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Isn’t It About Time Microsoft Announced Some Exclusives?

LittleBigPlanet 2 [review] kicks off Sony’s PS3 exclusive push for 2011 in a matter of days now, and it’s going to be swiftly followed by the wonderful Killzone 3 [hands-on].  These two games alone will keep many gamers busy for a good few months – the former especially.

But that’s not all that’s lined up for the PlayStation 3 this year – look out for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, inFamous 2, The Last Guardian, Motorstorm: Apocalypse and Resistance 3 as big hitters, with the likes of MLB 11, Disgaea 4, PlayStation Move Heroes, SOCOM 4, Sorcery, Twisted Metal and a new Yakuza bringing up the rear.

It’s an impressive line-up, arguably, in fact, the strongest set of games that Sony and their third parties have pushed out this generation – something presumably spurred on by competition from the currently on a roll Xbox 360.  The problem on that count, though, is that Microsoft don’t really seem to like talking about anything lined up themselves this year apart from (the admittedly massive) Gears of War 3, Forza 4 and a few other titles that run the gamut between potentially mind-blowing and ‘still codenamed’. We want to know what’s coming.

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Sure, there’s the rather vague Panzer Dragoon-esque title, a new Steel Batallion, a Kinect survival horror from SEGA and the Crytek developed Codename Kingdoms, but what we want are the likes of Halo, guys, the stuff we find familiar and can get excited about. Halo sells consoles, it ignites gamers and – yes – we’ll happily settle for a HD remake of Combat Evolved this year if you’re taking a year out.

Exclusives are big business, the whole concept of having games that only play on your console (we’re, for the sake of this blog, ignoring PC and Windows phone releases) goes towards how one console manufacturer sets themselves apart from the others; and on that aspect alone it seems Sony have got this year all sewn up, at least going off what we know from the two houses.

For the first time, too, some might say – the PS3′s had a rather uneven release schedule ever since it was released with delays and misfires peppering what has actually at times been an underwhelming few years – but for the next twelve months we’re struggling to find what Microsoft are up to.

Maybe it’s the new emphasis on Kinect that’s absorbing all their energy.  Certainly, the brand new motion control device has meant that the 360 has seen far more TV-time than anything else this Christmas – the games are fresh, massively fun with mates and require no grasp of traditional games to enjoy: put your Granny in front of Kinect and fire up Bowling and she’ll be off – the line-up has actually resulted in a solid set of highly playable games that are far weightier than we first thought. Dance Central is, by all accounts, bloody fantastic.

But are Gears of War 3, Forza 4 and some unknown quantities going to be enough to convince Microsoft’s hardcore following that they’re still the company’s focus?  Of course not – and we don’t think for a second that there’s only going to be the games mentioned (and don’t forget that there’s still loads of multi-format games coming out) – and Greenberg’s already talking about how 2011 will be big for Xbox 360 exclusives. But that’s the point of this article – with Sony having already announced a good deal of their 2011 exclusive offering (and they’re still not talking about Starhawk) we have to wonder why Microsoft are being so cagey with their games.

Are they holding off for a massive bout of list-wars E3, or is there something else set for Los Angeles that’ll blow us all away…? Microsoft, we’re all ears.

Microsoft Surface 2 is real and it looks amazing

Microsoft’s eternal Surface project that never seems to actually reach the consumers whose lives it has the potential to revolutionize has hit version two, and today at CES Microsoft gave it a public outing.

The second incarnation runs on Windows 7 and has some very impressive hardware inside to make it leaps and bounds better than its predecessor. According to Tom Warren:

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The new version of Surface, due this year, is powered by a multicore CPU and GPU by AMD. Microsoft’s Windows 7 will power the new Surface. Samsung manufactures the device in partnership with Microsoft and the new model is just 4″ thick. Due to the new size of the Surface 2, customers have the option to mount it vertically. The top part of Microsoft’s Surface 2 uses the biggest piece of gorilla glass that has ever been bonded to an LCD.

The new vertical mount capability will greatly add to its potential use case array. The first announced customer, Royal Bank of Canada, will install the devices this year.

The new Surface is to be widely available later this year, and again according to WinRumors will be priced lower than the first version of Surface.

I had the chance to play with Surface 1 in 2009 at Microsoft’s PDC, and I found it to be a very powerful piece of research hardware. The new surface has taken the original concept and made it appropriate for mass consumption and use.

It could be that, given the new tile interface that is supposed to be under preparation for Windows 8, the Surface 2 has a large future in Microsoft’s hardware and software lineup. Mass mountable Surface computers with two hand multi-touch in my apartment? Sign me up.

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The related exams:

70-680 TS:Windows 7,Configuring
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Microsoft Lowering Prices on Older Xboxes

Microsoft apparently held a media roundtable Monday night after its Xbox press event, confirming that it will eventually phase out its existing models in favor of the new “slim” model.

My colleague Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat reported:
“The new Xbox 360 with a 250-gigabyte hard drive and the smaller black design will sell for $299,” Takahashi wrote. “The older Xbox 360 Elite console with a 120-gigabyte hard drive will sell for $249. And the Xbox 360 Arcade console, which does not have a hard drive, will sell for $149. The Elite and Arcade consoles will be sold until existing supplies run out.”

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Microsoft has not said if it will release versions of the Elite or Arcade models with the new design. The latest Xbox costs $299, and will be available this week.

To date, Microsoft still has not released a price for the Xbox Kinect peripheral; Aaron Greenberg, an Xbox product manager, denied reports that the Kinect’s price had been set. Gamestop reportedly posted a Web page claiming that it would be priced at $149.

“No Kinect price announced yet, retail price estimates are purely speculative, final price & pack-in details are not yet determined,” Greenberg tweeted.

Microsoft’s own official Twitter account, however, has revealed that Kinect will go on sale on Nov. 4, backed by 16 launch titles. Microsoft will begin selling the new slim Xbox in Europe on July 16.

Passware Warns of Microsoft Risk

Password-recovery experts at Passware warned Friday that the security of Microsoft’s Bitlocker whole-disk encryption is seriously compromised on a computer configured to use sleep mode. The same is true of the open-source TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption tool.

The company’s Passware Kit Forensic 1.03 can “decrypt hard disks encrypted with BitLocker or TrueCrypt in a matter of minutes if the target computer is running”. If the computer is powered off decryption can still be accomplished by analyzing the file hiberfil.sys, which is created by Windows when the system enters sleep mode. According to the company, any computer that has hibernated even once with a mounted TrueCrypt or BitLocker hard drive is vulnerable, as their product can “instantly decrypt the hard disk even if the computer is no longer running”.

It’s worth noting that BitLocker Drive Encryption is only present in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, not in any earlier edition. And only the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of those platforms include BitLocker support. ZoneAlarm DataLock, a third-party whole-disk encryption product, supports all current versions of Windows including Windows XP. During the initial encryption stage DataLock disables hibernation. Afterward it interacts with the hibernation feature so that the encryption password is required on waking from hibernation.

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If you do use BitLocker or TrueCrypt, you need to configure the encrypted system so it doesn’t accidentally go into sleep mode. Using the Power Options applet in control panel, set “Put the computer to sleep” to “Never”. If the computer has a sleep button, set “When I press the sleep button” to “Do nothing”. And be very sure you never choose “Sleep” from the options menu for the shutdown button.

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Find Out What’s Not Working in Windows 7

You may have problems with hardware you don’t even know about. Here’s a way to check for these and correct them. I recently had to do a clean install of Windows 7 on a friend’s laptop. Easy, right? Boot from the installer disk, and let Windows download all the appropriate drivers.

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Not so fast. What if the very network driver, which allows this downloading of the rest of the drivers, wasn’t working? That turned out to be the case with my laptop upgrade.

Have Windows Automatically Fix Driver Problems

The first thing to try is Windows 7’s automated hardware troubleshooter. Click on the Windows button, and type “fix hardware” into the search bar. The top hit should be “Find and fix problems with devices.” Click on this. This will start a Wizard entitled Hardware and Devices. Click Next to have it start detecting problems and checking for missing drivers. The troubleshooter will search through all your installed devices, and for each issue it finds, you’ll be offer a choice between Apply this fix, and Skip this fix. It’s probably a good idea to choose the first, especially if the troubleshooter appears to have found your network driver.

It’s not a bad idea to run this feature even when you may think you have no problems, just to make sure. If it works, you’ll see notification bubbles at the bottom of the screen saying “Installing device driver software.” But in some cases, like mine, the troubleshooter won’t be able to get your hardware working, and that message will change to “Device driver software was not successfully installed.”

Get the Right Driver for the Right Hardware

Next you may think, just go to the laptop maker’s site, and download the driver. Of course, this requires another computer that is successfully communicating with the network, so you may have to visit a pal. (You may even have thought of that before this point.) But often the laptop maker uses several different possible network adapters for even the same laptop model and sub-model. You’re basically left to guess which you have. You needn’t guess, but finding the answer is far from straightforward. Before you can proceed, you must install one of the vendor’s drivers. It may be the right one if you’re lucky, but if not, it will enable the next step to determine the actual hardware.

Open Windows 7’s System Information window, by typing “System Information” in the Start Menu’s search box and clicking on the top found item. This opens a two-panel window, showing an expandable list of Hardware Resources, Components, and Software on the left, and details on the right. Hit the plus sign next to Components, and near the bottom of its list, you’ll see a Problem Devices choice. Your nonworking network adapter should be there, named from the nonworking driver you installed. Windows 7 System Information

The key is in the second column, “PNP Device ID.” This will show a long string, such as

PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&SUBSYS_11208086&REV_61\4&32FF

We’re interested in the four digits or letters following the letters VEN_ and the four following DEV_. Make a note of these and head to your friend’s PC with the working internet connection. You can find the manufacturer name by entering the four digits after VEN in the PCI Database site. Unfortunately, you can only enter the vendor code or the model code, but not both in a single search. Entering the device ID in the second search box shows a list of possible devices, and matching it with the vendor name you found in the first search should do the trick.

In my case, it was enough to know the correct network adaptor vendor and download the driver based on that from the laptop maker’s site. I’d originally installed a driver for an Intel adapter, but the process above showed me that my laptop actually had a Realtek device. Running the installer from the laptop maker’s support finally got me online, and all the other system drivers needed were detected, downloaded, and installed automatically by Windows 7.

Tip: Resizing Photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery

A colleague recently needed to both crop images to a square aspect ratio and resize them down to thumbnail size. At first glance, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the free downloadable image editor for Windows 7 and Vista, seemed to offer no help. But a little peering into the app showed it was completely up to the task.

The Crop tool is obvious, with its big button in the Edit ribbon. And getting a square crop isn’t much harder; just click the drop-down arrow below the button, choose Proportion, and then Square at the bottom of the list of choices. This constrains the crop box to a resizable square, and clicking the button again or just hitting the Enter key completes the crop. Other standard proportions, such as 8×10, A4, or widescreen (16×9), or custom dimensions are also on offer.

Now, for resizing. On the single image edit view, there’s no right-click or toolbar button choice for resizing. But if you head to the small Properties button, the second choice is Resize. This offers a few presets for the maximum dimension on a side, for example, Smaller—640 pixels, Medium—1024, and Large—1280. What we needed a smaller thumbnail size, so the Custom option let us enter any pixel dimension, say 100 pixels.

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Windows Live Photo Gallery Properties Resize

Clicking the Resize and Save button didn’t seem to have any effect on the on-screen image, so we wondered if it really had worked. Turns out that Photo Gallery saves a separate copy of the image at the new size, adding the new dimensions to the filename in parentheses, e.g., Mexico_281 (100×100).jpg. Your original picture file will still be in the folder, too. Where’s the folder? Just right-click the image and choose “Open file location” to see both.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Open File LocationFinally, what if you want to resize a bunch of pictures all at once? No problemo. In gallery view, you can select a bunch of photos (but note that this doesn’t just mean clicking on them—you have to actually place the mouse pointer in the thumbnail’s check box at the upper-left), and then right-clicking gets you the same Resize dialog we saw before. To get the “Open file location” right-click choice, deselect all but one of the thumbnails.

What to expect in MCTS: Windows Vista

Microsoft’s 70-620 test validates your skills and knowledge to efficiently install, configure and manage the MCTS Certification operating system in an enterprise environment. It is helpful for IT tech support personnel to upgrade their skills to Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. The TS: Microsoft Windows Vista, Configuring (70-620) exam provides credit towards MCTS: Windows Vista, Configuration certification.

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