01/04, 9:15am
Microsoft accuses UK retailer Comet of mass piracy
Microsoft on Wednesday sued British retailer Comet for allegedly committing mass piracy. It claimed the store made and sold 94,000 "counterfeit" copies of Windows XP and Vista as recovery discs. The sales were "unfair to customers," Microsoft's associate general counsel David Finn claimed, implying that customers didn't concern themselves with or know that the discs weren't from Microsoft.
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01/03, 3:55pm
Microsoft cheers end to IE6 use
Microsoft's hopes that Internet Explorer 6 would die were partly validated after the company's Roger Capriotti noted that the decade-old browser had been reduced to irrelevance in the US. Working from data at NetApplications, he declared IE6 over as it made up just 0.9 percent of all American web traffic. The US was late, having been preceded by parts of Europe and Scandinavia, but was coming at the same time as the Czech Republic, Mexico, the Philippines, and others were also dropping below one percent.
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11/12, 9:05pm
Chitika has Lion adoption levelling off
Adoption of Mac OS X Lion has slowed significantly in the past month, Chitika found in its latest web traffic results. While it was up to 14 percent in September after being available for two months, it had moved just two percent more by late October to hit 16 percent of the Mac user base. Snow Leopard still had a clear majority at 55 percent, while even the four years old Leopard was at 22 percent.
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10/28, 10:45am
ITG xpPhone 2 uses Windows 8 with 1.6GHz CPU
Chinese electronics maker ITG is preparing a successor to its Windows XP-running smartphone in the xpPhone 2, which uses Windows 8. The first smartphone to do so, it gets a 4.3-inch touchscreen to display the desktop software's Metro-inspired interface. It measures in at a large 140x73x17.5mm (5.5x2.9x0.7 inches), and hardware will also be nearly desktop-like, with a 1.6GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, and as much as 112GB of storage space.
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10/25, 1:05pm
Windows XP still top OS despite Microsoft attempts
Microsoft on Tuesday marked the tenth anniversary of Windows XP shipping by doing its best to kill use of the OS. The company's Rich Reynolds heralded the impact of XP, noting that it was there at the threshold of changes both in technology as well as in Microsoft's leadership and the ultimate rises to power for Apple and Google. Simultaneously, however, he mounted a campaign to get users to upgrade, insisting that they could "accomplish much more" with Windows 7.
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10/13, 3:15pm
Windows 7 passes XP in usage share for first time
Windows 7 has become the first OS to be used more than Windows XP in the decade since launch. New data collected by StatCounter has shown Windows 7 just passing XP as of October at a rate that saw it grow just as much as XP declined. The troubled earlier release, Windows Vista, never got more than a quarter of users.
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08/24, 4:55pm
Windows XP RTM now a decade old
Microsoft passed a milestone Wednesday as Windows XP reached its tenth anniversary. The OS was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, two months before it reached stores October 25 that year. It quickly became the most popular Microsoft OS and to date has sold hundreds of millions of copies.
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04/30, 5:15pm
Gartner breaks down 2010 desktop OS share by cash
A unique breakdown of the OS market by revenue share published by Gartner on Wednesday has revealed moves up in revenue market share by Apple, Microsoft, and some Linux developers last year. Windows as expected stayed on top and gained share by its cash intake, up almost nine points to 78.6 percent and $23.85 billion dollars' worth of sales. Apple only moved up a tenth of a point to 1.7 percent total share, but the growth had it moving twice as quickly and jumping 15.8 percent to $520 million.
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04/11, 1:55pm
Windows 7 now top OS in the US, ekes out XP
Windows 7 has just overtaken Windows XP as the top operating system in the US, according to the latest stats from StatCounter. As of April 7, the newer OS reached a 31.71 percent of share, while Windows XP is only slightly behind, at 31.56 percent. The data was collected using visitor stats from over three million websites and should theoretically cover a large enough swath to represent real share.
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03/01, 1:25pm
Seagate begins shipping 3TB Barracuda XP HDD
Introduced in the fall, Seagate has now began shipping its 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive. The highest capacity hard drive is rare in supporting legacy operating systems such as Windows XP, which can't normally support hard drive capacities higher than 2.1TB. DiscWizard software that's available for download ships with the drive and lets the system read and write to, though not boot from, the extra-large drive.
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10/22, 12:55pm
Microsoft Windows XP preload deadline is today
As announced earlier this summer, Microsoft as of today will no longer allow PC makers to preload Windows XP onto new computer systems, specifically notebooks. The only way to get XP through new system from now on will be a downgrade option, which is said to remain a viable option until 2014.
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09/09, 10:50am
End of line for new XP installs
Dell has confirmed that it's following Microsoft guidelines and will no longer be shipping any PCs with Windows XP Professional or XP Home after October 22, 2010. According to Dell, it will stop offering XP as a OEM or downgrade option on its PCs beginning this month in preparation for the termination of all consumer licensing agreements for XP by Microsoft. In its place, Dell is advising customers who need to use XP for any reason to run XP Mode in Windows 7 Professional if required.
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11/12, 4:30pm
ViewSonic shows phone with Windows XP, Intel ULV
What appears to be a rebadged Nokia E90 handset is actually a ViewSonic handset, the VCP08, which is running on Windows XP. The device is said to have an Intel ULV-series processor at its core and otherwise has a 4.3-inch display, along with 512MB of RAM and 8GB of integrated storage space.
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09/08, 12:10pm
Microsoft found innocent in anti-trust breach
A three-month old investigation by Russian anti-monopoly service FAS into the supposed violations of local anti-trust laws by software giant Microsoft has been closed, with no wrongdoing found. Microsoft was accused of cutting back shipments of its Windows XP operating system both as a standalone product and preloaded onto PCs and over the pricing policy on the aging but still popular OS.
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06/22, 4:55pm
Daewoo Solo Tablet C920
South Korea-based Daewoo has recently announced the upcoming release of a convertible tablet netbook, the LUCOMS Solo Tablet C920-mini. As with many other tablets, processing power comes from a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU and there is 1GB of RAM onboard. Graphics are handled by the Intel 945 Express components and users can interface via the 8.9-inch, 1024x600 resolution touchscreen when in tablet mode. The 60GB 1.8-inch, 4200rpm hard drive is preloaded with Windows XP Home.
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04/01, 12:40pm
Android netbooks coming?
The Android platform for mobile phones, developed by Google, may soon be used in netbooks, with HP confirming interest and ASUS and Dell rumored to be developing devices as well, says the Wall Street Journal. HP says its engineers are testing the technology, but the decision has not yet been made to go ahead with the plan. The free open-source software could drop the prices of netbooks, which are entry-level devices with low margins that make ultra-low price points hard to achieve. Taiwan's ASUS has said it is considering Android-powered netbooks; Dell may be more likely to develop Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) with the software, but neither company has elaborated on statements.
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11/17, 2:40pm
Eee PC 901 SSD, battery
A new ASUS Eee PC 901 model has been spotted for sale in France that offers a high-speed 16GB solid state drive (SSD) along with a new, six-cell 8700mAh battery that is good for 7.2V and should provide users with as much as eight hours of battery life. An Italian Eee PC 901 GO offers the new SSD as well. The 8.9-inch netbook uses Windows XP or Linux operating systems. Previously, the Eee PC 901 offered 20GB of SSD storage for the XP version and 12GB in the Linux versions.
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10/22, 1:10pm
Apricot drops Linux
Linux is no longer a choice of operating system on the Picobook Pro, according to Apricot. Although the netbook was only released last week, Apricot has decided to remove the option of SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition, which cost only £279 ($454) instead of the £328 ($534) for a Windows XP system. In compensation the company has lowered the price of the latter, which is now £299 ($487).
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06/16, 6:40pm
Dell to stop XP shipments
Dell recently announced the last day to purchase one of the company's Inspiron laptops, desktops or workstations with an OEM Windows XP license, which is due to expire on June 30 as per Microsoft's Windows Life-Cycle Policy. Buyers have until June 18 to purchase computers thus equipped, and have the option of buying Windows Vista Business or Ultimate with a downgrade service to Windows XP Professional thereafter. This news confirms earlier reports that the PC and laptop maker will not offer Windows XP pre-loaded onto its products past the Microsoft-imposed deadline.
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06/02, 11:10am
MS on Safari vulnerability
Owners of Windows XP and Vista should avoid using Apple's Safari browser for the foreseeable future, Microsoft has warned. The company notes that while there is a vulnerability in how XP and Vista handle executables on the desktop, this may not be an immediate issue except that browsers like Safari do not ask permission to download a number of files. An independent analyst, Nilesh Dhanjani, suggests that this could be used to litter websites with automatic malware downloads, effectively "carpet-bombing" PCs.
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