Windows 7 RC has Less than a Month Left

The free ride that users who opted in to the beta testing of Windows 7 has been a fairly long one, but it’s important to remember that it won’t last forever, and time is running out.

You've had your free ride, now cough up... please

Of course, as we reported back in August of last year, those running with Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) won’t just wake up on March 1st to a machine that doesn’t boot up. Instead, those of you still running the Windows 7 RC will find that your PC decides to restart it once every two hours… whether you want it to or not. It’s not going to be a killer for everyone, but it should be enough of a headache that people will feel the need to move to a retail copy of Windows 7.

Office 2010 Beta Hits 2 Million Users

Microsoft’s upcoming office suite, Office 2010, has jus hit the nice round number of 2 million downloads, making it a fairly massive testing operation.

The word comes from ReadWriteWeb that the open beta of Microsoft’s upcoming OS has managed to attract so much attention that it’s already broken the record set by Office 2007’s open beta program, but it also poses an interesting question, asking just why Microsoft has been so successful in gaining so large a userbase. While they speculate that a lot of it is to do with people being used to Office, and it effectively having a “locked in user base,” there are some other fairly simple reasons.

Microsoft Planning Office 15

With Office 2010 in public beta now, it seems that the majority of work on it is done, still, it’s a little surprising to hear that Microsoft is moving on to Office 15 already.

Of course, the whole thing isn’t entirely unexpected, we had received word very shortly after the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, that the company was already moving on, with staff working away on Windows 8. The big difference is, for now at least, that the word that we could expect to see Windows 8 around 2012 prompted speculation that the manner in which MS releases OS updates would be changing to something a little more incremental… it seems less likely that that’s the case for Office.

Core i9 Processor on Ebay

Intel’s upcoming Gulftown processor, which most of us expect will become the Core i9 by the time it eventually goes on sale has showed up on Ebay, with the still in-development and testing CPU selling for the ripe price of $1,200.

While the current range of Core i5 and Core i7 processors top out at quad-core, the Gulftown/Core i9 boasts fully six cores, and some of the data leaking out from Intel’s tests show it to be a very interesting beast indeed. If nothing else it’s curious to see that there’s a Gulftown processor already working and released into the wild, regardless of just how much illegality it took to get there.

Office 2010 Testing Starts

When Microsoft revealed that a significant portion of its upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 would be ‘cloud-based’ significant questions were raised about the capacity to deliver a robust experience through the web.

All About Microsoft is reporting that Microsoft has released (to a select number of approved recipients) the “Microsoft Office 2010 Click-To-Run Technical Preview Program for Home, Student and Small Business Consumers.” We’re hoping that catchy name gets kept on until Office 2010’s release. We’re interested to give MO2010CTRTPRHSSBC a go as soon as we can.