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Andrew wrote an intriguing post today on
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Looks like the United Kingdom won’t be affected by the strange Windows 7 pricing scheme set in the European Union. After much investigation thanks to CNet, it seems like full editions of Windows 7 will be offered in the UK for half of its American counterparts. It’s important to note that Amazon UK had said that the pricing on their website was “indefinite.”
On Amazon UK, a full edition of Windows 7 Home Premium costs £64 or $105 USD while the same item in the US costs $200. It also costs less than the upgrade edition in the US, which sells for $120 USD. Windows 7 Professional sells for £150 or $250 USD, which is still slightly lower than the retail price of $299 in the US.
Another major UK retailer called Play.com is selling the product at £75 or $125 USD, which is slightly more expensive than Amazon but still much […]

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Al wrote an intriguing post today on
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Here are some great looking fan-made Windows 7 DVD covers from MyDigitalLife for Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. The full size is 1613*1080 and is supposed to resemble the retail package of Windows 7. Hope you guys enjoy them.

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Download from MyDigitalLife
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Al wrote an intriguing post today on
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Here nationwide in the United States, Microsoft is hosting free events for Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010. Attendees will receive a free copy of Windows 7 Professional starting September 28th, 2009 through November 4th.
Participating Cities:
* Atlanta – Sep. 28
* Baltimore – Nov. 9
* Boston – Oct. 5
* Chicago – Oct. 20
* Cleveland – Oct. 12
* Dallas – Nov. 4
* Denver – Sep. 24
* Detroit – Oct. 28
* Houston – Nov. 9
* Kansas City – Nov. 4
* Los Angeles – Oct. 28
* Miami – Sep. 24
* Minneapolis – Sep. 24
* New York City – Oct. 20
* Orange County – Oct. 26
* Philadelphia – Sep. 28
* Phoenix – Sep. 28
* Pittsburgh – Sep. 30
* Portland – Oct. 14
* San Diego – Oct. 26
* San Francisco – Oct. 20
* San Jose – Oct. 5
* Seattle – Oct. 12
* St. Louis – Nov. 9
* Washington – Nov. 4
Don’t […]

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David wrote an intriguing post today on
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Windows 7’s XP Mode will not work on all Sony laptops that have hardware virtualization capability, despite being equipped with fully capable Intel Core 2 Duos. According to Gizmodo, this move was made after Sony faced much negative criticism from its original decision to disable virtualization across all its current Vaio model laptops.
Xavier Lauwaert, Senior Manager Product Marketing at Sony, stated two primary reasons for disabling VT in a comment over at the Windows Team Blog:
Contrary to perceived opinion, we have received very little if any requests to enable VT technology up until very recently.
In addition, our engineers and QA people were very concerned that enabling VT would expose our systems to malicious code that could go very deep in the Operating System structure of the PC and completely disable the latter.

Another user called Levicki in the same article claims that he has been able to enable VT-technology on Sony VAIO […]

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Al wrote an intriguing post today on
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The Windows 7 API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework v1.0 has been released and is now available on the MSDN Code Gallery. The Code Pack will allow developers to tap in to various new features from managed code that aren’t available in the .NET framework.
Here are the new features supported in the release:

Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers.
Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects.
Explorer Browser Control.
Shell property system.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs.
Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs. (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
Sensor Platform APIs
Extended Linguistic Services APIs
Power Management APIs
Application Restart and Recovery APIs
Network List Manager APIs
Command Link control and System defined […]

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Al wrote an intriguing post today on
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Microsoft allowed pre-orders for Windows 7 at half-price in Canada, US, and Japan a couple of weeks ago. The problem with this is that it was not something that was advertised strongly and most of the non tech-savvy community never got word of it at all.
Gizmodo has been quietly mentioning this in some of their Windows 7 articles for quite some time now so I felt it would only be right to pass the message on. The tech blog thinks that another set of deals will be coming near launch, “plus… [they’ve] heard some stuff.”
It might be a good idea to hold off on pre-ordering a copy for now until we’re closer to launch.
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Al wrote an intriguing post today on
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Microsoft has released an upgrade chart to display the options you have for installation when upgrading to Windows 7. The chart is a good visual for those who just want to jump straight to the answer for their desired path.

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Custom Install basically means that you must install the operating system from scratch. If you run the installation when already booted into Windows and choose a system drive for installation, the wizard will ask if you want to move all the files on the existing partition to a new folder called Windows.old.
As you can see, the large number of cells in the graph may be confusing or too intimidating for many. Ed Bott has made a simplified version of the chart that I personally find much easier to understand.

via EdBott. Click via Full View

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Al wrote an intriguing post today on
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Windows 7 RTM contains what appears to be a memory leak bug that occurs when the chkdsk /R command is initiated on a non-system volume. The result is the process taking up as memory as possible until the system is using over 90% of your total memory. The memory usage issue occurs when chkdsk /R is initiated in the command prompt and in the GUI, in which case it would be under the explorer.exe process. The memory usage issue can also be replicated in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Chkdsk Stage 4 of 5 at 82% completion. A total of 7.82GB out of 8GB of RAM was being used.

Some fans have been calling this a “showstopper” bug. Randall Kennedy from Infoworld even goes as far as to suggesting that this “bug” could derail the launch.
However, ZDNet’s Ed Bott claims this bug is nothing close to a showstopper. A few tries at […]

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