Ed Bott has recently posted a tutorial on how to legally get an extended 4 month trial of Windows Vista.

On the other hand, if you’re an IT manager, you should be aware of the fact that hackers have recently cracked the Windows Vista activation. So you may want to keep an eye out for illegal copies of Windows Vista on your networks. I’m sure it will be a matter of time before Microsoft release an updated WGA tool to circumvent this latest activation crack…..but you can expect the hackers to consistently keep coming up with updated cracks. Here’s a more in-depth review of the crack.

Robert McLaws makes a very good point regarding this particular hacking tool:

Here’s the problem with this, folks. Previous Windows cracks have used leaked corporate activations keys to unlock Windows, which only really hurts Microsoft. This method actively steals a valid Product Key from Microsoft customers, because most keys can only be activated once. Think about that for a second. What if your mom just got home from laying down $150 for Windows Vista Home Premium, only to get it home and install it, and find out that their key has already been activated. Now, Microsoft doesn’t get hurt, because the key has been paid for. But now your mom is branded a pirate, and has to go through a giant hassle to get a new legitimate key.

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Microsoft have been working hard the last few years on Windows Vista. On February 1st 2007 Microsoft finally released the various editions of Windows Vista to the general public. They didn’t get the mad midnight openings with hundreds of people just waiting to pounce when the retail store doors were opened. The Vista launch was far more mild.

The problem

Part of the reason for this is that there was a lot of mixed press regarding Windows Vista, since there were two big problems that Microsoft would have a hard time with: driver availability and compatibility of all of the common software applications which people use.
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Those of you who have been using NT based Microsoft operating systems would all be very familiar with the good old boot.ini file which is normally on the root of your C: drive.

Boot.ini is just a plain text file, which can relatively easily be modified and tweaked.

With the release of Windows Vista, the boot.ini has been left behind, and manipulation of the boot manager menu has been replaced by the utility “bcdedit”. To access the syntax, go to a command prompt and type “bcdedit -?” (without the quotes).

Microsoft have a page showing how to use the bcdedit tool. It’s a short and sweet 14 pages worth!
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The first bunch of free extras for Windows Vista Ultimate users recently became available for download.

If you’re running any other version of Windows Vista, then you’ll just have to get on by without them. Where’s the love Microsoft?

So what’s in stock for you in these updates? Here’s the list: Read more »

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Here are the 8 videos of the CES 2007 presentation by Bill Gates.

If you don’t feel like watching all of the videos, then you can have a skim read of the transcripts as well.

Bill’s presentation (yes, Bill and I are on a first name basis ) covered the following technologies:

• Windows Vista
• new XBox 360 developments (IPTV)
• Ford Sync (Microsoft’s Windows for Automobile platform)
• Windows Home Server

Here are the videos. Read more »

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Speech recognition in Windows Vista has been vastly improved, when compared to prior editions of this kind of technology by Microsoft.

The question is: does it work?

There’s a lot of “Vista bashing” going on at the moment, and it certainly didn’t help matters when Microsoft did a public demonstration of the speech recognition technology where the results were absolutely terrible (see the second video below). Read more »

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Here’s a guy that can demonstrate how to install Windows Vista in under 5 minutes.

Somehow I doubt that Microsoft would be very impressed though.
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