Microsoft has just released Windows SteadyState. It is a free program that allows you to lock down a Windows installation, and make it suitable for use in a public environment.

It is actually a major upgrade (So major they renamed it) from an older tool called the Microsoft® Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

A few features that make it much more attractive than the older version:

-You don’t need to repartition your hard drive to take advantage of the hard drive protection features

-User settings have been simplified to a high, medium, and low setting for each account.

-It enables you to import and export user accounts from one computer to another

-It includes a fully-revised Windows SteadyState Handbook

I decided to take it for a quick test drive, and one of the most compelling features is the hard drive protection.

This is great. Even if a script kiddy takes over my kiosk and vandalizes the thing, I can set it to refresh back to…

• Featured Windows Vista Download: Keep Files Organized with The Magic Folder
  A Vista sidebar gadget to help organize your files based on their file type.
  (tags: Gadget Software Sidebar )
• It?s payback time: If the Vista team could write ad copy ?
  After all the smack talk by Apple fanboys, their new OS could be at least as buggy, if not more so.
  (tags: none)

If you’re a regular reader, you probably know by now that we just love performance and can’t get enough of server performance-improving software/code… Especially when it comes to WordPress.

Donncha has recently released a great plugin for WordPress, called "WordPress Super Cache." It builds on the original WP-Cache plugin by Ricardo Granada - except that it fixes all the bugs in the original implementation and has been written in enough pure PHP that it’ll also run on Windows servers - both IIS and Apache for that matter! <cue applause>

At the moment (as of version 0.3.1) it needs a bit of work to make it run, but not much. So here goes - 10 easy steps to get cached content on your IIS or Apache server under Windows:

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When you use a program that tries to bind to TCP network ports on a Windows-based computer, you may receive the following Winsock error message:

WSAEADDRINUSE (10048) Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.

This behavior occurs if the following conditions are true:

• Internet Connection Sharing is enabled on the computer that is running Windows.
• The program tries to connect to TCP ports in the 5001 to 5032 range.

This week we posted some new videos on www.windows.com and www.windowslive.com. We call them demos but really they’re little stories about people using Windows to do more, connect with loved ones and share memories. I’m excited about the videos for a couple of reasons (besides the fact that it’s always fun to have something you had a hand in producing actually Out There – in front of real people who will have real opinions about them) – naturally I’m excited about the chance to paint a picture of Windows Vista and Windows Live working together and to showcase new features and capabilities in the product, but what I’m most excited about is the opportunity to put Windows in the context of people’s lives – which is an approach we haven’t traditionally taken with product demos on the Windows website.

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I went out on a limb a bit with these videos because of this – our initial storyboards revolved around the product, just showing the UI

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This week we posted some new videos on www.windows.com and www.windowslive.com . We call them demos but really they’re little stories about people using Windows to do more, connect with loved ones and share memories. I’m excited about the videos for a Read More……(read more)