text, audio, image files, etc, on the computer. Previously called Windows Desktop Search (WDS), Microsoft had initially introduced their version of Desktop Search as MSN Desktop Search, along with the MSN Toolbar suite.

The software giant claims that Windows Search 4.0 is much faster than the search tool included in Windows Vista. This was accomplished, they say, because they have been able to fix most of the bugs that were reported for it while in Vista.

Meanwhile, Windows Search 4.0 is available both as an update to Vista’s built-in search engine, as well as an updated version of the XP add-on. You can download the Windows Search 4.0 (beta) application here, and find details about it here.

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If you’ll recall, Microsoft announced that it was teaming up with SanDisk last May to conjure up a suitable U3 replacement. Not quite a year later, we’re starting to hear the first whispers of what that replacement may be. Purportedly dubbed StartKey, the so-called Windows companion would essentially allow users to “carry their Windows and Windows Live settings with them” on any sort of flash memory device — be it a USB drive, SD card, etc. Interestingly, it’s also being reported that Redmond would like to “build an end-to-end StartKey environment,” but aside from the tidbit that it should be out in at least beta form by the year’s end, pretty much everything else remains murky.

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