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For the concerned people around: “During our regular Update Tuesday bulletin cycle this week, we released Security Advisory 2719615, which provides guidance concerning a remote code execution issue affecting MSXML Code Services. As part of that Advisory, we've built a Fix it workaround that blocks the potential attack vector in Internet Explorer. Fix its are a labor-saving mechanism that helps protect customers from a specific issue in advance of a comprehensive security update. We encourage customers to read more about SA2716915's one-click, no-reboot-required Fix it in an in-depth post on the SRD blog.” "MSXML: Fix it before fixing it" By the MSRC Team Regards PS - 10 Immutable Laws of Security View the thread

Posted on Windows 8 PC’s, Linux, and the UEFI, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft is not working to make Linux easier to use. Recently, Microsoft shipped out a new version of New Features That will be good news for Linux users, who may be wondering if Microsoft is going to kill their Skype – Linux connection. No it won’t. So here are some of the features. One improved feature is easier conversations. The new conversations window lets you manage all your recent conversations in one place users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. This eliminates the multiple chat windows issue from before. There is a new Call View and improved audio quality plus they are also working on improving video call quality and have also extended support for more cameras. Improvements Now chat synchronization is better than before, plus there are new presence and emoticon icons. You also have the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact’s profile. And the chat history loading is faster. Plus, there is a lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze. While these improvements are good for the user, Microsoft, warns, however, that the very first time you start Skype for Linux 4.0 might take a few minutes to launch. This depends on how lengthy your chat history is. Versions Formally, the new Skype for Linux is available for the 32 and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian 6.0 and the 32-bit versions of Fedora 16 and OpenSUSE 12.1. Here are the overall requirements to use this Skype version: Qt 4.6.0, D-Bus 1.0.0, libasound2 1.0.18 with both PulseAudio 1.0 and BlueZ 4.0.0 being optional. Without a source code option, though, you’re much stuck with the Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE Linux families. Linux users should be happy with this announcement, because they may have bee worried after Microsoft acquired Skype, that their Linux-Skype connection would end. Doesn’t look that way.

When watching a .wmv or .mp4 file in Windows Media Player, after skipping ahead to avoid commercials, the audio no longer lines up with the video. Can this be remedied? View the thread

When we set out to design the Calendar app for Windows 8, there was no shortage of directional possibilities. Given the long history of calendars in society, and the diversity of Windows customers, we asked ourselves: What are the essential attributes of a great calendaring experience and how can we bring them to life by using the uniquely rich capabilities of Windows 8? At its heart, a great calendar should to do the following: Show your life clearly. You should have crystal clear visibility into what’s happening in your life – at home, at work, and at school. Make it easy to get around. Moving back and forth in time should be quick and efficient. Opening events and appointments should feel natural. Make it easy to add new items. New things are always coming up in your life. A great calendar makes it easy to make new plans. Keep you on time. Well laid plans aren’t very useful if you show up late! . Be ready to do more. As you get busier, scheduling gets more complicated. Calendar should gracefully handle your needs as they change. Showing your life clearly One of the most important functions of a calendar is its ability to answer the questions “What’s going on for me today?” and “What’s coming up next?” As we designed the Calendar app, we focused on providing that clarity and eliminating distractions. Given all the potential capabilities of a digital calendar, keeping this focus can actually be quite difficult. The temptation to add extra bells and whistles can be very real. At the same time, we realized that focus is one thing paper calendars have always been quite good at --- they simply present you with the calendar grid and the information you’ve written on it. With that insight and the clear principles of what it means to be a great Metro style app, we committed to clarity of presentation. The app focuses on the calendar and your content, above all else. . A calendar with no distractions - your schedule is the focus. Of course, having an easy-to-read calendar is only useful if all your information is available. Whether you’re keeping track of appointments at work, managing family activities, or mapping out your class schedule at school, Calendar brings everything together to provide a more complete picture of your life. . Work and personal appointments are available in one view You’re also in complete control of how these calendars appear in the app. For example, if a certain calendar has special meaning for you, you can make it stand out by changing its color. If you’re overwhelmed by the number of birthdays showing up from your favorite social network, you can hide those items in order to see everything else more clearly. All of these personalization controls are tucked away neatly in Settings to avoid distracting you when you don’t need them. . Having less frequently used Calendar options tucked away in Settings provides control without distractions. Making it easy to get around Another important function of the calendar is the ability to move around in time. Our most important goals were: Making it simple to move forward and backward in time Making view switching predictable Making it easy to open and view existing events Moving forward and backward in time One thing was apparent to us early on: We wanted a simple model where a gesture forward would take you into the future, and a gesture backwards would take you into the past—a direct way of moving around in time. No buttons to click or extra controls to manipulate. But even in this simple design there's a question of how far forward and how far back each movement should take you. Not only were there user experience tradeoffs to be considered, but technical ones as well. If we decided one swipe could move you forward multiple months (depending on the speed of the gesture) that would give you a natural and powerful way to make huge leaps forward in time. But there’s a challenge in making the landing place predictable. That is, if you’re starting in June, and want to move to July, you might end up in August if you swipe too quickly. If this happens frequently enough, it can feel as if you’re not in control. Additionally, since the boundaries between months are well defined–landing halfway between July and August doesn't make sense–accuracy is important. Contrast this to panning a two-dimensional grid of photos, where “getting close” is ok as long as you arrive in the general region of the photos you’re looking for. To avoid these pitfalls, we went with an approach that enables you to consistently move forward one month at a time–by swiping once, hitting page down on the keyboard, or clicking the Forward button. This makes your experience much more predictable, putting you in control. If you’re in June and you want to arrive at August, you simply click or swipe twice. That’s it. You’re guaranteed never to overshoot the intended target. . Simple movements forward are quick and predictable Switching views When using the app, most people want to stay in the same view the majority of the time, depending on how busy their schedules tend be. People with fewer appointments tend to prefer Month view. Those with very busy schedules tend to prefer Day view. So, rather than making view switching a top level command that would always be visible, we opted to place it on the app bar instead. You can easily pull up the app bar in Windows 8 with a right-click or swipe up from the bottom edge, so you have access to the view switcher when you need it, without being distracted by it the rest of the time. . Opening the app bar gives you simple switching between views when needed Opening individual events Making it easy to open events is an interesting problem because of the tension between two variables: Making each event larger (in height and width) makes them easier to target with the mouse or your finger. Making events smaller means you can see more content at one time. . We needed to find a solution that would give you easy targeting while also showing enough content in each view. This was especially important in Month view, which has the tightest space constraints for each particular day. Keeping the key variables in mind, we designed the event sizes within a sweet spot, one in which Month view typically shows 2 events per day (the average for the majority customers) while maintaining nearly 100% accuracy for mouse and touch targeting. And, of course, when you have busier days at home, work, and school, switching to Week o Day views shows you all the events you need while providing the same high accuracy. Making it easy to add new plans Because new events can come up in life so quickly, we wanted event creation to be direct and instantly available at all times. When you think about paper calendars, they’re very direct—you identify a date, move your hand towards it and start writing. It all happens quite naturally, and we do it without much thought because of the paper calendar’s simplicity and purity of design. In a similar way, you can add new events to the Calendar in Windows 8 by simply clicking or tapping on the day or time you want. . Click-to-add is like putting pen to paper This design—using the grid as the primary command surface—means no other buttons are necessary to complete this frequent task. Everything happens in the calendar grid. This reinforces our Metro design principle of content over chrome. And it allows for a pure experience that isn’t just about great consumption, but also about simple and direct creation. Keeping you on time Of course, even given all of the above, a calendar is only valuable if it helps you stay on time. Towards that goal, we designed Calendar with a range of smart capabilities to ensure you don't miss any important events. Notifications and reminders In the full page for an event, you can set any reminder time you want. At the desired time, you'll get a lightweight popup to remind you. . Notifications tell you about upcoming events Notifications don’t block your current task. They don’t force you to interact with them. Using the built-in notifications system in Windows 8, a Calendar notification simply nudges you about what’s coming up and gets out of your way. In addition, similar to Windows Phone, you can see information about upcoming events on the lock screen and on the Start tile: . Snapping the Calendar for always-on visibility When you’re extremely busy on a particular day, you often want your full schedule visible at all times. With Snap, you can see your calendar while you use other apps. Of course, the slim form factor of the snapped view presents quite a design challenge for Calendar. Some views, like Day view, fit very naturally into the more condensed space. To make it fit, we could simply show one day instead of two, and the overall model of the view would stay the same. Problem solved. But Week and Month view are more challenging. A full week or month is quite difficult to fit in such a narrow area with any hope of showing the actual titles of each event. In addition, we want to maintain predictability in the system by avoiding situations where certain views (like Day view) look essentially the same when snapped, but other views (Month, Week) look entirely different when compared to their larger versions. Given the challenges and goals, we designed a simple and consistent model where all views are represented by a single, snapped view. This single view maintains the context and positioning from the larger views. (That is, if you’re on Wednesday in the large view, you’re still on Wednesday when going to snapped view.) It’s also designed to give you the same life clarity and ease of navigation: All events from all of your calendars are available in a simple list. A swipe or click to the right or left takes you forward or backwards in time. . Calendar in snapped view lets you plan and browse at the same time Ready to do more Lastly, if we’ve done our job well, more and more customers will start using Calendar to manage larger portions of their lives at home and work. With that in mind, Calendar is designed to do more as your usage increases. Week view As you’d expect, Week view is useful when you have a large volume of appointments, and it’s crafted to give you the clarity you need for a particular week: . Week view lets you see a Sunday to Saturday overview Two-day view We also know there are days where you’re extremely busy at work, home, school, or all three. And we wanted a design that would allow even greater focus and precision. At the same time, we didn’t want to zoom in so far as to create “tunnel vision” by removing too much context. To strike the right balance, we designed Calendar with a two-day view: . Two-day view gives you the best detail about today and tomorrow The two-day view is useful because making good time management decisions today often requires understanding what’s coming up tomorrow. In addition, this view takes advantage of today’s modern wide-screen displays without adding additional chrome or distractions just to fill up the extra space. As with the other views, it’s simply the calendar grid and your events. (And here’s a tip: each day scrolls independently without affecting the adjacent day. So, you can view information about tonight, while keeping an eye on your first appointment tomorrow.) Doing more with events Finally, we know many customers already use their calendars for quick reminders to themselves (e.g. “Pay the phone bill”, “Parent/Teacher conference at noon”). As mentioned earlier, you can click or tap any place in the calendar, and simply type in the few details you need. In addition to these typical scenarios, we designed Calendar so you can do more as your needs change—because depth and richness are a core part of what makes a digital calendar special. For example, you may have a family trip coming up this summer. Not only can you add your trip to the calendar, but you can also add all the related information about your trip directly in the appointment—things like flight times, confirmation numbers, and day-by-day itineraries—no separate papers or messages to manage. It’s all right there. You can also send the event to other members of your family, directly from the calendar, so everyone has the info they need. As another example, on my family’s calendar we have a recurring appointment that lists each person’s cleaning responsibilities for Saturdays. On a paper calendar, this would be tedious to manage, or it would require a special calendar dedicated to that purpose. However, a dedicated page for each calendar event makes this level of richness possible in a single app. . The events page provides the options you need to manage your life As you use Calendar in the Release Preview, we hope you enjoy it. The feedback we received during the Consumer Preview was extremely valuable, and we’ve looked at all of it very closely. Thanks! As we move towards the final release of Windows 8, we hope you’ll enjoy the upcoming improvements as well. Source: Windows 8 Blog

June 20 is Microsoft’s Windows Phone Summit, expected to be all about the Apollo operating system. Here’s what we think we know so far. Source: All About Microsoft

What kinds of changes is Microsoft making to its JavaScript engine in IE10? A couple of recent Microsoft blog posts offer some details. Source: All About Microsoft

Hello, I would like to deploy office with different sets of features enabled for different purposes. for example i would like my setup to include the following: Marketing department computers Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher Training Department computers Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access Admin Department Computers Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, InfoPath I would like to accomplish this using the OCT, i have already created one MSP and placed it in the updates folder, but if i create other MSP files with different features, how would the installer know which MSP to apply to which computers??? Hope that makes sense, any help most appreciated. Thank you Steve View this thread

Hello Gentleman, I`m not sure that I`m posting this question in the correct section on the forum, so forgive me if I'm not). Lets start from the beginning: I`m running Office 2010. I`ve installed it and everything worked seamlessly. But yesterday when I`ve opened the presentation I faced next: the window has opened but I couldn`t do anything with it - I hear the "ding" sound when clicking on it (you know, the same so as when some dialog window is prompted and you are trying to click on the program window, not on the dialog box) and nothing is happening. This issue is reproducing not with single document - I see similar behavior when just opening PowerPoint. The weirdest part is that if I`m logging in on this PC with different account everything works just fine. I`ve tried a lot of things - restarting the computer, uninstall the Office, install it again, deactivate PowerPoint and after active in Fresh Install mode, run Repair, delete everything from C:Users%user1%AppDataRoamingMicrosoftPowerPoint to the corresponding folder of my account - nothing worked. I dont`t know. I`m really sure that there is some dialog box is prompting but it is laced somewhere beyond the screen (I have two monitors and I`ve changed one big to smaller one and same actions in opposite directions after if it can help), but I just have no idea how to kill it or something like it. I know that 100% way (well,` at least 90%) is to re-create my profile, but that is a huge work that I unfortunately have no ability for. I would really appreciate if someone could guide me to some direction. Thank you at least for reading this for now. View this thread

when trying to reload to my win xp with my hp psc 1210 program loads to computer but when I try to open it message reads file inaccesable Moved. Original title: *** Email address is removed for privacy *** View this thread

HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT TO DO. windows or hotmail I HAVE RECEIVED AN EMAIL WHO SAYS THEY ARE WINDOWS LIVE HOTMAIL, AND IF I DONT SIGN IN TO MY ACCOUNT WITH THE NEXT 24HRS MY ACCOUNT WILL BE SUSPENDED, ANY IDEA'S PLEASE. I HAVE ALREADY BEEN HACKED TWICE. AND I NEED TO KNOW ASAP. THANKS EMAIL ME View this thread

bonjour je n'arrive pas à lire mes dvd enregistrés ,ni mes cd que je lis sur mon ancien ordinateur ..Celui ci est un portable récent asus .. Quand j'insère le disque il ne se passe rien ..que faire? merci View this thread

I accidently deleted the internet explorer icon on my task bar. I tried to restore my system to an earlier time and then the icon appeared. But, when I clicked on it, a box popped up saying internet explorer was renamed, moved or deleted. Now, I can't figure out how to get that icon back and an icon that works. Please help me figure out how to restore or add a internet explorer icon that works like I had before. Thank you. View the thread

I do a lot of download and delete folders everyday, which cause many fragments within hdd, Does anyone have any suggestions on any problem if I defrag my hdd every week? Thanks in advance for any suggestions View this thread

Ok, this is really dumb, but my boyfriend and I broke up, I changed passwords on all accounts on my Windows 7 and I forgot the new password(all the same) except my son's and his account is limited. Can you please help me? I have learned my lesson! I can't do any Admin. work. I can access my email, Facebook through my son's account. View the thread

Rumors around Microsoft’s June 18 announcement are taking a new turn towards some kind of Microsoft-branded tablet. Could this be an Amazon Kindle Fire competitor? Source: All About Microsoft

I WAS TURNING ON MY LAP TOP, IT WAS STILL IN WARM UP MODE. SO I DECIDED TO WIPE DOWN THE KEYPAD. I WENT FROM RIGHT TO LEFT. THEN I NOTICED THAT MY SCREEN IS UPSIDE DOWN. HOW DO I RETURN TO IT'S RIGHT POSITION? View the thread

a friend took my laptop (hp pavilion 5000) to a friend to overhaul it basically. it had windows xp on it at the time. when i got it back it had windows 7 ultimate on it and it worked wonderfully. about five to six days later i noticed down in the righthand corner of my screen it said: windows 7/Build 7601/This copy of windows is not genuine. adn then i keep geting a popup from microsoft telling me i have so many days to resolve this problem. well i didnt put the windows 7 on so i dont have a product key right? so my question is: can i uninstall 7 and go back to my xp? View the thread

I now how this works in Windows7, but have not had to make this work in XP. I just want certain applications to stay available on my taskbar even when I'm not using it. View this thread

How do I know if I have the correct version of Microsoft Security Essentials installed? View this thread

In the GUI I don't see any text in the selection tabs I only see blank narrow tabs. Tried uninstall/reinstall and got same issue. Thanks. View this thread

I just made the mistake of installing windows updates. Now, my Windows 7 computer will not boot up, and it did not create a restore point. i can not sign in usingthe last successful sign in. I do not have a windows recovery disc.Do you know what I can do? View the thread

Geachte, bij opstart krijg ik een dood scherm van17sec voorhet welkomstscherm,al een harde reset uitgevoerd,heeftU een antwoord? View the thread

who is mediame-- how did the get into my computer-- how do i get them out-- View this thread

I'm trying to install Access 2007 (from a CD) on a machine running fully updated Windows 7. The Product Key works and installation starts, but then repeatedly fails, leaving me a message stating, "Setup cannot find AccessR.WWAccRWW.cab. Browse to a valid installation source, and then click OK." I am unable to locate any such file. I have also tried repeatedly to install from the same CD onto a machine running fully updated Windows XP, also to no avail, and receive the same message. Can anyone enlighten me about this? What's happening? How can I get Access 2007 to install on the Win7 machine? Thanks for your help. View the thread

I have a Toshiba Laptop and I am running Windows XP and I am getting an error message when I try to start Microsoft Essentials. The Error Code is 0x80070424 and the screen says Real time protection off and vitus and spyware definitions are out of date. It then instructs me that Security Essentials isn't monitoring your PC because the program service stopped. You should restart it now. When I click on the restart now it gives me another message. Couldn't start the Security Essentials service. The specified service does not exist as an installed service. However when I go to my control panel it is there in my programs. How do I rectify this problem? View this thread