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I am embarrassed to say that I have not yet loaded Windows Vista, although that oversight I am sure will be fixed soon enough. I am really excited about Vista for no other reason than the complacency that I feel in Windows XP will be brushed aside and I will be able to learn the nuances of another Microsoft operating system.

Anyway Chris Pirillo has given us 10 tips for Windows Vista and since over the years I have learned a lot of tech from Chris’s websites and weblog I thought I would honor him as the first Windows Vista tips blog post. Have fun.

Here are a few keyboard shortcusts for Windows. anytime that you do not have to take your hand off the keyboard to use the mouse you are going to be saving time.

Functions
Alt+Tab: Toggle between active applications
Ctrl+C: Copy (Alt+PrntScrn to copy the active window to the clipboard)
Ctrl+X: Cut
Ctrl+V: Paste
Ctrl+Z: Undo
Ctrl+S: Save
Ctrl+F4: Close a window (document).
Alt+F4: Close an application

Formatting
Ctrl+B: Bold
Ctrl+U: Underline
Ctrl+I: Italics
Ctrl+L: Left Align
Ctrl+R: Right Align
Ctrl+E: Center

Navigation
Ctrl+Right Arrow: Move right one word
Ctrl+ Left Arrow: Move left one word
Ctrl+Down Arrow: Down one paragraph
Ctrl+Up Arrow: Up one paragraph
Home: Beginning of a line
End: End of a line
Ctrl+Home: Beginning of a document
Ctrl+End: End of a document

Highlighting (Blocking) Text: Add the shift key, and the combinations above become tools to highlight text for deletion, replacement, font attributes, and so on.

Ctrl+A: Select all
Shift+Ctrl+Right Arrow: Block right one word
Shift+Ctrl+ Left Arrow: Block left one word
Shift+Ctrl+Down Arrow: Block down one paragraph
Shift+Ctrl+Up Arrow: Block up one paragraph
Shift+Home: Block from the cursor to the first of the line
Shift+End: Block from the cursor to the end of the line
Shift+Ctrl+Home: Block from the cursor to the top of the document
Shift+Ctrl+End: Block from the cursor to the end of the document

Tab from one field to the next on a screen. Shift+Tab will take you in reverse order.

Microsoft Corp. at LinuxWorld today is expected to unveil a new Web site that provides users with information about its Linux and open-source interoperability efforts, according to the executive in charge of those plans.

Bill Hilf, general manager of Microsoft’s platform strategy group, will discuss the site, http://www.port25.technet.com/, during his keynote at the conference in Boston later this morning. The site will go live today.

Hilf, who formerly worked on Linux deployments at IBM, has been overseeing Microsoft’s Linux and open-source interoperability lab in Redmond, Wash., for the past two years. He recently moved into a more senior position, replacing Martin Taylor, who has moved over to the Windows Live team. Hilf is now in charge of all of Microsoft’s open-source compatibility efforts, including its controversial Get the Facts anti-Linux campaign and its SharedSource initiative, which is the company’s own version of allowing developers access to some of its proprietary source code.

The aim of the new Web site is to showcase Microsoft’s efforts to ensure its proprietary systems interoperate with open-source software, including Linux. The company also is encouraging advice about how to advance these goals, Hilf said.

“It’s going to be the interface to all of the open-source lab work Microsoft does, where a variety of people blog — including myself and others on my team,” he said. “People in the community also can provide feedback and give us ideas for better interoperability.”

Even the site’s name reflects this notion of an open channel of communication, Hilf said. Port 25 is the server port that sends and receives e-mail on a server, thus facilitating two-way communication, he said.

In the past several years, Microsoft has appeared to become more open-source-friendly, but mainly from a market perspective. Without planning to support open-source itself as a strategy, the company has realized that Linux and other open-source software is here to stay. From a business perspective, it’s important that Microsoft technology can coexist peacefully in the same network with those products, Hilf said.

“The great thing is that as a market we’ve gotten past the David and Goliath stuff,” he said. “The reality is that customers run different technologies. …We’re still a commercial software company, but in some cases, people want to run Linux, want to run Windows virtualized, want to manage Linux using [Microsoft products]. In those situations, we can find a way to interoperate.”

To that end, Microsoft earlier this week at LinuxWorld released Virtual Server 2005 Release 2, the latest version of its virtualization environment for Windows that also supports the client and server versions of Linux distributions from Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. Microsoft also announced it would offer the product for free.

This is always the story that I look for to probve that support is over for a Microsoft operating system. As you may remember Microsoft continued patching Windows NT long after they said they would stop because they had so many corporate users running their servers on that platform. This time around most businesses are running either Windows 2000 pro or Windows XP as desktops and the server side is still Windows 2000 or Windows 2003, I would be horrified to hear of many businesses running critical apps on a Windows 98 desktop box.

Microsoft Corp. has defended its decision not to patch a critical security flaw in Windows 98.

Support for the operating system officially ends next month on July 12.

The vulnerability exists in Windows Explorer and the way it handles Component Object Model objects, whereby a malicious Web site could force a connection to a remote server where Explorer could fail, executing arbitrary code and giving the attacker complete control of the OS.

Patches correcting the flaw were issued for Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003, but the vulnerability remains unpatched on Windows 98.
Read the rest of this entry »

Starting July 11th, more than an estimated 70 million Windows users running Windows 98, Windows 98 Special Edition and Windows Millennium Edition will no longer receive security updates from Microsoft.

Microsoft had originally planned to phase out support for these operating systems in January 2004, but chose to delay in order to give users time to upgrade their systems.

Existing support documents and content, however, will continue to be available through the Microsoft Support Product Solution Center Web site . The solution Web site will continue to host previous How-to, Troubleshooting, and Configuration content for anyone who may need self-service.

The following is brief history of the three operating systems no longer receiving support.

Windows 98
Codenamed Memphis, Windows 98 was originally released on June 25, 1998 by Microsoft. The Windows 98 operating system was essentially an updated version of Windows 95, and like that earlier version, it was a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit product. Among its features were better AGP support, functional USB drivers, and support for multiple monitors and WebTV. Also added was support for the FAT32 file system which allowed Windows 98 support disk partitions larger than the two gigabyte maximum accepted by Windows 95. As in later releases of Windows 95, Internet Explorer continued to be integrated into the Windows Explorer interface (a feature which was called Active Desktop). It was also the first version of Windows to support ACPI.

Windows 98 Second Edition
Windows 98 SE was released on May 5, 1999. It included fixes for many minor issues, the replacement of Internet Explorer 4.0 with the significantly faster and lighter Internet Explorer 5, and Internet Connection Sharing, which allowed multiple computers on a LAN to share a single Internet connection through Network Address Translation. Also added was Microsoft NetMeeting 3.0, and support for DVD Playback.

Windows Me
Millennium Edition was released in September 2000 and upgraded Windows 98 with enhanced multimedia and Internet features. It also introduced the first version of System Restore, which allowed users to revert their system state to a previous “known-good” point in the case of system failure. System Restore was a notable feature that made its way into Windows XP. The first version of Windows Movie Maker was introduced as well.

Windows Me was conceived as a quick one-year project that served as a stopgap release between Windows 98 and Windows XP. As a result, Windows Me was not acknowledged as a unique OS along the lines of 95 or 98. Windows Me was widely and sometimes unfairly criticised for serious stability issues, and for lacking real mode DOS support, to the point of being referred to as the “Mistake Edition”. Windows Me was the last operating system to be based on the Windows 9x kernel and MS-DOS.

Discuss and Learn More
Discuss this story in the Windows 98 Support Ends discussion thread in the Home Computing forum in the Digital Forums. Membership is free and with over 75 forums and 20,000 members, there is always something new and interesting to discuss.

New data from Microsoft reveals that about 1 in every 300 times its scans a PC while downloading security updates an infection by malware is identified, of which the most common type are Trojan horses.

The data, taken from scans using Microsoft’s malicious-software removal tool of 270 million computers over a 15 month period, turned up 5.7 million computers that had been infected at some stage.

The malicious-software removal tool is a temporary program that is downloaded with security updates for Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003 and then self deletes.

The majority of infections, according to Microsoft, which released the data at its TechEd 2006 conference, were potentially dangerous Trojan horse bot programs. Increasingly prevalent bot programs, are often used by attackers to gain remote control of computers and use them for criminal activities such as the circulation of spam and spyware.

After Trojans, the next most prevalent and a growing form of malware found by Microsoft was rootkits, software which acts as a cloaking device for malware such as a Trojan. Rootkits were found by Microsoft on 780,000 computers that it scanned during the 15 month period and one in every five computers which was found to have a rootkit also had at least one Trojan.

As some commentators have pointed out, the Microsoft data is revealing insofar as it only addresses the Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003 platforms. Earlier platforms like Windows 98 and Windows ME are generally considered even less secure and Microsoft is in the early stages of ceasing security support for them.