Microsoft is reminding customers that the end date for support for Windows XP Service Pack 2, as well as some other versions of the Windows operating system, is already on the horizon.

“The company will officially end support Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Client on July 13, 2010, according to an official company blog post. The software maker is encouraging users of those operating systems to upgrade systems to Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 by the cutoff date. It’s also reminding customers that upgrades directly from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 are not officially supported.” Read More

[via InformationWeek | Paul McDougall]

Network Lights is a Windows program, which blinks keyboard LEDs Light Emitting Diode indicating outgoing and incoming network packets on network interface. Network Lights lets you monitor network activity upload/download from your keyboard ScrollLock and NumLock indicators. Each LED will flicker when network traffic is detected.

“I’d recommend against running Network Lights on a laptop which doesn’t have a full numeric pad on the keyboard. As the app flicks the LED on and off, your dual-mode keys (usually on the right side around J-K-L) will periodically become unresponsive. While this is an older app and hasn’t been updated in quite some time, Network Lights runs just fine under Windows 7.” via [Lee Mathews | DownloadSquad]

“This utility is a standalone executable.  You can use the system tray icon (click the mouse) to customize program settings. If you have an older motherboard and your keyboard LED doesn’t blink when there are network traffic, try going to Settings and enable “Force Keyboard Capture” option.” via [Raymond.cc]

via Network Lights – IT Samples.

Stephen Shankland over at CNET informs us that Microsoft is actively urging IE 6 users to upgrade. (If they allowed Windows 2000 users to upgrade to IE7 they wouldn’t be in this mess. They created their own monster in my opinion.)

Microsoft has begun a campaign to actively urge users of its 8-year-old Internet Explorer 6 browser to upgrade.

After launching IE 8 in March, Micosoft has concurred with critics that IE 6 is outdated. Many people have dropped the older browser, but the remaining users are often the tough cases–those who don’t have a choice because of corporate computing policy or who aren’t tech-savvy enough to realize there’s a reason to move on.

It’s this latter population Microsoft is targeting with a campaign that runs through June 2010 that touts its own IE 8 as a better alternative. The campaign’s first visible elements are a video aimed at online holiday shoppers and a Web slice to promote daily deals at eBay. Web slices are basically live bookmarks that can show miniature Web pages in the browser.

According to Net Applications‘ statistics, Internet Explorer 6 is still the most widely used browser, with 23.3 percent share of usage in October, followed by IE 7 at 18.2 percent and IE 8 at 18.1 percent. The newer browsers are gaining on IE 6, but so are rivals including Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome.

Read more via Microsoft actively urges IE 6 users to upgrade | CNET

Device Doctor is a freeware/donationware Windows application that scans your computer hardware and checks to see if there are new driver updates available for your devices. It also locates drivers for “unidentified devices” in the Windows Device Manager. Device Doctor queries their own manufacturer driver database and immediately fetches the correct driver files for your computer.

Device Doctor version 1.0 is now available, download the free driver updater (4.6 MB)

Features:

Device Driver Database

• Provides drivers for every major computer hardware and device manufacturer
• More than 3 terabytes (3,000 GB) of drivers currently in the database
• We cache all drivers so downloads are quick and work every time
• Fast hardware scan takes mere seconds

Consistent Updating

• Constantly updated to include new driver versions as soon as released
• Every driver is human reviewed using specialized compatibility tools
• Learns from other users to recommend better drivers every day

Future-proof with Windows 7 and 64-bit Support

• Designed for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Thousands of drivers coming in weekly for Windows 7
• Full support for 64-bit systems, as well as 32-bit systems

Other Big Deal Functionality

• Provides device names for unknown devices before updating drivers
• Can be used offline – scan results are saved so you can move them to a connected computer and download there
• Updates WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) and non-WHQL drivers

via Free Driver Update Software – Device Doctor.

Stephen Shankland over at cnet writes:

Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.

The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to use graphics cards' computing power. They're built into Windows 7, and Microsoft is bringing them to Windows Vista but not Windows XP.

Read More via Firefox hopes to one-up IE with fast graphics | Deep Tech – CNET News.

Can’t convince the boss to shell out some bucks for Sharepoint server? Oh what’s that…He doesn’t trust Google with company resources? Ok well, you still need to figure how to set up a collaborative website/cms/wiki whatever you want to call it. In this case we will use the term “wiki” because that is the solution to your problem.  Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor shows us how to set up MediaWiki to make you totally forget about Microsoft, Google and your cheap ass boss!

“The free MediaWiki software is best known for powering Wikipedia, but you don’t have to be writing an encyclopedia to put it to good use. Extend, skin, and customize MediaWiki to create any kind of easy-to-update, collaborative web site.

MediaWiki is arguably the most advanced, install-it-yourself, free wiki package available. A wiki is an editable web site; you can change each page's content without having to log into a content management system like WordPress or access the server via FTP or other means—you just hit the edit button. While MediaWiki is built for public web sites that anyone can update, like Wikipedia, you can customize it to limit access to certain users.

Like WordPress and Firefox, MediaWiki is extendable via plug-ins that add functionality. MediaWiki is also skinnable, which means your wiki can sport a custom theme so it doesn’t look just like Wikipedia.”

Read More via Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate Collaborative Web Site – Wikipedia – Lifehacker.

Pulse 2 helps organizations ranging from dozens to 100 000+ heterogeneous computers to inventory, maintain, update and take full control on their IT assets. It has been designed to handle 100 000+ computers spread on many sites.  It supports heterogeneous platforms such as MS Windows, GNU/Linux (Mandriva, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu., etc.), Mac OSX, HP-UX, IBM AIX and Solaris systems.

In this latest release Mandriva went beyond the traditional maintenance fixes, the aim of this release is to push away the limits of the system, under heavy load and/or on potentially unreliable networks. In this context, this release introduces several enhancements :

• Package-server side : for MS/Windows XP and later, a new reactor to able the server to handle up to ten times the usual amount of parallel requests, as well as a better user feedback in case of errors (pserver down, unreachable, etc …)
• Scheduler side : some mechanisms are now available to ensure a better behavior in hard environments : broken commands can be automatically neutralized, and an optional lock system can be activated for systems under heavy load.

Amongst other things of interest, starting with this version we are GLPI 0.72 compliant.

As usual, installation instructions and packages are available in the Download section, and up-to-date documentations may be found in the Documentation section. Upgrade instructions are available on the upgrade procedures page. The Pulse 2 demo image has also been updated, amongst its evaluation guide.

Previous announces can be found here

via Pulse 2.

Lee Mathews over at DownloadSquad hit another home run:

“Adobe has done a lot to improve Reader in recent versions. I’m more than happy to run an open source alternative, however. Sumatra PDF is ridiculously small (a 1.2Mb download), lightweight, and handles the PDFs I throw at it without skipping a beat.

Today, Sumatra has finally hit version 1.0. Sumatra’s a pretty bare-bones application, so don’t expect any mind-blowing changes. What the new update boils down to is better compatibility, bug fixes, and performance tweaks.”

Read More: Open source Adobe Reader alternative Sumatra PDF hits version 1.0.

Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security… Blah Blah Blah here is the video: