Somehow, the folks running the Digital Life tradeshow in New York missed the note I sent them advising that I won’t be attending their event press preview today. Sounds fun, but I’m thousands of miles away and just not available.

They interpreted this to mean that I was planning to attend. Go figure. And they apparently added my name to a press list saying I was going to be there. As a result, I am getting a barrage of requests to stop by this booth or that party at Digital Life.

So this is just a public service announcement: No, I’m not in New York and I won’t be attending the Digital Life press preview. Thanks for the invitation. (I might, however, be in town for the actual Digital Life show in late September.)

PS: Press registration for CES 2009 just opened. I won’t be attending that show, either. You PR folks might want to make a note of that.

Robert McLaws notes that Windows 3.11 has finally reached its End-Of-Life date. OK, the retail product has been dead for years, but it’s still been selling for use in embedded systems.

I eagerly await InfoWorld’s Save Windows 3.x petition. Surely no one can accuse it of being bloated or slow, right?

My daily working setup includes two desktop PCs, both Dell quad-core systems. It’s not something I recommend that everyone do, but it’s useful to me as a way of testing software and hardware configurations without screwing up my main working system.

System #2 is a Dell XPS420 with an ATI Radeon HD2600XT video card. It’s set to dual-boot between x86 and x64 editions of Windows Vista Ultimate. In checking installed drivers today, I noticed that the installed ATI video drivers were several months old in each installation. So I downloaded the latest drivers (8.6, released June 2008) from ATI’s download site and ran the installer. The Catalyst Install Manager did its normal thing, but at the end of the process it didn’t ask me to reboot. That’s a refreshing change from the previous behavior, which required a reboot.

The Catalyst release notes indicate that this is indeed new behavior:

Catalyst Install Enhancement – No reboot required after Catalyst upgrade install

This release of Catalyst introduces an enhancement to the Catalyst installer. Users are no longer required to reboot their system after Catalyst has finished installing (as long as the installation is an upgrade from a previous Catalyst install).

Earlier this week I updated the Intel network drivers on another machine and noticed the same thing: no reboot required. It looks like the hardware vendors are finally getting over some old, outmoded habits.

Bonus factoid: Did you know that ATI updates its Catalyst drivers monthly? The numbering system corresponds to the year and month. So the package named 8-6_vista32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_64789 is the June 2008 English-language release for Vista x86 editions.

I just got a message from Microsoft alerting me that the final release of the Hyper-V virtualization software is now being offered on Windows Update.

By coincidence, I had just this morning manually updated my production Windows Server machine (a Dell Inspiron 530 quad-core box, previously discussed here, here, and here). I have a virtual machine running Windows Server under Hyper-V on that same machine, and when I checked Windows Update on that VM, I found the update files waiting for me:

This was one of the easiest, cleanest updates ever. I didn’t need to uninstall the Hyper-V release candidate (although I did have to reboot after completing the installation). If you’re using Hyper-V, be sure to update the Integration Services for each virtual machine. In both my Vista and Windows Server 2008 VMs, I received “unknown device” error messages at startup; a little digging revealed that the Virtual Machine Bus (VMBus) driver wasn’t being installed. Both VMs were using the release candidate version of the Integration Services components, which don’t work with the final Hyper-V release. The correct driver is installed (and the error messages stop) when the Integration Services components are updated.

This stuff is really slick and easy to use. Kudos to the team at Microsoft that put this out, and props to whoever made the decision to delay the final release for a few months to ensure that it worked properly. The wait was worth it.

These two messages landed in my Inbox only four minutes apart:

TOP STORY

Associated Press VMware said President and CEO Diane Greene has resigned, and the business software company lowered its outlook for revenue growth. Shares tumbled more than 25%.

Virtually anything is possible. Many of you have proven that to be true. At VMworld 2008, Virtualization successes will be shared, celebrated and realized throughout the four days of the conference. Come to VMworld 2008 to hear what virtualization has made possible. VMworld 2008 offers a content-rich program for attendees new to virtualization [including} general session keynotes from VMware executives and other virtualization leaders.

Well, we know at least one VMWare executive who won’t be giving a keynote.

I follow prices and supplies for all leading PC hardware makers, including Apple. In the past year, I’ve noticed that Apple almost never discounts its prices (the exception of course being permanent price cuts when they upgrade a particular line and want to move out the older stock). Occasionally, I see a local dealer chop $100-200 off the price of an iMac, but that’s rare and usually on a line that has just been upgraded or is due for a refresh.

Am I missing something? If any Apple watchers are out there, do you have secret or not-so-secret sources of discounts? Or does the company just hew to its retail prices like other suppliers of luxury goods?

Mary Jo Foley and I are teaming up with a pair of posts on the same topic over at ZDNet. My entry is titled “Why you’ll have a long wait for Microsoft’s next OS”:

The recent buzz over Microsoft’s efforts to build a completely new OS from scratch has led to some wild speculation. As my colleague Mary Jo Foley has reported, Microsoft already has an all-star team that’s working on a next-generation operating system. It’s called Midori, and Mary Jo’s sources say it’s in “incubation,” which means it’s on a fast track to being turned into a product. But will Midori replace Windows in the near future? Not a chance. If Microsoft really does turn this project into a commercial product, I believe it will exist alongside Windows for several years, at a bare minimum. To learn why, let’s dust off the Windows history books.

Mary Jo has some new insider information and some interesting speculation on the status of the next-generation project in Might Microsoft’s Midori be ‘Cairo’ revisited?

Let me know in the comments here whether you like this approach. We’ve also discussed plans to do this sort of thing in podcast format as well. How many of you would be interested in listening to a Bott & Foley podcast?

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. If you run Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, you should download and install Windows Search 4 (separate packages are available for x86 and x64 systems).

If your network includes a system running Windows Home Server, you should install the Windows Search 4 update on it. WHS is 32-bit only and is based on the 32-bit Windows Server 2003 platform, so use this update package. (For 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003, go here.)

For Windows XP use this package (unless you’re crazy enough to use 64-bit XP, in which case you need this one).

After you install Windows Search 4, you’ll need to completely rebuild your search index. On Vista, this task is easiest if you install the Indexer Status Sidebar gadget and then use the Index Now button. That kicks the indexer into full-speed mode and disables the behavior that causes indexing to back off while you work with the PC.

Using Windows Search 4 speeds up local searches, but the killer feature is that it allows you to perform indexed searches over the network and automatically adds shared folders to the local index. So if I open a shared folder on another computer in an Explorer Window on my Vista PC and type some text in the Search box, that search will use the index on the other PC (assuming Windows Search 4 is installed) and return results instantly.

I was very happy to run across updated versions of these two Firefox extensions:

• Live Writerfox allows you to highlight a snippet of text on a web page, right-click, and click a menu option to open Windows Live Writer with the text included in the draft post along with a link to the page. (In fact, that’s how I wrote this post.) It works with the recent technical preview of WLW and with Windows Vista x64.
• Send to OneNote allows you to send a web page or a selection to a OneNote page, using a right-click menu.

I still prefer Internet Explorer for some tasks, but the Mozilla folks have done an excellent job with this release and it’s hard not to like it.

At first I thought this was satire:

Why I Still Use Windows 95

[…]

I am accustomed to getting strange or uncomplementary reactions from other people when they find out that I still do: "Are you insane?" or "Why the hell are you using Windows 95?!" are only typical. I can no longer count on most of the latest software being capable of running on this configuration. So, why do I still endorse a computer operating system more than ten years old?

What follows is the usual litany of Windows gripes about every post Win95 version: “frivolous animation and eye candy … slow performance … poor interface design … no compelling functionality…”

I would rather use a hammer and chisel with stone tablets than go back to Windows 95. Apparently the rest of the world agrees. The author of this piece says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the proportion of people still using Windows 95 on a regular basis is ½% or less.” Heh. According to Net Applications, the correct number is 0.01%. Windows 98 and Windows Me are both significantly below 0.5%.

That corresponds neatly to numbers from this site. Of the last 100,000 visitors to this site, 8 were running Windows 95, 22 were on Windows Me, and 202 were using Windows 98. Maybe they can all get together and form a tontine.

(via Bink.nu)