I read this PressPass article this morning from Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft plans to reduce the prices on several versions of retail editions of Vista with the launch of SP1.

“Since its release, Windows Vista has seen solid sales through the first year of availability, primarily through the sale of new PCs. Stand-alone retail sales, while not representing a large percentage of the business, represents an area of opportunity for additional growth the company sees based on the new editions introduced in 2007. To help reach that goal, Microsoft today announced price reductions on several consumer stand-alone editions.”

However, as Mary Jo Foley put it, “don’t get too excited about those Vista price cuts”.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes posted some information he has about the actual price cuts.

• The price of the upgrade version of Windows Vista Ultimate will drop from $259 to $219.

• The upgrade of Vista Home Premium will drop from $159 from $129.

There doesn’t appear (at this time) any information about the full retail version of Home Premium, which seems to be the choice of many consumers. When I buy a Windows operating system, I want the full version not an upgrade, but that is just my personal choice. Vista’s price point is one of the biggest faults of Vista, and we can only hope Microsoft has learned their lesson with this.

Microsoft needs to take all this into consideration when the next version of Windows is ready. Forget all the different SKU’s that most people have no clue about the differences of. Make one version, price it reasonably, and get it out there. Also, give consumers a family pack of 3 or so licenses for a discounted price. There is no value for me to upgrade all the PC’s in my house to Vista.

This past Sunday I discovered a trojan on my main desktop PC. Later on that day I discovered it had also made its way to my laptop. It had disabled some Windows applications, and just to be on the safe side I decided to just back up my data, and restore a disk image with Acronis True Image. Doesn’t sound too bad? Yeah right.

The disk image for my desktop appeared to install correctly, but after a few hours of working with it, it appeared something got corrupted in the process. This, of course, after I spent hours updating, installing applications, and updating again. So I just said forget it, and did a clean install from my Vista Ultimate disk and started from scratch.

Next, I tried to restore my laptop image, and of course the disk image was corrupt. Something must have gone wrong on my external drive at some point, which screwed up both disk images. It’s now Monday and I’m doing a clean install of Vista on both my desktop and laptop PCs. The amount of reboots between updates is just incredible.

So here we are on day three and I almost have my laptop ready to take a new disk image. While that is being done I will finish installing applications and setting up my desktop PC, and then image that drive again as well. So three days of nothing but installing and reinstalling. I can’t do a bunch of things I was working on because I need the computers, so all I pretty much have to work with is my Mac, which I’m writing this on now.

I guess that’s just the way it goes in a Windows world.

After being in beta for quite a while, Microsoft officially released Windows Live SkyDrive. During the beta testing users had up to 1GB of online storage, but today it was upped to a whopping 5GB! In addition to the increased storage, SkyDrive also rolled out in 35 countries as well.

I have been using SkyDrive throughout the beta period, and I have been very impressed at its progress and usefulness. SkyDrive gives you the ability to have public and private shared folders, which is great when needing to collaborate with someone across the country, or now, across the world.

http://skydrive.live.com/

A few weeks ago I wrote about the release of CursorFX, which is the replacement for CursorXP. CursorFX allows you to easily and safely change your Windows cursor to one of the thousands already available for download.

The original release was a little bumpy, so today an update was released that fixed a host of issues.

CursorFX is a free download, and there is a Plus version available with additional features. For more information visit cursorfx.com.

Since today is Valentine’s Day I thought it would be good to give people some links to some Valentine’s inspired skins and themes.  There are several types of themes and skins you can use from cursors to wallpapers, and much more.

• http://islanddog.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?aid=177708
• http://islanddog.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?aid=177509
• http://islanddog.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?aid=176950
• http://islanddog.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?aid=176035

Stardock has released Tweakvista 1.1. TweakVista has become one of the most popular tweaking tools for Windows Vista. It lets users safely “tweak” various Vista system settings to let users get Vista running to their desired preference.

TweakVista 1.1 is merely the first step on the journey to let users start tweaking Vista themselves. Here’s what’s new:

• Snapshots. This is a basic feature that lets people mess with things in a lot safer way. It’s more useful in many respects than “Microsoft System Restore” because what it does is pinpoint changes to what’s loading on start up. The snapshot feature lets people pin-point apps that are causing problems and be easily eliminated.
• Process Exploration. Resource Page now has a services tab so that all those “svchost.exe” processes can be easily looked at to see what they’re really doing.
• Service Explorer. It’s not hard to look at services in Vista if you know what you’re doing. TweakVista, however, lets users easily manage what services are running and includes a way for each service to be part of a web forum thread where users can discuss in depth each service and why they do or don’t need it.
• Locked File Query. Ever have a file that you can’t delete or modify because it’s in use by some other program? Now you can find out which program is doing that and terminate it.

Download and more information: www.tweakvista.net

If you are a fan of the Xbox 360 like myself, I often find myself at stores like GameStop picking up some original Xbox games for a value price.  The big downside is not all original games are compatible, and the list on Xbox.com isn’t the easiest to navigate to.

If you have an iPhone, I developed this web app that displays the list of original Xbox games in an easy to navigate and read format.

Point your iPhone to: Link 

More information can be found here.

CursorFX is a free program that allows users to customize their mouse cursors in ways far beyond what Windows is capable of doing on its own.  CursorFX is the replacement for CursorXP which only ran on Windows XP systems.  CursorFX runs on both Windows Vista and XP, and updates the Windows mouse cursor engine to support fluid animations, alpha blending, effects, real-time shadowing, user-action mouse states, mouse cursor resizing on the fly, color changing, trails, and much more.

A gallery for CursorFX cursor themes is available on WinCustomize.com to download hundreds of free mouse cursors, trails, effects, and more.  CursorFX is a free program. A plus version is available for $19.95 that adds more features.

Download:  www.cursorfx.com

The launch day for the highly anticipated 4x strategy space game, Sins of a Solar Empire, is finally here. Sins is available in both retail stores and through the digital distribution system, Stardock Central.

A gameplay example was written that gives an awesome overview of what some of the gameplay entails. You can check out that article here.

Screenshots, videos, and more info can be found at the official Sins of a Solar Empire Web site.