It is getting better and better. I was describing a method to extend the activation period of Windows Vista by 90 days to a total activation period of 120 days. But this is actually not the maximum that you can extend the activation period of Windows Vista. Ryan from Cybernet wrote a nice article today that explains how every Windows Vista user can extend the activation period by the factor three raising the total time until Windows Vista has to be activated to

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I’m not using Internet Explorer 7 at all but I know some guys who like it so much that they might ditch Firefox for it. The new Internet Explorer 7 has basically the same functionality and expandability as Firefox. You can download add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 to add functions to it. The Windows Marketplace lists more than 550 add-ons for Internet Explorer 7. The major difference that I can see is that Microsoft offers free and commercial add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 while I do not know of a single Firefox add-on that is commercial. (correct me if I’m wrong)

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If you want to connect a Zune to a computer that is not its home zone you receive a popup asking if you want to connect the Zune as a guest or “sync with your library on this pc.” The second option would remove all content on the Zune and sync it with the library on the new computer. I suppose this is another feature to please the Music Industry by making it harder to add music from your friends computer to your own Zune. This spells troubles. Imagine if you have purchase a new pc or something gets messed up on your old computer.

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Imagine a race. A race between Microsoft and Crackers. Whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system that they say is absolutely secure and uncrackable some crackers find a way after days, weeks or even months. Vista was designed to be the first operating system that would not be copied en masse because of the way it had to be activated to function after a trial period. The first workarounds popped up pretty quickly buying time for the one real workaround to rule them all.

The weakness was first discovered by the famous (underground) group Paradox which discovered a way to emulate so called “Royality OEM2″ which require no activation at all. Those special OEM versions are only issued to major computer manufacturers such as Dell and Asus to take the hassle of activating the operating system away from their clients. These manufacturers embed license information into their hardware products which is equivalent to a online or phone registration.

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Did you know that you can add ifilters to the search function in Windows Vista ? The new ifilters, think of plugins if you like, add content indexing for various formats that the default Vista search (and desktop search) does not support, those include Adobe Reader documents, mp3, wmv and wma files as well as various other formats including zip, rar and help files. This is a great addition to the search in Windows Vista, especially if you do work with those file formats regularly.

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