When Windows 7 launched last year, they offered a special “Family Pack” that allowed 3 computers to share the same copy of Windows. It was only $149 USD but sold in limited quantities. This October this pack is coming back.

Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world, however it’s amazing how it makes most of it’s money on just a few products. The Office and Windows products far outweigh any contribution by all their other services, including all of their online ventures, mobile ventures, hardware and gaming.

Did you just get Windows 7? Well head on over the Microsoft’s Personalization Gallery for some free themes to customize the look of your new OS. This includes free themes from sports car companies Ferrari and Porsche amoung others.

Today Microsoft launches the newest version of their operating system, Windows 7. Yes, it’s worth the upgrade. No, it’s not as bad as Vista. Put simply, it has all the good features of Vista, and all the bad features have been replaced and several new features in the user interface will be welcome by all. More importantly, it’s not as expensive as Vista was, and there are some good pricing options including a “family pack” of 3 licenses per household for only $199.

If you bought a computer after June 2009, you are eligible for a free upgrade. Sorry you netbook buyers, computers with Windows XP do not get the free upgrade.

Having run both beta and release candidates of Windows 7, I can honestly say it’s worth the upgrade – something that I could not say with Windows Vista.

A friend was offered to pay for antivirus software on her new computer and I wondered why when there are plenty of good products available for free. This week, Microsoft unveiled their own tool, called Microsoft Security Essentials. I’ve replaced my copy of FreeAV with it to test it out for a while. So far, it works quite well but has about 50 MB memory footprint. Still, I’ve decided to keep it.

A lot of my friends have switched to Macs, mostly the notebooks. Given the smaller resources available on notebooks, it’s important to run software that efficient and doesn’t bog the computer down. When Mac owners want to run a Windows program they’ve had two commercial products available to them – Parallels and Fusion. MacTech did some pretty exhaustive tests and found out that Parallels is almost always faster.
Stick with Parallels.

Ok, admittedly Microsoft Vista is a failure. Noone “wants” Vista, everyone just gets it or upgrades it because they have to through Microsoft’s monopoly of offering it on every new computer built. I don’t even want to know what tactics they’ve used to get corporations to adopt it but considering they’ve been target of antitrust lawsuits in most of the G8 nations, it’s probably not very nice.

Windows 7 is the next version of Windows, and it’s coming next year. In the latest demo of their beta build, it shows that they’ve been paying attention to what matters most: the user interface. While Vista brought technical enhancements to customers without any visible benefits, Windows 7 trys to use the original enhancements as well as some new ones, in a way that people can see and visualize right away. Gee, it’s like they’re actually thinking about people using their software.

On Lifehacker, Get Window’s 7 Best Features Now, shows people how to enhance Vista to get many of these features right away, without waiting for the late and very expensive Windows 7. Many of the addons are really good and have a nice benefit.

There is no arguing that the Xbox has been successful, very successful. But the designers at Microsoft didn’t really plan for the list of games to grow to such a huge extent – nor the explosive success of “casual” games. It’s becoming a pain to scroll through long lists of games on your Xbox to find the one you want to play, or buy the right one in the marketplace, they have redesigned the user experience.

Next Wednesday, the 19th, a new update will be pushed to the Xbox with a dramatically different user inteface. A preview is on the Xbox Live site. Along with the new update, there will be a Video Marketplace, Parties, Community Games and Avatars.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any coding, but I sure wish Microsoft did this when I started my career. They offer Express Editions of many of their software development tools for free from their website. These are “stripped down” versions of their popular tools including Visual Basic 2008, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual Web Developer.