"If you’ve ever offered technical support to other computer users, you might find yourself losing a slice of your sanity over their inability to describe the problem clearly. And most times it’s not the fault of the user, it’s just difficult to describe what you see with words. A feature new to Windows 7, called “Problem Steps Recorder” looks to be the missing tool for documenting where it all goes wrong."

This is pretty useful - and even machine-parseable. Could make for some much-improved support experiences.

"The OSC (Open Source Consortium) has started a complaint with the BBC's Fair Trading Unit claiming that the BBC are advertising a Microsoft product that "does not even yet exist." Obviously the OSC didn't attend Microsoft's recent PDC to pick-up their copy of Windows 7 that clearly exists."

WTF, seriously. Fair enough, you dislike BBC because their iPlayer is not Linux compatible. Fair complaint. But this doesn't even make sense. What exactly have BBC done wrong?

"In the last couple of years nearly every program comes with its own updating software. Don’t believe me? Try Apple Software Update, Adobe Updater, Google Updater, Mcafee AutoUpdate, and the list goes on. All of these pieces of software have their individualized settings and behaviors with no unified interface which leads to confusion and missed updates–some of which are critical for security."

Indeed I'm sick of all these update checking apps running in the background, cluttering my systray, and annoying me out of context about an update. Building it into Windows Installer would be good I think, which most things are using now.

"Jensen Harris from the Office 2007 design team gave a very rare presentation at Microsoft’s MIX08 event today about not what the Office 2007 Fluent (Ribbon) interface is about, but instead how it came to be and what other concepts they tried. He admitted himself it was the first time ever in a public venue where they’ve shown these never-before-seen prototypes of what would become Office 2007."

Pretty neat seeing the various possibilities. I'm quite liking the result, although some of the colour schemes here are very nice.

"After years of wild rumoring and enthusiastic anticipation, the Latitude XT is Dell’s first bet in the ever-bleak Tablet PC industry. Whilst Dell didn’t deliver what everyone have hoped for - the cheapest tablet PC - they did however design one featured packed notebook with numerous innovative ideas and engineering worthy of at least some credit."

Nice review with lots of pics of Dell's new Tablet. I like the design, the features, the multi-touch screen, but the cool stylus related features intrigued me the most. Now, if only they weren't so damn expensive...

"I figured the new Dell Vostro desktop range might be worth a look - and since the machines were shipped with "Just the Software you need - no Trialware installed" then it would save me time in rebuilding the systems when they arrived (as I'd generally do)... On starting up the PC, we had Google Desktop indexing everrything, even though Vista was doing that already. We had a Dell/Google Browser Helper Object just waiting to redirect every bad URL or search..."

Tell me about it. Lenovo are similar too - I've done it so many times I can nearly recite all the crap they install. Arrgh!

"It's strange that we haven't heard a peep about this earlier, but apparently Microsoft's been working on a suite of bundled network discovery and configuration tools called Windows Rally, designed to ease ODM development of network devices and make them as easy to use as USB gear."

This is pretty neat; goes one step further than Apple's Bonjour/zeroconf. But at the end of the day, these things have existed in some form for years already, yet device manufacturers still haven't adopted them - will this change?

"Browser software company, Opera, has complained to the European Commission over Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system -- but Microsoft says it's been doing it for a decade and the practice is good for consumers... Opera has asked the Commission to force Microsoft into separating Internet Explorer from Windows and even bundle alternative browsers on the desktop. "

WTF, when will these companies stop whinging and be consistent - go sue Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, Apple as well if you're serious. A browser is an integral component, and having more pre-installed crap is the last thing I want.

"Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia!"

This is a cool extension, but not only does it let you launch different things, you can also do requests for information, e.g. weather, and have that appear in your start menu! It's like an instantly configurable temporary gadget!