Microsoft Corp. has warned Windows Home Server users not to edit files stored on their backup systems with several of its programs, including Vista Photo Gallery and Office's OneNote and Outlook, as well as files generated by popular finance software such as Quicken and QuickBooks.

A federal judge has said consumers may go ahead with a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over the way it advertised computers loaded with Windows XP as capable of running the Vista operating system.

The lawsuit said Microsoft's labeling of some PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" was misleading because many of those computers were not powerful enough to run all of Vista's features, including the much-touted "Aero" user interface.

In a blow to Microsoft Corp., a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit late Friday alleging that Microsoft unjustly enriched itself by promoting PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" even when they could only run a bare-bones version of the operating system, called "Vista Home Basic."

Microsoft Corp. has dramatically cut the price of Windows Vista in China in a bid to boost sales of its new operating system.

Not only did Windows Vista - billed by Microsoft as its biggest operating system for 10 years - fail to distinguish Microsoft's latest fiscal year from previous, non-Windows-Vista years, but Microsoft also missed its own expectations by several million dollars.

As of this writing (Tuesday Feb 16th) there don't seem to be any new suggestions from Microsoft to assist XP users whose systems were rendered un-bootable after installing the February 9th patches. For example, the last entry on The Microsoft Security Response Center blog is four days old. So let me offer a suggestion: boot to Linux and move some files around.

Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users' knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates.

Samba is a Linux/UNIX software package that allows you to share files and directories with computers running other operating systems over the network. It also allows your Linux desktop or laptop to sign into a Windows network and be able to share files inside a workgroup

Microsoft Windows remains the dominant desktop operating system with approximately 90% of the client operating system market. If Microsoft's monopoly is ever going to be challenged by Linux, there has to be an easy way for Windows' users to be able to learn about this rival operating system.