Russian authorities originally charged school teacher, Alexander Ponosov, with installing pirated versions of Microsoft Office and Windows on PCs at the school where he taught. The case was thrown out of court after the court said Ponosov’s actions were “insignificant”. Posonov had claimed the PCs had come with the pirated software pre-installed by sub-contractors.

In a bizarre twist Ponosov has ended up being fined US$200 (about half a month’s salary or a crate of Stolichnaya) after he joined prosecutors who lodged an appeal after the first case was dropped. The appeal led to Ponosov’s retrial and subsequent guilty verdict and fine. Bet he wishes he’d kept quiet now. But no, he does plan to appeal again. Just keep on digging mate, keep on digging.

However the story sounds a bit fishy to us? How come there’s no reports of the authorities pursuing the ‘sub-contractors’ that Ponosov bought the PCs from? Also Russia is on an American ‘watch list’ regarding copyright protection, perhaps the Russian authorities think that Posonov’s conviction will satisfy the Americans? It just smacks of a political manoeuvre by Russia in its effort to join the World Trade Organisation. What do you think?

Source: CNN

The change from XP to Vista wasn’t as sudden as most would have expected. Despite the craze that has surrounded Microsoft’s newest product, not everybody was ready to drop their former operating system (namely Windows XP, because I doubt many Mac or Linux users made the change) and switch to Vista.
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I am positive that you know what I’m talking about just after reading the title. After a while, your Windows practically refuses to shut down as fast as it used to, even though you successfully closed all of the running applications.

Microsoft says the issue is caused by a problem it experiences while trying to unload the current user’s profile, and they have published a HOTFIX for this.

Basically, you’re installing a new service, a service to help with slow log off and unreconciled profile problems. The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

On Windows 2000 you can benefit from this service if the application event log shows event id 1000 where the message text indicates that the profile is not unloading and that the error is “Access is denied”. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 either event ids 1517 and 1524 indicate the same profile unload problem.

To accomplish this the service monitors for logged off users that still have registry hives loaded. When that happens the service determines which application have handles opened to the hives and releases them. It logs the application name and what registry keys were left open. After this the system finishes unloading the profile.

It practically reclaims the resources of the ended tasks. I tried this myself on a XP test system, and it worked like a charm.

Since the first beta version of Windows Vista, along the time a bunch of experimented designers and coders built up theme packs, icon packs, partial transformations or even full transformation packs for XP mostly, that would change the face of your operating system, to be similar to the one of Vista.

I’m going to start with something simple enough. Some icon packs, for those of you who just want the icons to look different. Vista High PX is a package which contains more than 150 icons based on the model of Windows Vista at an exemplary quality. Or if you’re more of the picky kind of person, you can browse through Windows Vista Icon Packs, which is the greatest pack of Vista and Longhorn icons with a total of over 1200 icons.

Each time you start programs from the Start menu, you use the interface that has not changed for 10 years. No wonder that it becomes more and more difficult to use it due to the increase in the number of programs. Vista Start Menu is a completely another approach to the interface. In the process of development we were oriented towards how people perceive information and also towards the ability to remember the position of items.

And now for the top three transformation packs out there. The first would be Vista Customization Pack 3.6. Since it’s not just a “skin”, but a shell utility, the pack not only improves your desktop’s look, but it adds a few goodies too. The package performs many improvements to your Windows XP installation. The new icons, theme, color schemes and fonts blend in and give your system an awesome look. If, after you’ve installed it you’ll want to get back to the XP style, you can simply uninstall the pack, and it will undo the modifications.
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