Windows

Microsoft has announced that they will end support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 on July 13 and Windows Vista RTM (the original release without service packs) on April 13. You can find out which version you are running by right-clicking on My Computer (Computer in Vista) and left-clicking on Properties. You can download the latest service packs (SP3 for XP and SP2 for Vista) at www.microsoft.com.

Microsoft will release Windows 7 on Thursday October 22nd. Are you ready? We’ve been testing 7 from early this year, and we really think it’s a worthwhile upgrade from Vista. You can check your machine to see if the hardware and software you have are compatible using the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor (Beta) here, or you can use the compatibility check on the Windows 7 DVD when it’s released. If you would like advice on whether or not you should upgrade, feel free to contact us.

Update: Microsoft has released the official version of the Upgrade Advisor here.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 will be available to the general public beginning October 22nd, according to the Wall Street Journal. This should give them a much better foothold with 7 coming out before the holidays than they had with Vista being released at the end of January. Unfortunately, even though Windows 7 is getting rave reviews from most people testing it, Microsoft has kept the convoluted versioning scheme from Vista. There will be 6 different versions of Windows 7; could they make it any more complicated? Here is a quick breakdown of the versions for anyone interested.

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is now available for download from Microsoft. You can download the 32 bit version here and the 64 bit version here. To find out which version you need, simply right-click on Computer and left-click on Properties. Under the System heading, it will tell you whether you have a 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows. Service Pack 2 should be available through Windows Update soon.

Service Pack 2 is here! Well, Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 is here; Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista is on its way. Service packs are large updates that roll together all the little updates that have been released before them, and usually include added security and functionality. You can download Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 here. Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 2 should be available for download soon, hopefully early May, here.

In an earlier post I mentioned how people are wondering if their files will transfer to Mac from an existing Windows machine. In that post I talked about running Windows on a Mac if you needed access to a Windows-only program. PC Magazine has a great article on the different methods to accomplish this, if you are comfortable doing it yourself. You can read the article here.

Conficker (also known as Downadup) is a pretty nasty worm that has three known variations (A, B, and most recently C). It gets onto your machine through a Windows security flaw that was patched in October of 2008, and is programmed to call a sequence of control servers for updates and presumably other nasty activities. Recently, Kaspersky Labs, a security software and research company, was able to figure out the list of names the worm would check for updates and teamed with OpenDNS to block these attempts. Now researchers are saying that the worm is programmed to do something on April 1. What that is, they don’t know; they only know that it is set to “call home” on that day. Fortunately, there are many ways to remove the worm if you’ve been infected. And as always, keeping your antivirus and antispyware software up-to-date and installing Windows updates will help protect your machine.