With Vista struggling, Microsoft has extended the period in which it will make XP available for PC makers' downgrade programs.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
October 8, 2008 12:29 PM

Windows XP is proving harder to kill than a Halloween vampire. With businesses having all but shunned Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to extend the period in which it will make copies of its older sibling available to PC makers.

Microsoft originally planned to stop distributing Windows XP media to large OEMs on Jan. 31, 2009, but this week said it would move the deadline to July 31 of next year.

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Anti-Virus (AV) comes in all shapes and sizes. AV protection is one of the key layers of security you simply must have on your computer. Part one of this article, moving into the second week of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, will discuss Anti-Virus solutions, focusing on what they do and how.

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Firefox 3.0 is barely out of the gate, but already Mozilla is moving toward the future with the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1. The final release of 3.1 is scheduled for the end of 2008 with the usual series of alpha and beta releases in the coming months.

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In it’s own words Microsoft promotes IE8 for “professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.“, because of it’s built in tools for debugging purpose. ReadWriteWeb has done a great job promoting IE8, this is what they had to say regarding it’s standard compliance:

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Or download your virtual machine image H E R E

Written by Bernard Lunn / August 1, 2008 12:32 AM /

I recently moved to a new office and found that I couldn't send mail via Microsoft Outlook. I've had this same problem in different locations. I've been told that it depends on the ISP settings and it is easy to fix by contacting the ISP. That seemed like a pain, so this week I just started using Gmail as my default. I've not looked back. This is anecdotal and maybe I am a market of one, but it is a big deal for me. I have “lived in Outlook” for years. It was the one part of Office that I thought I would never replace. I suspect I am not alone.

I use multiple email addresses. I need to send and receive mail from company domains. That took me about 10 minutes to set up in Gmail. Once I had done this, I noticed two big benefits:

1. 99% of Spam was gone - poof. I had foolishly once put my email address on a web site in clear form where it could be collected by spammers and one of my accounts, managed on an Exchange server, was overrun with spam. Once I went to Gmail, no problem. I am sure I am missing a few valid mails that got incorrectly seen as spam, but that will eventually correct itself as people contact me some other way. When I am contacting somebody new by email I always now assume that overzealous spam filters stop my mail getting received, so I ask a contact who knows that person to forward my mail. That is a small price to pay for getting rid of spam and using contacts that way is obviously good for business as well.

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The Web became a substantially more dangerous place this week, thanks largely to the publication of instructions that show cyber criminals how to exploit a pervasive, critical flaw in the Internet infrastructure.

While Internet service providers and corporations can mitigate the danger by updating the software that powers vulnerable components of their networks, data released yesterday indicates that only about half of the world's online population is currently protected by these updates.

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