Ryan Carter and Jason Clarke haven’t disappeared — they’ve just moved sideways a little. Ryan and Jason’s all-out coverage of Microsoft is now part of Download Squad, our blog about all kinds of software and online services.

You can roll your Download Squad experience in several different ways:

BOOKMARKS

Main blog:
http://www.downloadsquad.com

The Microsoft category:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/microsoft/

All Ryan Carter all the time:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/bloggers/ryan-carter/

All Jason Clarke all the time:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/bloggers/jason-clarke/

RSS FEEDS

Main blog:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/rss.xml

The Microsoft category feed:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/microsoft/rss.xml

The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog will remain exactly where it is, with its tremendous archive of blog entries. Use it as a reference point, and point your browser/newsreader to Download Squad for the continuous Microsoft updating you’ve come to expect. Thanks for reading!

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Filed under: Trends and Buzz, News and Info

I just wanted to let all of you know that this will be my last post on The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog. As of this morning, I have moved over to a tiny little blog you might have heard of called DownloadSquad. It is a new opportunity and a new challenge for me, so I hope you will join me over there, and continue reading if you aren’t a huge fan of DownloadSquad already. You will get a better mix of everything over at Download Squad including Google, VoIP, Microsoft, and many other topics. They already have a huge following that is definitely well deserved. If you haven’t yet, come check it out. You can even continue to get Microsoft-only feeds if you wish, there are instructions on Download Squad on how to do this. I will be bringing you a wider range of topics, not just Microsoft, so it should be a great ride. Thanks for everything, all the comments, thoughts, and opinions. It has been fun.

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Filed under: Vista

Having dipped my toe into the Windows Vista beta 2 waters, I found myself in want of anti-virus to secure my OS. I remembered Ed Bott reported about free anti-virus options for Windows Vista so I went looking, and found this article. Ed reports that there are free versions of both eTrust EZ AntiVirus and Trend Micro’s PC-Cillin products available. Happy antivirusing!

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Filed under: Tips and Tricks

Almost anyone who has applied Windows Updates during their day has been annoyed by this issue. Once Windows finishes its update, it asks you to reboot. You click “later”. Ten minutes later, a window pops up asking you to reboot again. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the middle of typing, this can actually trigger the “Reboot” button (the default is this button, so simply pressing the space bar while that window is in focus will do it) effectively losing whatever you’ve been working on.

There’s a solution for this issue, which is that the length of time Windows waits before hassling you again is configurable. Colin Mackay has the details.

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Filed under: Vista, Internet Explorer

The last post regarding Marc Orchant`s OneNote article was the first that I have posted here running the Windows Vista and IE 7 betas. After making the post, I viewed it in IE to double-check that everything rendered correctly, and was greeted with a warning that The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog may indeed be a phishing site.

Now I commend Microsoft for doing something about the phishing problem that plagues the web - it`s certainly not going away, and anything the tools we use can do to help us not get taken in by these scams is welcome by me. Of course, it`s quite disconcerting to discover that one`s own site is considered to be a potential threat.

But, consider that we are a site that has `Microsoft`right in our sub-domain, even though we`re not part of Microsoft`s microsoft.com domain. And we collect information, if you call asking for a name, email address and URL to comment on posts as collecting information, which in fact it is. So it`s reasonable that software might consider us as a potential threat.

Fortunately,  Microsoft foresaw that the tool might pick up many false positives, and offers a form right on the warning to allow site owners to alert the Phishing Filter team to the problem. There also appears to be a voting mechanism so that if enough regular site visitors tag the site as either legit or not, the site will be considered that way. Pretty cool, as long as that is not easily abused.

Kudos to Microsoft for attempting to further protect us. I can`t say that I`ll stick with IE7 for longer than it takes to get a feel for it - in my opinion Firefox is still leaps and bounds ahead of IE in terms of usability and extensibility. But so far IE7 is a welcome update to a sorely outdated browser.

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Filed under: OneNote

Marc Orchant, who most of you will remember as the sole voice of this Microsoft-focused blog for many months before his departure, today had an article posted at Microsoft’s Office 2007 preview site. The article highlights all of the new innovations in OneNote that have turned it into a real personal information hub, collaboration powerhouse as well as a time and task management tool. Rather than steal any of Marc`s thunder, I`ll just point you to the article which is well worth a read.

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