Dell said today it will use the Windows Azure platform appliance, for its Dell Services Cloud to develop and offer cloud services.

The Windows Azure platform appliance will allow Dell to offer private and public cloud services for Dell and its enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers. Dell will also work with Microsoft to develop a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance for enterprise organizations to run in their data centers.
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During its Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event, Microsoft introduced the Windows Server AppFabric Release Candidate and announced that final availability will follow in June.

The company also made available the first public beta for BizTalk Server 2010, which supports Windows Server AppFabric and is scheduled to release to manufacturing in the third quarter of 2010.
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May 11, Windows will be receiving some critical patches for both Windows and Microsoft Office. They will be plugging holes which can leave users vulnerable to remote attacks. The patch will be issued for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 users. Along with Microsoft Office, the patch will address Visual Basic problems as well.
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One of my favorite features of Mac OS X is how PDF (portable document format) tools are tightly integrated into the operating system. Want to save something as a PDF document? Any app that can send a document to the printer, be it a Web page, a screen capture, or a nicely formatted report, can just as easily do a “Save As PDF”, and even specify what image quality should be used. Sure, Adobe sells its Distiller program, but on a Mac I would estimate that 95%+ of your document to PDF requirements are already included in the operating system.

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At the Mix10 conference, the Windows Phone 7 teams had some very big announcements – a lot of it had been kept secret and first revealed to the public now. There is however still some details they keep secret. Some of these secrets are the user agents of Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 7, which they simply wouldn’t give us.

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Many Microsoft Windows 7 users have started to notice a decline in their batteries longevity.  At first they were confused thinking it was the BIOS drivers that needed to be upgraded, but then began to notice that others who installed Microsoft Windows 7 had the same problem. (more…)

I just spent the better half of the day upgrading my son’s Dell 1721 laptop from Vista to Windows 7. I have done my share of Linux installs and upgrades on all kinds of hardware configurations but this was one of the toughest I have ever been through. Once I resolved it, the fix is rather easy, but finding the fix was a challenge. I am thankful for the many people who post useful information in forums so that people like me can resolve our problems. Hopefully this post will help some folks and save them a great deal of time and frustration.

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Every so often I go to download some software for my Acer Windows PC and have to decide between a 32-bit and 64-bit version of the application. I’m running Windows Vista but when I look, it just says that I’m running “Home Premium”. How do I know if I’m running 32-bit or 64-bit Windows?

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Microsoft has possibly pulled a fast one on the European Commission (EC) in its wrestling match to see whether their Internet Explorer browser (IE) will be packaged in the new Windows 7 offering. The EC has contended that by including the browser in the operating system that competition is being squeezed out unfairly by Microsoft. Well, we may be seeing that EC stands for ‘Exceptionally Clueless’ considering how they may have stepped all over their own case against the software giant.

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I’m an old-school computer user and when I got my new laptop I decided that rather than overwrite the OS with Linux, I’d actually stick it out and learn Windows Vista. So far, not so bad, but one thing’s bugging me: when I create a file like “test.xls” the system shows it as “test” with an Excel icon. I want to see the filename suffix, though, the “.xls” part. How do I enable that feature / disable that feature in Microsoft Windows Vista??

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