Vista

Two announcements from earlier this week suggest that digital reading is poised to reach a wider audience now that the technology is embracing a wider spectrum of platforms and applications.

Northwest Missouri State University recently gave a progress report on its electronic textbook pilot project in cooperation with publisher McGraw-Hill. The university is hoping to launch an all-electronic textbook program for students beginning as soon as the fall semester.

Microsoft has unleashed its Vista Service Pack 2 release candidate to a wider audience for testing. The operating system update, which covers both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, features improvements based on extensive feedback from Microsoft customers, the software giant said.

Announced in early December, Vista SP2-RC was initially offered to Microsoft's TechNet and MSDN subscribers for downloading and testing. Now Microsoft is recommending the upgrade to individuals, organizations and technical enthusiasts who feel comfortable evaluating software before its final release.

There's bad corporate PR, and there's REALLY bad corporate PR. The accounting department of software giant Microsoft offered a textbook example of the latter.

A lawsuit claiming people were fleeced by the way Microsoft Corp. advertised some Windows XP computers as capable of running the new Vista operating system is no longer a class action, a federal judge has ruled.

The lawsuit, certified last February as a class action, argued that Microsoft's designation of some PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" was misleading because many of those computers were not powerful enough to support all of Vista's features, including the sleeker "Aero" user interface.

Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 is reportedly being released to testers, and updates to Windows 7 beta are slated for next week.

Although Microsoft is being relatively mum on the subject, a variety of Web sites are reporting that a release candidate build of Service Pack 2 for Vista and Server 2008 has been released to Microsoft Connect testers. The build, according to the sites, is 6002.16670.090130.

'More to Share' Soon

Microsoft finds itself on the horns of a dilemma these days. On the one hand, the company is getting some much-needed buzz and earlier critical support for the upcoming release of its latest operating system, Windows 7. Preliminary reviews suggest the new OS is faster, less of a memory hog, less fussy about hardware, and generally less annoying.

One of the frequent questions I get is how best to move stuff from one PC to a new one.

In many cases, the switch involves going from one operating system to another (like XP to Vista), so that makes things even more dicey.

The rollout of a new operating system is a challenging time for a software company. That's particularly true when the company's most recent release was something of a commercial dud, and the last well-received version is nearly five years old.

System administrators handling Windows Vista and XP for small and midsize enterprise networks may have some work ahead, on the path to the inevitable-looking Windows 7 upgrade.

Microsoft gave a heads-up to enterprise IT professionals that the service-pack blocker tools for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 will expire on April 28 and May 19, respectively.

System administrators handling Windows Vista and XP for small and midsize enterprise networks may have some work ahead.

Microsoft gave a heads-up to enterprise IT professionals that the service-pack blocker tools for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 will expire on April 28 and May 19, respectively.