Windows 7 has a new feature, displayswitch.exe, which sounds great in theory. If you hit the Windows Logo key + P, you get a pop-up window that allows you to navigate through four different settings for multiple displays:

The four settings are:

• Show desktop only on computer display
• Duplicate desktop on projector
• Extend desktop to projects
• Show desktop only on projector

Well, if you have multiple monitors, you might be tempted to play around with these settings. At least, I was. But I quickly regretted it. I switched from the default setting of “Extend desktop to projector” to “Duplicate desktop on projector” and found my desktop cloned on my secondary monitor. Okay, cool.

I then switched back to the normal setting (Extend) but found that my primary display was now stuck in low resolution. My 24 inch HP was displaying in 1280 x 800 instead of the 1920 x 1200 that it should be. Changing the resolution through the display settings didn’t help; the slider bar allowed me to increase it, but it wasn’t applied. I was stuck with these huge gadgets and a taskbar that was two inches wide. Arggh.

I tried restarting, hoping that would restore normality, but hope, no luck there. After trying a few more tricks, none of which worked, I resorted to System Restore. This was the first time I’d used it on Win7 (first time I’d had any need to). Within a few minutes, my display was back to normal. And I won’t be messing with the WIN+P settings again anytime soon.

I filed a bug report; I’m sure this isn’t normal/desired behavior. Meanwhile, be careful about changing those settings unless you have a good restore point you can go back to.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

My recent blog post on my problems with Blu-ray garnered more responses than any other topic I’ve written about on this blog since its inception. I was absolutely inundated with messages from readers who have had similar problems and are furious about shelling out $30 for a movie that they can’t play. Many suggested that I update the firmware; problem is, I already did that to no avail. I can find no firmware for the player (an LG GBC-H20N) that’s more recent than the November 2008 version I have. I tried replacing it with the same thing anyway, but that had no effect.

Some suggested that my player is of an older profile. According to all I’ve read, that should matter only in terms of whether I can access special features such as BD-Live. It shouldn’t keep a movie from playing at all. And interestingly enough, the BD-Live feature, which is only supported by Profile 2.0 players, does work fine on the discs that won’t play.

Others blamed the Cyberlink DVD Playback software. It may very well be to blame – but I’m hesitant to spend $80 on one of the other two alternatives when I don’t know whether they will work any better. If either offered a free trial, I’d certainly give it a try.

Dave suggested that the problem may be related to the copy protection in Vista. Indeed, it does seem to be a DRM issue, since we get a message saying the content is copy protected and won’t play “in this display mode.” He also forwarded a link to one of Peter Gutmann’s articles about Vista content protection and how it can be triggered mistakenly and prevent the playback of content. Although Gutmann’s writings on this topic are controversial and some of his points have been disputed, I am suspicious enough that this is a problem with the computer software that I’ve pretty much decided to buy a dedicated Blu-ray player in hopes of not having to deal with this in the future.

Or maybe not. Right now, I’m a bit disillusioned with Blu-ray in general. When it’s good, it’s very, very good … but whether or not a particular disc will be good (look better than DVD, or play at all) is an expensive crapshoot that I’m not sure I want to take. I know I’m utterly disappointed in our experiences with this LG SATA player on Vista. I might be willing to give Blu-ray another chance via a player made specifically for the home theater, but if it doesn’t work considerably better, I’ll be going back to regular DVDs for my movies.

In fact, this experience (along with the difficulty of recording HD content on Media Center) has me re-thinking the whole concept of integrating my computing and entertainment equipment. Media Center is great if all you want is analog quality, but now that I’m becoming accustomed to the look of high definition, and the ease with which the cable company’s DVR records and plays it, I have to question the wisdom (for the average consumer, at least) of spending all the money, time and effort that it takes to get a quality picture through the computer.

Copy protection is something that I, as a content creator, understand. But I don’t want to steal movies. I just want to be able to play the ones for which I paid good money, without jumping through a million hoops to do it.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

Ritz Camera files for bankruptcy | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News

Sad news, but not surprising. Local bricks and mortar shops can’t compete with Internet retailers on price and sometimes not even in terms of fast delivery. The last major photographic purchase I made was my 18-200 VR Nikkor lens. I looked at Wolf Camera (owned by Ritz), a local shop because I was somewhat in a hurry to get it. However, they didn’t have it in stock and it was going to take them three to five days to get it in – and their price was over $100 more than Amazon’s. Guess who got my money? I bought my last three Nikon cameras from Amazon, too, for the same reasons.

 
Smile! I did, when I saved over $100 by buying my lens from Amazon

Digital technology has been great for photographers in many ways, but not so much for camera stores, which made a lot of their profits not from the equipment but from selling film and doing photofinishing. Now instead of spending hundreds of dollars a year on film, I buy a $40 flash card and use it over and over. No need to print contact sheets to see which photos are good, either.

Oh, I have great memories of hours spent in the darkroom … but would I want to have to do all that today to make pictures? Heck, no.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

'Windows 7 Capable' PCs Slated For June – InformationWeek 

LOL at that headline. No need to wait until June – I already have a houseful of “Windows 7 capable” computers right now. Every system on which I’ve installed 7, except for the EeePC (which just didn’t have enough disk space on the SSD) has run it beautifully.

Of course, the article is referring to Microsoft’s upgrade plan, whereby beginning in June, those who buy Vista PCs will be able to upgrade to 7 at no cost when it becomes available. I guess that’s a good thing for the hardware vendors, since many people would probably put off buying a new system otherwise, especially with all the bad press Vista has gotten.

Of course, the article refers to “Vista Home Professional” and “Windows 7 Home Professional.” Ummm, that would be “Home Premium,” folks.

Meanwhile, according to this article, Win7 drivers are available for the HP TouchSmart (our kitchen computer). Dare I install the beta on yet another machine? If this keeps up, soon I’ll have 7 on every (non-server) computer in the house. And there are a lot of computers in this house!

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

This is a problem that I’ve had with my Sony VAIO TX ever since I bought it two years ago with Vista Business installed. Like a recalcitrant child, it absolutely refused to go to sleep. Closing the lid didn’t do it, regardless of the Power settings. If I put it to sleep manually through the shutdown options, it would wake back up almost immediately.

Now, with Windows 7 installed, my defiant child has turned into an obedient little angel. Shut the lid and it goes right to sleep as it’s supposed to, greatly extending battery life. Just one more little way in which 7 has improved my computing life.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Like the way Windows works but also like the Mac look? Here’s a “just for fun” thing: give your Windows XP computer an OS X-like “dock.” RKLauncher is a free download that runs as an executable without installing, and gives you the look and functionality of the Mac dock. It’s customizable, too.

The RKLauncher doc on my XP computer

You can download it at http://home.cogeco.ca/~rklauncher/

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

A few days ago, I read an article on the Yahoo Tech site titled DVD Sales Plummet, Blu-ray Unable to Save the Day. The article speculated on the reasons DVD sales are down – including the current economic climate and the advent of services such as Unbox and Netflix’s movie streaming.

There are all undoubtedly factors in the overall decline of movie purchases on disc, but some of us – the “collectors” who have a little extra cash and get a kick out of filling our shelves – are still buying movies. However, as to why Blu-ray sales in particular aren’t skyrocketing, I think I can offer a little insight there based on personal experience.

Shortly after Blu-ray was declared winner of the HD war, we bought a new Media Center PC with a Blu-ray player. We also bought a spectacular 65 inch Sharp Aquos HDTV and upgraded our basic cable subscription to digital/HD. We are enormously impressed with high definition TV. The HD cable channels provide the most amazing picture ever – so sharp and clear that you can see every freckle or individual beard stubble on a person’s face.

Blu-ray movies are a mixed bag when it comes to picture quality. Some of them (such as the animations) look great. Others, such as recently purchased Lakeview Terrace, not so much. The picture is grainy and actually looks worse than regular DVDs.

But that’s not the worst of it. Within the last few weeks, we’ve spent $30 a pop for two different Blu-ray movies and gotten them home to discover that they won’t play at all. The FBI warnings and the previews play fine, but when you start the actual movie, all you get is garbled, popping sound. Sometimes we also get a message saying “Content is protected and won’t play in this display mode,” leading me to believe this is a DRM problem.

The same movies that won’t play on the Blu-ray player in the Media Center also won’t play in the Blu-ray player on the Tank (17 inch HP laptop). I don’t know if this is a problem related to the HP playback software, which is CyberLink DVD Play. I looked for a trial version of another playback program, but couldn’t find one. Roxio, Win-DVD 9 and every other Blu-ray playback program I could find costs $80 or so and doesn’t seem to offer a trial version.

So we have $60 worth of worthless discs at the moment. We had already been thinking about buying a dedicated Blu-ray/DVD player such as the Sony BDP-550 (that model because our older but excellent home theater receiver doesn’t have HDMI inputs).  I guess that’s our next step in trying to watch these movies.

Most people would not take that step – they would just say “to heck with this” and go back to buying regular DVDs, which cost at least $10 less and in most cases look almost as good, especially with a quality upconverting DVD player.

Copy protection killed the CD industry and now it looks as if it just might be the death of Blu-ray. Any relationship counselor will tell you that if you try too hard to protect what’s “yours,” you’ll probably end up losing it. Maybe it’s time for the movie studios and record companies to consider that they are in a relationship – with their customers. And that when their over-protectiveness is perceived by those customers as abuse, they may keep the content but they’ll lose the thing that matters: the sales.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Well, after yesterday’s aborted attempt to install Win7 on the EeePC, I decided to take the plunge and today went ahead and put it on the Sony TX laptop.

No problems this time; the installation went off without a hitch (I had Vista SP1 on it, so I decided to try an upgrade since I hadn’t done that – all my other Sevens were clean installs). It took around 45 minutes, and everything seems to be working fine, including my 802.11N PC card NIC.

Win7 on the Sony VAIO

I also noticed that it uses less RAM at startup than it did with Vista. Cool.

The primary reason that I decided to go ahead and do it: didn’t want to have to spend the week of the MVP Summit working with Vista when I’ve been spoiled by 7. :)

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

This morning I had some rare free time, and thought I’d try installing Win7 on my little EeePC. Truth be told, I rarely use it – mostly because I don’t like being stuck with XP. I knew Vista wouldn’t run on it, but had heard many stories of Win7 working well on older systems that wouldn’t run Vista acceptably. Why not give it a try?

This is the old, original model of the Eee and it only has a 4 GB Solid State Drive (I have upgraded it to 2GB of RAM). I knew that wasn’t enough space to install Win7, but I was hoping maybe I could put it on the SDHC card. I pop in a 16GB card, plugged the USB DVD drive in, inserted the Win7 disc, and hoped for the best.

 
Starting Win7 setup on the EeePC

Setup started out promisingly enough, although everything was very slow. Well, everything’s always slow on the Eee – after all, I’m used to my XPS desktop. I can be a patient person. My patience didn’t pay off, though. When I finally reached the point of choosing where to install the OS, the only option was the SSD. And if I tried to pick that, of course I got a message that Windows couldn’t be installed on that drive.

Oh, well. It was a nice little dream while it lasted. Guess I’m stuck with XP on this machine. Or maybe I’ll try Ubuntu, just for the heck of it - although even that wants the entire 4 GB to install. Wish I’d waited a little longer and gotten one of the later models with a decent amount of hard disk space. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether I want to take the plunge and upgrade the Sony TX to Windows 7. I’d do it in a second – if not for the fact that the beta expires in August and I don’t know how long it will be afterward until the final release is available. Still, the urge is almost overwhelming … we’ll see.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

If you’re a fast typist, you probably prefer key combo shortcuts to moving one hand off the keyboard to manipulate a mouse or trackball. In addition to the shortcuts you know and love in Vista, Windows 7 offers some spiffy new ones:

WIN + Left/Right Arrow keys: I love this one. If you’re beta testing Windows 7, you’ve probably already discovered that by dragging a window to the right or left side of the screen, you can cause it to dock there at exactly half the screen size. Very useful for comparing documents. Well, instead of using the mouse to drag, you can do the same thing by pressing the Windows Logo key plus the right or left arrow key; this will dock the currently active window on the left or right side. Way cool. With multiple monitors, adding Shift moves the window to the right or left monitor (for example, WIN + Shift + Right Arrow moves the window to the monitor to the left of the monitor on which it’s currently displayed.

WIN + SPACEBAR: This one serves as a “show desktop” function, making all your windows transparent so you can see the desktop underneath. It’s especially handy if you have gadgets (for example, the clock or calendar) that are hidden beneath open windows and you need to see the information on the gadget.

WIN + T: This one will focus, in turn, on each item on the taskbar so you can select an item without using the mouse.

WIN + +/- : By pressing the Windows logo key plus the + or – key, you can zoom in or out (this zooms all windows, not just the current active one).

WIN + HOME: This minimizes all windows except the current active one. Pressing it a second time brings back the minimized windows.

WIN + UP/DOWN ARROWS: This maximizes the active window (WIN + UP ARROW) or minimizes it/restores it if it’s maximized (WIN + DOWN ARROW).

ALT + P: This key combo when you’re in Explorer will hide or display the Preview pane.

Enjoy!

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Less than two weeks to go. Microsoft’s annual MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) Summit is kicking off a little early in 2009, compared to the last few years. We’ll be converging on Seattle/Redmond starting Sunday, March 1. For a Texan such as myself, Washington weather is a tad chilly even those years when they waited ‘til mid-April for the gathering (as they did last year). I guess I’ll have to lug around my heavy coat this year.

It will be interesting to see how attendance holds up in light of the current economic conditions. There will undoubtedly be some MVPs who won’t be able to afford the travel expenses this year. Last year it was reported that more than 1800 MVPs from over 30 countries were in attendance. With the world-wide financial crisis going on, I wonder if we’ll see a drop in attendance. Especially for those coming from overseas, airfare is a significant cost. And with many companies downsizing, it may be harder for IT pros and developers to take a week off work.

At last year’s Summit, it was downright embarrassing to see all the so-called Microsoft people running around the place showing off their iPhones. I can’t believe they weren’t banned on campus. Maybe this year we’ll see more cool Windows Mobile phones. I know I’ll be proudly using my “Better-Than-An-iPhone” (Samsung Omnia). And I’m thinking about installing Windows 7 on the EeePC and taking it with me for light weight note-taking.

Meanwhile, there’s lots of work to get done between now and takeoff time for our flight to Seattle, so I’d best get back to it.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

We had a couple of computers in the house that were running Free AVG as their AV programs. I got a site license for VIPRE a while back and have been using it on my desktop machines but hadn’t gotten around to updating these two: my Sony laptop and the Media Center PC. Both are Vista machines; the Sony runs Vista Business and the Media Center runs Vista Home Premium.

A couple of nights ago, the Media Center froze up while Tom was using it and he tracked the problem back to AVG. Its icons had disappeared. He reinstalled and things started working again.

Then today, I started up the laptop (which hadn’t been on for several days), installed a couple of Windows updates, and found that when I rebooted AVG appeared to be completely gone. It didn’t even appear in the Programs menu or the Add/Remove Programs applet. How odd.

I did a web search and found some forums where others seem to have had the same problem, but there was no definitive cause given and no solution offered other than “reinstall the program.” Well, rather than do that (and possibly have the same thing happen again), I just seized the opportunity to go ahead and install VIPRE on it instead – but I am very curious as to what “ate” AVG, so if anyone out there knows, please write and tell me what’s going on with this.

Meanwhile, a VIPRE scanned showed no viruses.

VIPRE scan showed no viruses after the mysterious disappearance of AVG

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

It’s one of the very few I’ve found, but it is quite annoying: In Vista, when I printed to my HP 6310, I was able to select on the “Paper/Quality” page of the document properties whether I wanted to print in extra high quality, normal, or fast draft mode. Since the fast draft mode looks just fine for most jobs, I saved both time and ink by selecting it as my default.

After installing the latest drivers (for Vista) on Windows 7, I still don’t get that option.

 
Option to print in high quality, normal or fast draft mode is now missing

And yes, I’ve searched through all the rest of the dialog box for it. It’s just not there. The printer prints in Normal mode only. For a short one or two page doc, that’s just annoying. If I need to print a large document, I boot back into Vista to do it. That moves it from minor annoyance to major inconvenience.

Yeah, I know it’s a beta and (I hope) HP will fix the problem when they release drivers for Windows 7. Meanwhile, so far this is the biggest problem I’ve had with 7 so I can’t really complain too much.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Back in January, a Twitter employee’s account was hacked, which gave the hacker access to administrative tools that were then used to reset passwords on other regular users’ accounts. This gave the hacker the ability to post tweets that appeared to be from those accounts. Passwords to some celebrities’ accounts were posted to a hacker forum.

http://www.enterprise-security-today.com/news/Behind-Twitter-s-Hacking-Troubles/story.xhtml?story_id=03000118QU9U 

The hack was possible in part because the employee used a common dictionary word for his/her password, and Twitter doesn’t lock up after a set number of failed logon attempts as many sites and services do, so the hacker could just keep on trying until he got it right (brute force). Every Windows administrator is familiar with the Group Policy setting to limit the number of logon attempts; a user might mistype the password once or even twice, but someone who knows his password is not going to have to try 57 times (that’s just an example; in a dictionary attack, a hacker may try thousands of different possible passwords, using automated software, before hitting on the right one).

An Account Lockout policy’s lockout threshold can be set to whatever number seems reasonable. Some set it as low as 3, others as high as 15. The key is to balance the security of preventing hackers from guessing passwords with the inconvenience to legitimate users who have trouble remembering or typing their passwords. Mistyping is more likely to occur when, for example, entering your password in a browser on a smart phone since the keyboards are small and/or virtual.

The problem with lockout policies is that when a legitimate user does mess up and get locked out, regaining access can be a hassle. In a secure corporate environment, usual practice is to lock out the account indefinitely and have the user contact the administrator to get it unlocked. But another option is to have the account automatically unlock after a specific period of time (e.g. 24 hours). Then the user gets the same number of tries again.

So far, it doesn’t appear that Twitter has implemented a lockout policy in response to last month’s incident, although they did report that they had taken the administrative tools offline. And some security pros I’ve talked with are having a hard time getting too excited about Twitter’s lack of security. After all, it’s not like someone who gets the password to your account is able to access data that belongs to you or drain your bank account. It’s just a microblogging service; it’s just a way to post short messages. What’s the big deal?

The problem is that as the service has become more and more popular (and thus more attractive to hackers), it has taken on uses that were probably never envisioned by its creators. It may have started out as a way for teenagers to tell each other that they were headed to the mall, or going to a movie, or grounded at home. But today business people are using it to keep clients and co-workers informed about their activities, journalists are monitoring tweets to find breaking news, and emergency services workers are even using it to communicate with each other during crisis situations.

Now, the company could say that those who use the services for such purposes do so at their own risk, but like it or not, people are relying on the veracity of the content, based on who posted it. If a tweet went out saying that Steve Jobs had died, it’s one thing to have it come from an unknown person but if it came from an account known to belong to someone high in the Apple organizational chart, people would believe it. What might that do to Apple’s stock?

There have been rumors floating around the Internet lately that Twitter may start charging a membership fee for business users. If they do, they need to realize that people expect much more from a service they’re paying for than from a free one. Businesses will demand reliability and security if they’re going to be charged to tweet.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Panda recently released the results of a study showing that more than 90 percent of the email received by business mail servers is either annoying spam or worse, malware. Specifically, not quite eight and half percent of the 430 million messages analyzed were legitimate mail. Luckily (or at least somewhat luckily) the majority of the messages were plain old spam, with only a small number actually carrying malevolent payloads.

That represents a tremendous waste of bandwidth and resources, not to mention the money that companies have to spend on filtering software to make sure that most of that spam doesn’t reach user mailboxes. Just imagine: if there were no spam filtering software, ordinary workers would spend much of their work time slogging through their Inboxes, attempting to identify the real messages from the spam.

As it is, most users probably have little idea of how much spam comes in. Even our very small network gets well over 100,000 spam messages every day, sometimes up to 300,000 or 400,000. Here’s the daily report for yesterday:

 
Daily spam report: click to enlarge

You can see that the vast majority of the spam comes from known spammers who are on the RBL lists. In fact, 122,803 messages were blocked by the RBL filters. Another 4513 were sent to invalid recipients – addresses that don’t have accounts on our mail server. This happens when spammers just flood a mail domain with addresses with common names (for example, adam@domain.com, bob@domain.com, charlie@domain.com, and so forth). Messages that were determined to be spam based on heuristics made up a smaller portion (331 messages). Only one virus was found, amazingly enough, but the real shocker is that out of almost 128,000 messages that came in that day, only 134 were legitimate (“clean”) pieces of mail. Wow.

What’s the solution? Short of widespread implementation of email authentication technology that can positively verify the identification of the sender, there probably isn’t one. And even authentication wouldn’t stop all spam. But I believe we’re headed toward a day when anonymity on the Internet will not be an easy thing to attain. Real identities will be required in order to access information, send mail or other communications, even to log on. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe a little bit of both.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

I love the new taskbar in Windows 7. I like those big icons without text and I like being able to pin my favorite programs to it. But I had one problem: I have a lot of programs that I use often. I like putting my taskbar on the side of the screen instead of the top or bottom, since widescreen monitors give you far more extra space at the sides. But that reduced the amount of room for all those pinned programs.

I tried switching to small icons but they’re a little too small. What I really wanted was … the Quick Launch bar.

Well, it turns out that it still exists in Win 7 (and if it didn’t, you could create it). Here’s how to get it back:

1. First, open Explorer and go to Tools | Folder Options | View tab. Scroll down and make sure the option to Show hidden files, folders and drives is selected.
2. Now right click an empty space on the taskbar and select Toolbars | New Toolbar
3. Browse to this folder:
   C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer (Note that AppData is a hidden folder and you won’t see it in the <username> folder if you don’t have Explorer set to show hidden files, folders and drives.
4. Highlight the Quick Launch folder and click the Select Folder button.

This adds a Quick Launch toolbar to the Windows 7 taskbar. Unlock the taskbar if you haven’t already (right click and uncheck Lock the Taskbar). Now you can drag it to make it the size you want, and you can drag additional programs to it.

To get rid of the Title and Text, right click the Quick Launch toolbar and uncheck Show Text and Show Title. If you want the icons bigger, select View and Large Icons.

The advantage to having the Quick Launch bar back is that you can put the programs there that you use less often (but still want them one click away) and use small icons, giving you much more space than if you pinned all of them to the main taskbar.

Here’s what my taskbar looks like with the Quick Launch toolbar at the bottom just above the notification area:

 
Click to enlarge

This is also good for those people (like my husband) who have trouble distinguishing between open programs and those that are simply pinned to the taskbar. You can unpin everything and put them in the QL bar, and only running programs will appear on the Win7 taskbar.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 have been certified to support the newly launched SAP Business Suite 7, according to a recent press release.

SAP Business Suite includes ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) and SCM (Supply Chain Management) solutions and is based on the NetWeaver platform, which is SAP’s integrated technology and applications platform. It’s a modular suite that’s built on an open service oriented architecture (SOA). It also included industry-specific solutions (banking, healthcare, insurance, public sector, higher education, oil & gas, retail, and more).

According to the release, almost two thirds of new SAP installations are deployed on Windows.

Well, I’ve been bursting at the seams to talk about it, but the news was under “embargo” for those of us who’ve signed NDAs – until 12:00 p.m. PST today. Now the cat’s out of the bag: Windows 7 will come in six flavors but the focus will be on two of them: Home Premium and Professional. Pro replaces the “Business” label in Vista. Here’s the full list:

1. Starter: will be available for low powered netbooks

2. Home Basic: for emerging markets only

3. Home Premium: includes Aero, multi-touch, and Windows Media Center

4. Professional: can join a domain, has EFS and advanced backup, location aware printing AND includes everything that’s in Home Premium

5. Enterprise: only available through volume licensing, includes BitLocker, DirectAccess, AppLocker and BranchCache

6. Ultimate: Includes everything in the previous editions

Perhaps the most exciting part of the announcement is that unlike with Vista, each “higher” edition includes ALL the features of the previous ones. You don’t lose features when you move up (as you did with Vista, whereby moving up to Business from Home Premium meant losing Windows Media Center and other multi-media applications).

A common scenario for power users was that you wanted to be able to join a domain and encrypt files with EFS, but you also wanted Media Center, so you had to buy Ultimate. Now you’ll get all that in Professional. This has the potential to save you some money if you don’t want/need BitLocker, AppLocker and DirectAccess.

Microsoft says the vast majority of Win 7 computers will come with either Home Basic or Professional edition. No pricing has yet been announced.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com