Windows 7 pics…

Toshiba’s First Laptops with New AMD Platform, are Out

Toshiba on Wednesday introduced laptops powered by the new Puma-based processors recently announced by Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD’s new Turion X2 Ultra ZM processors will be included in Toshiba’s new Satellite PCs, which will ship later this year, a Toshiba spokesman said.

The Turion X2 Ultra processor is part of the Puma platform launched by AMD on Tuesday. The processors come in two speeds: the ZM-80 runs at 2.1GHz and comes with 2M bytes of cache, while the Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86 runs at 2.4GHz and includes 2M bytes of cache.

Along with the Turion Ultra ZM, Toshiba said two other chips from AMD — Athlon Dual Core QL and Turion Dual Core RM — will be offered in the Satellite P300D, Satellite A300D, Satellite M300D, Satellite U400D, Satellite L300D and Satellite L350D laptops. It wasn’t immediately clear what processors each laptop would come with.

During the Puma launch, AMD said it had won notebook designs for the platform from PC makers including Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, NEC and Toshiba. About one-third of laptop designs have 15-inch screens, with other models having screen sizes from 12 inches to 18 inches.

Puma laptops are designed to run Windows Vista, AMD has said.

The Puma platform also includes the mobile AMD 7-series chipset and ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series graphics cards. The Puma platform supports hybrid graphics technology, which boosts the platform’s graphics performance by running both the integrated graphics processor and a separate graphics card.

Microsoft Fixes Vista SP1 Reboot Bug

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Microsoft Monday said it has fixed a Vista SP1 reboot bug that had caused some users to suspend migrations and that the revised software will again be offered via automatic distribution.

The Vista Servicing Stack Update (SSU) was a prerequisite for installing Vista SP1 via Windows Update that was made available by Microsoft in February. The software, designed to ease installation, instead had the opposite effect by throwing some users into an endless reboot cycle.

At the time, Microsoft called negative reaction to the issue “a feeding frenzy.”

Microsoft says the problem is fixed and it will again offer the SSU prerequisite code starting April 8th. Users who have already successfully installed SSU do not need to reinstall it. In addition, users who have a copy of SP1 acquired by any means other than Windows Update do not need to install SSU.

Microsoft is fixing the problem by issuing a fix that installs prior to the installation of the SSU, a prerequisite for the prerequisite.

The new piece of code will ensure a “smooth install of the SSU by working to prevent the system from rebooting during the SP1 SSU installation,” according to the Microsoft Product Update Team Blog. The blog also says Microsoft made additional changes to the SSU installer code that will ensure the pre-SSU is installed before it attempts to load SSU.

The company said the original problem occurred during some “unknown and rare” instances when the SSU thought it needed to reboot when it did not. The resulting reboot try then touched off a never ending cycle of attempts and failures.

Microsoft says users with Windows Update activated do not have to take any action before April 8 to receive both the pre-SSU and the SSU code.

Microsoft Releases Visual C++

In separate moves, Microsoft has released its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack but discontinued extended support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE.

The feature pack had been available in a beta release since January, said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog this week.
“The Feature Pack provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) and an implementation of TR1 (Technical Report 1). Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications with the ‘look & feel’ of Microsoft’s most popular products — Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and Internet Explorer,” Somasegar said.

TR1 is a document that featured a Visual C++ implementation with extensions to the C++ ISO standard. Microsoft’s implementation of TR1 contains such features as regular expression parsing and sophisticated random number generators.

Also included in the feature pack are a component for the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar, Visual Studio docking, auto hide windows, and Windows Vista theme support.

The feature pack is downloadable by any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer, Somasegar said.

Also this week, Microsoft ended extended, paid support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE, which is more than 10 years old.

“If you haven’t converted all your apps to .Net, shame on you, but don’t freak out. Microsoft will continue to support the VB 6.0 runtime for all existing application in all the next versions of the Windows OS, including Windows Server 2008 and Vista,” said Microsoft’s Jeff Nuckolls, a technology specialist, in a blog entry from last week. Nuckolls still advised that users devise a migration plan.

An online petition in 2005 sought to save Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Basic for Applications. Still available, that petition has gathered 13,341 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon. A Visual Basic user who had participated in the petition drive downplayed his need for support of Visual Basic 6.0 Wednesday afternoon.

“‘Support’ is not something I need or have needed outside the peer support of other VB developers,” said Visual Basic user Don Bradner. “Now if it gets to where I can’t write a VB6 app or my VB6 apps won’t run, that’s a lot different; it is also likely to be a long way into the future.”

Adobe Patches ‘PWN To OWN’ Bug in Flash Player

Adobe Systems Tuesday plugged the Flash Player hole used by a hacker two weeks ago to take down a Windows Vista machine and claim a $5,000 prize in the “PWN To OWN” exploit challenge.

Adobe’s update to Flash Player — the popular program and browser plug-in used to view online content — patched seven vulnerabilities, including several that could be used by attackers to hijack machines running the flawed software. Among the seven was the one used to break into a Fujitsu notebook during the hacker contest sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint, which operates a bug bounty program called Zero Day Initiative.

Last week, Adobe claimed it had known about the Flash bug before it was used by Shane Macaulay of Security Objectives to hack one of the laptops up for grabs at CanSecWest, and would add a fix for it to a previously scheduled update this month.

Adobe had announced the April update about four weeks ago, but had left the timeline vague, saying only that it would refresh Flash sometime during the month.

The majority of the patches applied to Flash Player quashed bugs in how the software handled .swf files, the proprietary Shockwave Flash format. One of the .swf vulnerabilities had been reported to Adobe back in December 2007 by Google researcher Rich Cannings, who pointed out the format could be used to launch cross-site scripting attacks, which are commonly deployed by identity thieves and phishers.

Earlier, Adobe had issued updates to its Web developer tools that crank out .swf files, and told Web operators and site designers to make changes to their pages before it released yesterday’s end-user update. If they didn’t get rid of the older .swf files, they risked users being unable to access Flash content on their sites, Adobe warned.

HP Ships Ultraportable Laptop with Via Inside

Hewlett-Packard unveiled its Compaq 2133 ultraportable laptop, which uses a C7-M microprocessor from Taiwan’s Via Technologies instead of a chip from Intel.

The sleek device represents a significant design win for Via, which has struggled to win business from top-tier PC makers in the face of stiff competition from Intel. The win is even more remarkable because Intel just released its Centrino Atom package for handheld computers and will start shipping a line of low-cost Atom chips designed for laptops like the 2133 during the third quarter.

HP chose the C7-M because it met the thermal requirements needed for the 2133, according to Philip Devlin, a product marketing manager at HP Asia-Pacific, adding that Via has long provided microprocessors for HP’s line of thin clients.

Another important consideration was timing. The C7-M was ready when HP wanted to make the 2133 available, Devlin said.

The 1.19-kilogram 2133 has an aluminum-alloy case and is priced from US$499 to $899, depending on the configuration. The laptop comes with a C7-M processor running at 1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.6GHz, and runs Windows Vista or SuSE Linux Desktop 10. Standard features include an 8.9-inch screen with a resolution of 1,280 pixels by 768 pixels, a nearly full-size keyboard, a Secure Digital (SD) memory card slot, and an ExpressCard slot. It also has wireless interfaces for Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.

When it comes to storage, users have the choice of a 120G-byte hard disk or a 160G-byte disk. A 4G-byte solid-state drive is available for Linux, and HP expects to offer an 80G-byte SSD as an option for both operating systems during the third quarter.

The 2133 gets around two hours of battery life with the standard 3-cell battery and four hours with a 6-cell battery, Devlin said.

Devlin declined to comment on whether HP plans to use Via’s upcoming Isaiah processor with the 2133, but said the chip is “a point of conversation” between the two companies.

Isaiah is expected to offer significantly more performance than the C-7M processor while offering the same thermal characteristics. The two chips are pin-compatible, which means that no work will be required to adapt the 2133 — or any other computer that uses the C7-M — for the new processor. Laptop makers simply swap the C7-M for the newer chip, when it becomes available.

Windows 7 Release Set For 2009

Microsoft has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.

It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched to consumers until January 2007. Given Microsoft’s recent track record – Vista arrived more than five years after XP – most outsiders had pegged some time in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7′s arrival.

But News.com reported on Friday that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates answered a question at a business meeting in Miami about Windows Vista by saying “sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version”.

And during its announcement on Thursday that it would extend the availability of Windows XP Home for low-cost laptops. Microsoft said it would retire the operating system only after June 30, 2010, or one year after the release of Windows 7, whichever comes later.

That implies that Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 – the only codename known at the moment – although whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and OEMs to start installing it, is unknown.

A Microsoft spokeswoman told Computerworld US the company “is in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA”. She said the company was providing early builds of the new operating system to gain user feedback, but otherwise was not providing further information.

Gates also said that he was “super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways” but didn’t elaborate.

What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista’s 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical sub-system.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32bit and 64bit editions.

Screenshots of early betas of Windows 7  build 6519 of Windows 7 released in December

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Microsoft needs to start generating excitement about its software months or years in advance in order to prepare its millions of reselling partners.

But if it talks up Windows 7 too much, it runs the risk that large companies – Microsoft’s most profitable customer segment – will hold on to their Windows XP machines and skip Vista entirely in favour of Windows 7.

That appears to be happening. A recent enterprise survey by Forrester Research showed that only 6.3 percent of enterprises were running Vista at the end of December, with most of the upgrades coming at the expense of aging machines running Windows 2000, not XP.

The vast majority of the 100 million copies of Vista that Microsoft has sold so far have gone to individuals and small businesses purchasing new PCs.

The least-loved version of Windows has long been Windows Millennium Edition (ME), a buggy minor upgrade that was superseded by XP within a year of its release. Despite its far greater – some would say, too great – technical ambition, Vista may end up lumped together with ME as one of the blips on Windows’ long-term roadmap.

Transcend Introduces 16GB JetFlash V85

Transcend announced the availability of its new high-capacity USB flash drive — the 16GB JetFlash V85 in India. It has a compact zinc-alloy body and it measures 49.5mm long by 15.8mm wide, and is thin enough (7.4mm) to slide in pockets or tight-fitting stacked USB ports. The drive has up to 16GB of storage space so one can easily transfer, store, and share large number of files.

It comes bundled with Transcend’s handy JetFlash elite software package that includes seven useful tools specifically developed to help manage mobile data more efficiently and increase productivity. These functions include: Website AutoLogin, PC-Lock, Favorites, Secret-Zip, E-mail, DataBackup, and Online Update. The drive supports Windows 98SE/2000/Me/XP/Vista, Mac and Linux, and is now available in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities.

The drive is USB 2.0 compliant, which is also compatible with USB 1.0/1.1 Easy Plug and Play operation and requires no external power or battery. It can be used as a key to lock the computer and compress and password-protect files using powerful 256-bit AES Encryption.

The drive enjoys 3 years warranty and is available for Rs. 4,250. It is available through Supertron Electronics and Mediaman Infotech.

Google Brings Offline Access to Docs and Apps

Google is rolling out a much-awaited feature for its hosted applications: the ability for people to use them even when they aren’t connected to the Internet.

The first application to get this offline access will be the word processor, said Ken Norton, Google Docs product manager. “The design goal is to create a seamless experience, with or without an Internet connection,” he said.

Over the next three weeks or so, Google will turn on the feature for all word processor users, giving them the ability to view and edit documents while offline. During the same time period, Google Docs’ spreadsheet will gain offline ability for viewing, but not editing, documents.

Google Docs’ third component, an application to make slide presentations, will remain for now without offline access. However, Google has plans to extend the offline access to it and to other hosted services in the Google Apps suite, of which Docs is part. Apps also includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk and others.

“Offline access of [hosted] apps is the next step in making the Web as a whole a lot more reliable,” Norton said.

Expectation for offline access in Docs and Apps had been building since Google introduced its Gears open-source technology in May of last year. Until now, Google had only built Gears offline functionality for its Reader RSS feed manager.

By allowing Docs and Apps users to work offline, Google is addressing one of the biggest objections to Web-hosted applications. So far, offline access has required that users export their Docs files to third-party file formats, like Microsoft Office.

Gears is a browser plug-in that can store files and data locally, as well as run JavaScript applications without a server connection. It’s this architecture that will allow Docs users to work on their word processing documents if their Internet connection drops or if they’re somewhere without one, such as an airplane.

To access their Docs files offline, users need only install the Gears plug-in and type in the regular Google Docs URL: docs.google.com.

Work done offline will be automatically synchronized with the Google Docs servers when users connect to the Internet.

As an open-source technology, Gears can be used by developers outside of Google.

The offline access will be turned on “in batches” over the coming weeks in consumer Docs accounts and in the administrator consoles of Apps.

Gears is currently supported in Internet Explorer 6 and above and Firefox 1.5 and above for Windows XP and Vista, according to Google. Firefox 1.5 and above is also supported on Mac OS X 10.2 and above and Linux. Gears also runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 and above in Internet Explorer 4.01 and above.

Windows XP SP3 Due Next Month

Microsoft will release Windows XP Service Pack 3 during the second half of April, according to a report from a Web site that has correctly predicted recent Windows ship dates.

TechARP.com, a Malaysian Web site that nailed Vista SP1′s release-to-manufacturing (RTM) date last month as well as its release to Windows Update last week, said that Microsoft will wrap up work on XP’s third and final service pack next month. The site pegged RTM for Windows XP SP3 as “second half of April 2008″ for seven languages, with a follow-on RTM of the remaining supported languages “approximately 21 days” later.

By TechARP’s account, Microsoft will first finish work on the Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish versions of the service pack.

Microsoft declined comment, other than to repeat an earlier statement about the service pack’s timing. “We are targeting 1H [first half] 2008 for the release of XP SP3 RTM, though our timing will always be based on customer feedback as a first priority,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

The last time Microsoft made a public move with Windows XP SP3 was a little over a month ago, when it posted a second release candidate to Windows Update.

About two weeks ago, however, XP SP3 caused a minor stir when what was purportedly the newest build leaked to the Internet and hit BitTorrent search sites such as The Pirate Bay. Although Microsoft initially refused comment, last week it acknowledged that the build — designated 5503 — was real and had been released to a portion of the invitation-only beta test group.

It also warned users away from any download. “This build was not intended for public release and anyone who has that build and is not part of the private beta is working with bits that Microsoft can’t verify,” a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail last week. “It’s possible the bits may have been modified with malware or other bad code that Microsoft hasn’t tested.”

Multiple versions of XP SP3 build 5503, including English- and Russian-language editions, are available via BitTorrent.

Once SP3 ships, the next major milestones for Windows XP are June 30, when the popular operating system is slated to fall off the reseller and retail availability list, and Jan. 31 2009, when it will be taken out of all distribution channels, including system builders.