PC retail chain accused of mass Windows piracy

Microsoft has launched legal action against a major electrical retailer after accusing it of large-scale piracy. It claims the Comet Group PLC unlawfully copied and produced more than 94,000 sets of recovery disks for Windows XP and Vista, selling them to customers who purchased Windows-loaded PCs and laptops. Comet is owned by a French parent […]

Xbox Menus Get Voice & Motion Control

Microsoft is launching a new Xbox 360 dashboard tomorrow, and if you’ve got Kinect, you’re in for some high-tech gadgetry use. The new-look dashboard, reportedly based on the Metro interface that will feature in Windows 8, is designed to extend use of the motion control device beyond simply playing games. Kinect owners will now be […]

A Geek Girl’s Guide to Holiday Shopping

by Meredith Placko While millions of Americans fought tooth, nail, and pepper spray to get their hands on some mighty deals, this geek girl somehow managed to avoid the annual contact sport known as Black Friday. While sitting in my office, pouring over YouTube videos of people at their very best in Holiday cheer (and […]

Building Windows 8: Reengineering the Windows Boot Experience [Video]

With continued innovation in the hardware ecosystem, the biggest shift in firmware in 30 years, and software changes leading to boot times of ~7 seconds on machines with solid-state drives (SSDs), we decided it was time to bring the PC boot user experience into the 21st century. In a previous post by Gabe Aul, we […]

Windows 8 Boots Fast… Really Fast! [Video]

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time […]