For those of you still puttin' around on Windows 98 or Windows 98 SE, you'll be cut-off from Microsoft in July. If you're still running Windows Millennium, well I'm sorry to hear that. Customers will no longer be provided with critical security updates after July 11, 2006. From Microsoft's Help and Support site:
Microsoft on Tuesday claimed rapid adoption of its Sender ID framework for email authentication to fight spam, but at least one analyst firm said the software maker is waging an uphill battle in the industry.
On the eve of the second annual Email Authentication Summit in Chicago, Microsoft got the market machine humming for Sender ID, claiming its adoption has increased in March to 21 percent of Fortune 500 companies, compared with seven percent the same month a year ago.
With any major new Windows release such as Vista, application compatibility becomes a critical concern for businesses and individuals considering an upgrade. No matter how much Microsoft promotes the new version, users aren't going to make the switch unless their applications continue to function seamlessly.
Microsoft is expected to roll out to testers, the week of April 17, a new test build of Windows Vista.
The biggest barrier to users upgrading existing PCs to Windows Vista will be the new operating system's graphics requirements, analysts agree.
"It's very difficult to tell what kind of machine you need to experience the full Aero Glass interface," said Rob Helm, director of research at US-based Directions on Microsoft. "You have to know the video card's memory bandwidth, how much memory is on the card based on the screen size resolution you want to run, and what kind of shader capability your card's chip has."
Microsoft plans to jazz up its music player in Windows Vista, the company's next operating system. But at least some of the new features will debut much sooner.
Is Microsoft silently fixing security vulnerabilities and deliberately obfuscating details about patches in its monthly security bulletins?
Microsoft Corp. Tuesday warned of three "critical" security flaws in its Windows operating system that could allow attackers to take control of a computer.
Microsoft, the world's top software company whose Windows operating system runs on 90 percent of the world's computers, issued patches to fix the problems as part of its monthly security bulletin.
One of the critical vulnerabilities appears in some versions of Internet Explorer that could make it possible for an attacker to use the Web browser to take total control of a PC.
When you make the operating system that runs on the overwhelming majority of the world's PCs, there are a few things that go along with the massive market share. One of them is people who want to run your OS without paying for it. Microsoft has taken all sorts of steps in the past to deal with piracy, the most recent being making Windows Genuine Advantage mandatory for downloading updates to Windows XP.
Microsoft today released its security software patches for April, addressing an unpatched bug in Internet Explorer that hackers had been exploiting for several weeks.
As expected, the company released five patches, called "updates" in Microsoft parlance, addressing a number of critical vulnerabilities in IE and Windows. Microsoft also released an update for Outlook Express, rated "important," and a fix for Windows FrontPage Server Extensions and SharePoint Team Services 2002, rated "moderate." Here's a description of what Microsoft released.
