From Windows Vista Team Blog

Damn! The counterfeiters are improving their techniques more and more. Hmm, I wonder which one is fake?

Quote:

"Earlier today the Chinese Public Security Bureau and the FBI announced the largest bust of counterfeit software manufacturing or distribution ever.  The bust took place in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and includes arrests that took place over the last couple of weeks.  While the value of the software actually seized is estimated at about five hundred million dollars, we’re estimating that the value of software produced and distributed over the last few years by this particular group is closer to two billion dollars."

Read the rest here

As for the counterfeit Vista disk, its the one on the right. You can notice subtle differences such as washed out look of the copper hologram and the inner hub labeling is not centered properly. Its still a bit difficult to tell, especially for the average consumer, but with Windows Genuine Advantage and more education and awareness its really doing a great job.

Resources:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/howtotell/

 

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Yesterday, I gave my thoughts on the Acer controvesy, seems I am not the only who is also experiencing grogginess with Vista on their Acer systems. Matt Mondok over at Arstechnica shares his experience:

"While Acer will probably continue to blame Microsoft for its problems until Windows 7 arrives, I must admit that I, like many others, have not had good luck with Acer machines. Two months ago, I experienced my first and hopefully last taste of Vista on an Acer. I’ve worked on spyware-infested Windows ME machines that were more responsive than this brand new, Vista-Home-Basic-enabled Acer. From boot, the machine was ridiculously slow to the point that it was unusable. Sure, part of the blame could have been placed on Vista, but similar machines from Dell and HP ran just fine."

Read the entire post here

Acer president Gianfranco Lanci became the first major PC manufacturer to openly attack Microsoft over the Windows Vista operating system in the Financial Times Deutschland on Monday.

Lanci said the operating system was riddled with problems and gave users and businesses no reason to buy a new PC, according to the report. Taiwan-based Acer

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If you’ve been wondering why the lack of activity, well, now you know. CompleteRSS 1.1 has just been released; and we’re almost done with EasyBCD 1.61 (actually, we’re done) and we have another program we’ll be releasing in one form or the other sometime soon (as in 24-hours-soon).

CompleteRSS 1.1 fixes an elusive bug that rendered the_excerpt() useless, and a host of other compatibility issues with other plugins that incorrectly access the RSS action hook in WordPress.

Download CompleteRSS 1.1

Back in 2004, we lost Dave’s frame class. Dave’s frame class, or more accurately, DavesFrameClass,
was the window class that drew the CPU meter on the Performance
page of Task Manager.
As you might have guessed, Dave was the name of the original author Read More……(read more)

Do you know that by default, when you install Windows Server 2008, the following is default?

• The computer name is randomly assigned
• The computer is joined to WORKGROUP by default
• Windows Update is turned off by default
• All network connections are set to obtain IP addressesautomatically by using DHCP
• Windows Firewall is turned on by default.
• File Server role is installed by default.
• The Administrator account password is blank by default

So, do remember to alter any configuration to suite you.

Happy reading.

Guys, a share on Windows 2008 Active Directory - you can now break down to roles, just setup whatever you need for Directory Services. Below are the breakdown. We will share more, this is only intro :)

ADCS (Active Directory Certificate Services)
This server role enables creation and management of digitalcertificates for users, computers, and organizationsas part of a public key infrastructure.

ADDS (Active Directory Domain Services)
It's functionality has been carried forward into Windows Server 2008, along with an improved setup wizard. This also provide new management options for ADDS features such as read-only domain controllers (RODCs) - the hot topic in Windows 2008 AD.

ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services)
A feature that provides an identity access solution giving browser-based clients (inside or outside your network) single sign-on access to protected, Internet-facing applications.

ADLDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services)
A LDAP directory service provide the functionality that was provided byActive Directory Application Mode (ADAM), and provides data storage and retrieval for directory enabled applications, without the dependencies thatare required for ADDS. It also do not store security principle, which store by ADDS.

ADRMS (Active Directory Rights Management Services)
Works with Rights Management Services...