Microsoft News Tracker

This week marks the start of WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, where Microsoft traditionally proselytizes or, as some would have it, tells the PC hardware industry what they should be delivering to fit in with Microsoft’s plans. Mary Jo Foley reports that the theme for 2006 will be “We’re turning the corner” on Vista, Longhorn Server, and Office 2007 which seems to be somewhat defensive, but appropriate given the spotty record of Vista.

Also paving the way was the anticlimactic public release of hardware requirements to run Vista, sort of. The caveat is because Microsoft is persisting with the pointless lowest common denominator “Vista Capable” program which aside from 512MB of memory, covers just about any current PC and only guarantees minimal compatibility as we have discussed previously. If you want to experience the spiffy new Vista Aero interface, you’ll need more - at the “Premium” level, 1 GB of memory and a variety of graphics features that preclude many current PCs with integrated graphics on the motherboard.

If you would prefer get the information straight, without a PR intermediary, head on over to Windows Logo Program Requirements V. 3.0 for all the gory details including the “Basic” logo level which didn’t make the press release. Presumably this will all be clear to consumers, both business and personal.

Finally, there is a whiff of what is really piquing the curious at the MSBLOG (via Bink.nu) - Final (retail) Prices for All Vista Editions? (lightly edited):

Windows Vista Home Basic - $255.55
Windows Vista Home Premium - $511.10
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition - $638.88
Windows Vista Business - $830.54
Windows Vista Enterprise - $1,022.20

Yikes! These aren’t confirmed and they aren’t the OEM or volume purchase prices, but did someone just mark things way up? Per the post:

Let’s assume these are the final prices then Windows Vista Home Premium costs twice as much as Windows XP Professional which is the corresponding equivalent to it!

Maybe there is a pot of gold at the end of the Vista rainbow? Or a lot of scrutiny from various antitrust watchdogs.

Gregg Keizer at TechWeb via Yahoo:

Symantec raised its overall Internet alert Friday on the news that a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Word was being exploited by hackers hoping to hijack PCs.

“Currently, observed attacks are limited to attacks against select targets,” Symantec warned in a bulletin to customers of its DeepSight Threat Management System.

The attack is successful against the newest version of Microsoft’s word processor, Word 2003, but only crashes Word 2000 and Word XP, without leading to a computer compromise.

More details on the specific exploit by following the link, but the net is that any Word 2003 document you receive from external sources should be viewed with suspicion until Microsoft provides a fix.