While Barry Collins was researching his free upgrades to Windows 7 news story, he stumbled across possibly the most ridiculous offer I’ve ever seen: you, my lucky, lucky friends, can download Windows Vista Home Basic from the Microsoft UK store for £137.01. Excluding VAT.

Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.

A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT - and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).

So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.

Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search - Google kept on winning. (more…)

Microsoft’s pricing and upgrading plans for Windows 7 in Europe are bordering on a farce. You can’t upgrade from a previous version of Windows, but you can elsewhere in the world. You can buy the upgrade product but you will get full retail box instead.

And it won’t come with Internet Explorer 8, in a strangely “the sky is falling down” reaction to the antitrust spat with the EU. Microsoft hopes that this is enough, the EU doesn’t appear to be convinced.

But this could be a marvellous thing indeed. By forcing you to wipe the machine and start afresh, it is possible to ensure that all that accumulated crap is wiped from the machine. A clean OS is a happy OS. (more…)

Firefox 3.5 is out as a Release Candidate - as close to a final version as you can get without being a final version - so I’ve taken a look to see how it compares to its competitors.

Porn/Private Browsing

Most other browsers already had this feature, and now Firefox does too. With nothing more than a quick Ctrl+Shift+P your tabs will be whisked away and stored safely, leaving you with a fresh window for your… personal research.

When you’re all finished up, the same shortcut will bring back all your previous tabs and send all trace of your secret session into oblivion (it does not erase feelings of guilt). (more…)

I’m sure I can’t be alone in having a passionate love/hate relationship with Twitter. I steered clear of it for a long time, believing it to be a timesink and unwelcome distraction to my already communication-filled life. And now that I have joined the throng - as has PC Pro via @pc_pro - I haven’t really moved away from that point of view.

The problem is that the stream of information moves so fast. Even using the quite impressive TweetDeck, I find it impossible to keep track of the endless streams of communications happening. And the thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to hear what the likes of Jack Schofield at The Guardian have to say, but, well, he says so much! As do the numerous other friends, colleagues, influencers and publications that I follow. (more…)

Two announcements from Adobe today. 

First the bad news…

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Since Wolfram Alpha launched at the weekend, I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in which the author asks it inane questions and laughs when it falls flat. Even our own Darien Graham-Smith (along with several others in the office) seems almost delighted to prod and poke at it to find instances where Wolfram’s big pre-launch claims can be mocked - usually by comparison to Google or Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, this is something that was bound to happen given the publicity the site has received in recent weeks from the mainstream press. The big problem occurs because most people are attempting to hastily test the new engine without any real reason to be using it. (more…)

So, after months of anticipation, Wolfram Alpha is finally here. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a big disappointment.

I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.

Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.

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You know it’s Friday afternoon when a hastily-written blog post asking for inspiration for PC Pro’s Spotify account gets nearly 20 responses before four in the afternoon. The result is a barkingly-mad list of music which takes in artists from The Beastie Boys to Tina Turner, and from Styx to Korn.

A quick reminder of the rules: all the songs had to have some connection to computers and they had to be found in the Spotify library. 

The winners are:

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Last week, Microsoft announced some details of anti-piracy measures in Windows 7. It sounds like they’re going to be slightly less intrusive than those in Vista, and probably roughly as effective.

I don’t exactly resent all this product validation stuff. I’d prefer it if Microsoft didn’t feel the need to do it; but I accept that the company has a legitimate interest in dissuading casual copying, and to me a one-time online authorisation doesn’t seem an unreasonable way of going about that.

But I do resent all the weasel words and spin that surround the process. (more…)