Windows 7 Milestone 2 "Vienna" Video

Windows Server 2008 SKUs, Part Numbers, and Prices

Microsoft has been VERY slow to get part numbers, sku's and pricing to market on Server 08. I have collected the following list from many retail and wholesale sources.

WINDOWS SERVER 2008 STANDARD EDITION
RETAIL w/10CAL = P73-03882 $1125
RETAIL w/5CAL = P73-03883 $950
OEM w/5CAL P73-04001 $750
Open License w/0 CAL's P73-00499 $1400

Academic w/5 CAL's P73-03881 = $500
WebServer -Unlimited CALS - LWA-00078 = $400

CLIENT ACCESS LICENCES (CALS)
OEM - 5 User = R18-02907 $140
Open Licence - 5 User = R18-02453 $180

Vista SP1 - What are the Notable Changes

Hardware Ecosystem Support and Enhancements
· Adds support for new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) industry standard PC firmware for 64-bit systems with functional parity with legacy BIOS firmware, which allows Windows Vista SP1 to install to GPT format disks, boot and resume from hibernate using UEFI firmware.
· Adds support for x64 EFI network boot.
· Adds support for the 64-bit version of MSDASQL, which acts as a “bridge” from OLEDB to a variety of ODBC drivers thus simplifying application migration from 32-bit platforms to 64-bit Windows Vista.
· Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
· Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
· Adds support for SD Advanced DMA (ADMA) on compliant SD standard host controllers. This new transfer mechanism, which is expected to be supported in SD controllers soon, will improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization.
· Adds support for creating a single DVD media that boots on PCs with either BIOS or EFI.
· Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
· Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs.
· Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
· Enhances Netproj.exe to temporarily resize the desktop to accommodate custom projector resolutions when connecting to Windows Network Projectors.

Reliability Improvements
Reliability improvements vary from PC to PC based on hardware, environment, and usage. Customers will experience varying levels of benefit.
· SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
· Improves reliability by preventing data-loss while ejecting NTFS-formatted removable-media.
· Improves reliability of IPSec connections over IPv6 by ensuring by ensuring that all Neighbor Discovery RFC traffic is IPsec exempted.
· Improves certain problem scenarios where a driver goes to sleep with incomplete packet transmissions by ensuring the driver is given enough time to transmit or discard any outstanding packets before going to sleep.
· Improves wireless ad-hoc connection (computer-to-computer wireless connections) success rate
· Improves the success of peer-to-peer connections, such as Windows Meeting Space or Remote Assistance applications, when both PCs are behind symmetric firewalls.
· Improves Windows Vista’s built-in file backup solution to include EFS encrypted files in the backup.
· An improved SRT (Startup Repair Tool), which is part of the Windows Recovery environment (WinRE), can now fix PCs unbootable due to certain missing OS files.
· Users who did not opt-in to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) will be prompted again to join after installing SP1. The experience will remain the same and the default will continue to be opt-out.

Support for New Technologies and Standards
· Adds support for new strong cryptographic algorithms used in IPsec. SHA-256, AES-GCM, and AES-GMAC for ESP and AH, ECDSA, SHA-256, and SHA-384 for IKE and AuthIP.
· Adds the NIST SP 800-90 Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) to the list of available PRNG in Windows Vista.
· Adds support for SSTP (Secure Sockets Tunnel Protocol), a remote access VPN tunneling protocol that will be part of Microsoft’s RRAS (Routing and Remote Access Service) platform. SSTP helps provide full-network VPN remote access connections over SSL, removing some of the VPN connectivity challenges that other VPN tunnels face traversing NAT, web proxies, and firewalls.
· Adds full support for the latest IEEE draft of 802.11n wireless networking.
· Adds support for obtaining identity and invoke identity UI from an inner method via a new EAPHost runtime API as well as a configuration UI for tunnel methods. These APIs are useful for developers working on tunneling/multi-phased EAP authentication methods as well as those who implement networking supplicants which consume EAP authentications.
· Adds support for Windows Smartcard Framework to enable compliance with the EU Digital Signature Directive and National ID / eID.
· Adds support for the Parental Controls Games Restrictions for ratings from the Korean Game Rating Board (GRB).
· Enhances TCP Chimney network card support so that a TCP Chimney network card can also support Compound TCP.
· Adds support in the Wireless Client for a new FIPS (Federal Information Processing) compliant mode. This mode is FIPS 140-2 compliant because it moves the cryptographic processing from the wireless network card to an existing FIPS-approved cryptographic library.
· Enhances Windows Firewall and IPsec to use the new cryptographic algorithms that are Suite B compliant.
· Updated drivers are delivered primarily via Windows Update and directly from hardware vendors, not as part of a service pack. However, a small number of critical drivers are included as part of Windows Vista (e.g., display drivers, audio drivers) and some of these have been updated.


Misc
· Includes a new Offline Files interface that exports the dirty byte count for a file that is modified offline. This interface is exposed both through the COM APIs and WMI provider for Offline Files.
· GPMC (Group Policy Management Console) will be uninstalled with Service Pack 1 and GPEdit will default to Local Group Policy editing. Following these changes, SP1 users can download an updated version of GPMC which will include new Group Policy capabilities including adding comments to GPOs or individual settings and searching for specific Group Policy settings.
· With SP1, Windows Vista will report the amount of system memory installed rather than report the amount of system memory available to the OS. Therefore 32-bit systems equipped with 4GB of RAM will report all 4GB in many places throughout the OS, such as the System Control Panel. However, this behavior is dependent on having a compatible BIOS, so not all users may notice this change.
· Windows Vista is aligned with Windows Server 2008, meaning that many files are common to both products. A result of this design is that there are cases where a common binary is modified to enable a server scenario that has limited or no effect on Windows Vista SP1 capabilities.

For a more complete list see: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E71F0083-1013-4F9C-A3F9-C56E7120A5E9&displaylang=en

Amazing Microsoft "Surface"

This product has been released to a small number of commercial testers, including Harrah's in Vegas

From MARCH 2007 (i.e. PRE-Apple iPhone):


From CES, January 2008


Interesting "Surface" Experiments in 2006

RC2 of Server 2008 Is Unlikely

By Kevin McLaughlin, CMP Channel
6:43 PM EST Fri. Jan. 11, 2008

Windows Server 2008 is now close enough to being released to manufacturing that it's unlikely Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) will issue a third release candidate for the long awaited OS, according to a source close to the company.
Windows Server 2008 is currently in RTM "escrow," which means that the product team thinks the code is good to go but wants to tinker with it just a bit longer, said a source close to Microsoft, who requested anonymity. "There may very well not be an RC2," said the source.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined comment, saying only that Microsoft "is making good progress on Windows Server 2008" and is on track to launch it at the Feb. 27 launch event in Los Angeles, at which SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 will also be introduced.
http://www.crn.com/software/205603024

How To Slip Stream SP1 Updates into Office 2007 RTM

The process below works on all Microsoft Office 2007 versions which are:
Microsoft® Office Standard 2007
Microsoft® Office Ultimate 2007
Microsoft® Office Enterprise 2007
Microsoft® Office Home and Student 2007
Microsoft® Office Professional 2007
Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007
Microsoft® Office Small Business 2007

1: Download SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9EC51594-992C-4165-A997-25DA01F388F5&displaylang=en

2: Create a folder C:\Office2007 and copy the entire Office 2007 RTM contentfolder

3: type the following command C:\office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:C:\Office2007SP1MSP

4: Click ACCEPT and CONTINUE when prompted

5: Copy all of files from C:\Office2007SP1MSP into C:\Office2007\UPDATES

6: Have a nice day, your done!!

Windows Server 2008 to Ship WITHOUT Hypervisor But Will Have GP Preferences

From http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2228177,00.asp?sp=0&kc=HOTTOPICS120507STR1

...With regard to Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor product that is expected to ship within 180 days of the release of the server, Landes gave no update.

Windows Server 2008 RC1 brings with it enhancements to Group Policy through Group Policy Preferences, formerly known as PolicyMaker Standard Edition and Policy Share Manager. This allows customers to deploy and manage operating system and application settings that they were previously not able to manage using Group Policy, he said

Group Policy Preferences will be integrated into both the Group Policy management tools in Windows Server 2008 and the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista, which will be made available as a separate download in the Windows Server 2008 timeframe, Landes said.

The 8 Versions of Server 2008

From Eweek http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2215400,00.asp

Microsoft will release eight versions of Windows Server 2008 when it ships in late February 2008, three of which will include its hypervisor technology, Hyper-V.

The Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter versions of Windows Server 2008 will be offered with and without Hyper-V, both in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, Brad Anderson, general manager for the Windows and Enterprise management division, said at a press conference at the TechEd IT Forum event here Nov. 12.

Anderson's comments came ahead of the conference's opening keynote address by Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing.

The Windows Server 2008 Standard product with Hyper-V will cost $999 and include five CALs (Client Access Licenses) and $971 without Hyper-V. The Enterprise version with Hyper-V will cost $3,999 and comes with 25 CALs and retail for $3,971 without the hypervisor, while the Datacenter edition will cost $2,999 per processor including Hyper-V and $2,971 without, Anderson said.

Windows Web Server 2008, designed as a single purpose Web server, will cost $469, and Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based systems, which is optimized for large databases and line-of-business and custom applications, will cost $2,999 a processor.