Top Twenty Stories

Windows 7's dirty secrets revealed

PDC Hidden work arounds and complex dependencies

While chief technology officer Ray Ozzie was away in the clouds at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, technical fellow Mark Russinovich got down and dirty with the true heart of Windows - the kernel. He presented a two-hour session on changes made to the kernel used by both Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, shedding …
Macs not all that for reliability

Pretty though

A survey of 30,000 laptops has found one in three machines die within three years and netbooks do even worse, suffering 20 per cent more hardware failures than larger laptop machines. Apple is fourth placed for reliability behind, in ascending order, Sony, Toshiba and in first place Asus. To be fair to Apple there's not much …
Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision

Comment Behind the taskbar

Much better than Vista, and the best Windows yet. That seems to be the consensus view on Windows 7, and after two and a half months with the final build, I more or less agree - despite the niggling voice that says behind the new taskbar it is not really so different from Windows Vista. Nevertheless, Windows 7 on its launch …
Windows 7 lessons - the must know before you buy

Sin, SKUs, and puke

Today's launch of Windows 7 by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer marks the end of a 12-month product turn around - one of Microsoft's fastest. But what price did Microsoft pay to build Windows 7 so quickly? And what should we expect from Microsoft, and the Linux competition, as the company tries to entice people into …
Google Chrome OS - do we want another monoculture?

Microsoft ball breakers. Strings attached

Yes, Google has open-sourced Chrome OS, its much-discussed browser-based operating system. But as usual, the open sourcing only says so much about its openness. After all, this isn't something you can load on any PC. And it's not much of an operating system. You can't load local applications - not even one. As part of its …
Toshiba plans new enterprise: High capacity 3.5-inch HDDs

Wants to be a bigger player in the big drive market

Toshiba is planning to enter the high-capacity enterprise 3.5-inch hard disk drive market. Toshiba Storage Division Europe hosted a press event in London yesterday, following on the completion of its acquisition of Fujitsu's hard disk drive (HDD) business. Following the acquisition Toshiba has a portfolio of HDDs that are …
Dell is beat by The Street

Awaits Win7 bonanza

Dell released its financial results for Q3 ended 30 October on Thursday, and for its troubles, it took a beating in after hours trading. The good news is that the company remains profitable. The bad news is that those profits have sunk 54 per cent since last year - and were 5 cents a share worse than analyst estimates. And …
Fedora 12 - it's a horse, not a camel

Review Design by committee makes good

The Fedora Project has announced the latest version of its popular open source Linux distribution. Nicknamed Constantine, Fedora 12 has quite a few impressive new features and demonstrates that the project has gained a renewed sense of direction. In the build-up to the release of Fedora 12, the Fedora community has focused its …
Hackers in keyless Windows 7 entry

Crack skirts MS code

Hackers have found a way to bypass product activation in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to get free and illegal copies of Microsoft's latest operating systems. The hack, according to My Digial Life, means you can get Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 without the need for a product activation key. The crack apparently …
Ubuntu's Karmic Koala bares fangs at Windows 7

Review Shuttleworthian scrap

Ubuntu 9.10 - aka Karmic Koala - is taking the fight to Microsoft and its new Windows 7 operating system. The Koala - due for its official release today - brings faster boot times, a revamped software installer, better disk encryption, online services, and quite a bit more to the popular Linux desktop. We took the release …
AMD unmasks Opterons of servers future

Faces for 'Magny Cours' and 'San Marino'

It's financial analyst day at chip designer and seller (but no longer wafer baker) Advanced Micro Devices, and that's reason enough for the company to divulge a few more details about its future Opteron processors and related chipsets and platforms, due early next year. First of all, the official names of the processors. The " …
Major IE8 flaw makes 'safe' sites unsafe

Exclusive Microsoft's XSS buster busted

The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser contains a bug that can enable serious security attacks against websites that are otherwise safe. The flaw in IE 8 can be exploited to introduce XSS, or cross-site scripting, errors on webpages that are otherwise safe, according to two Register sources, who discussed …
Microsoft ordered to halt Win XP sales in China

IP champion accused of IP theft

Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Windows XP in China after a court ruled that certain fonts in the operating system infringe on a Chinese firm's intellectual property. On Monday, Beijing's 1st Intermediate People's Court decided that Microsoft had overstepped a deal with Zhongyi Electronics to include the company's …
Office 2010 fights Google with SharePoint bloat

Review Decent upgrade gets out of shape

Office is in a curious competitive position. On the desktop, Office is untouchable - even the free OpenOffice.org has done little to shift its hold, especially in business. Microsoft should worry though about competing online document authoring and collaboration tools, especially those from Google. They lack features now, but …
Microsoft squirts out Office 2010 public beta

Testing times ahead

Microsoft plans to punt five different flavours of its Office 2010 suite when it lands in the first half of next year. Customers will be able to get their hands on Ribbon-wrapped Standard, Home and Business, Professional Plus, Professional and Home and Student editions of the software, with three of those versions hitting …
Atrato replaces sales boss - again

To lose one is unfortunate, to lose two looks like carelessness

Atrato has replaced its sales VP, Marty Sos, after just three months, and recruited a marketing VP as well. Marty Sos joined Atrato, which makes disk drive storage arrays with canisters of 2.5-inch drives, in late August this year, having left collapsed optical disk drive and archive vendor Plasmon. He's now VP of sales at …
Windows 7 OEM prices revealed

Call yourself an OEM, get 50% off

Online retailer NewEgg has coughed up OEM pricing details for Windows 7 this week, revealing deep discounts from the full retail version. If you want Microsoft's latest OS on the cheap and missed out on earlier promotions, it's certainly not a bad way to go. Strictly speaking, OEM copies are intended for computer builders, but …
Riverbed going virtually into public cloud

Virtual Steelhead speeds iSCSI WAN traffic

WAN optimiser Riverbed has announced virtual Steelhead for the cloud and a way to speed up iSCSI data traffic. Riverbed's Steelhead is a physical appliance that sites inline at the entry/exit port to a data centre and speeds wide area network (WAN) traffic to and from the data centre. It co-operates with another Steelhead at …
The biggest flash drive in the world

An almighty tower of SSD power

ViON have produced a 100TB DRAM solid state drive, which they claim to be the largest flash memory-based storage box in the world. The HyperStor-6200 uses both Hitachi Data Systems and Texas Memory Systems technology - think RamSan 6200 - and provides five million I/Os per second (IOPS) with 60GB/sec bandwidth. It is a monster …
NetApp doubles profits ahead of Fujitsu love-in

Mighty strong quarter there

NetApp recorded more than doubled profits for its second fiscal 2010 quarter, out-performing its largest competitors and beating its own plans and Wall Street’s expectations alike. Revenues were $910m, essentially flat being down just $1.6m on the year-ago quarter, and up nine per cent sequentially, but net income of $96m was …