With the impending retirement of Bill Gates from Microsoft comes an obvious question: How will history view him? As a founder of the world's most influential software vendor and one of the biggest creators of wealth ever? Or as a monopolist and digital robber baron?
What will happen to my earlier version of Firefox?
Mac users have long gloated that the Mac OS is safer than Windows. The gloating should stop: There's plenty of recent evidence that Vista is, in fact, a safer operating system than Mac OS X.
Microsoft has taken plenty of heat in the Vista "junk PC" lawsuit. If the company is smart, it will take those criticisms to heart, and make sure it doesn't make the same mistakes when it launches Windows 7. Here's what I think that suit means for Windows 7.
Apple has made such a mess of its Safari 3.1 browser for Windows that Windows users should consider boycotting the browser, because of an underhanded way of distributing it, that according to CEO honcho John Lilly says "borders on malware."
PowerPoint users, your world has changed. The newest version, PowerPoint 2007, features the most thorough changes since the program's birth.
Microsoft held out the peace pipe to the Open Source community when the company announced that its offering free access to its most important APIs and formerly proprietary protocols, and will offer more support for open standards. Why has Microsoft seen the light? I have a one-word answer: Google.
If you've been waiting with bated breath for XP SP3, you can start breathing normally now. It changes so little in XP that you won't even notice it's there. But hidden and underneath the hood, as I'll explain, there are a few worthy changes.
A browser by itself is a poor thing, letting you browse the Web, but little else. To get the most out of the Web, you need add-ins that give your browser plenty of extra features.
The final version of Vista SP1 focuses on under-the-hood improvements to reliability, security and performance, with very few changes made to the interface or Vista's features. Think of it as a giant, glorified set of patches and fixes rather than a clear and visible change to the operating system.
Got a small network, home network, medium-size network -- even an enterprise network -- and want to get the most out of it? Then I've got good news for you: 10 free pieces of software that can make your network easier to use, troubleshoot and maintain. These freebies will help everyone from networking pros to networking newbies and everyone in between.
Don't like the way Internet Explorer 7 looks or works? Then change it. There are plenty of ways you can hack it, tweak it or just make it simpler to use. In this article, you'll find out how to speed up IE's display of Web sites, build your own Search Bar engine, get control over how IE prints Web pages, navigate with several essential keyboard shortcuts and more. These tips work in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Some of the tips are quite simple to perform, while others are more advanced. Some even require Registry hacks.
What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser. It's infinitely customizable, via editing a text file called userChrome.css, making changes via a command called about:config, and using free add-ons to extend the features of the browser.
Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, just released into beta, makes it easy for small businesses, workgroups and organizations to collaborate online and share documents. Even individuals who want to track projects and access documents from more than one PC will find it useful. It's a surprisingly sophisticated service, and although there remain rough edges and puzzling oversights (which may or may not be addressed in the commercial release), it's a very impressive piece of work, especially considering its price tag -- free for the moment.
The just-released Windows Vista SP1 Release Candidate (RC), like the previous beta, does more to improve the internal plumbing of Windows Vista than it does to make any major changes to the interface.
