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.

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/

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

I just knew this was going to happen.  Just a few days after Microsoft announced that they will give a free arcade game to Xbox Live gamers for the holiday network issues, someone decided that was just not good enough.  Someone has filed suit against Microsoft claiming Microsoft should have expected the troubles because of the holiday season, and therefore are in breach of contract.

I don’t know whether to laugh at this story, or to get angry.  Yes, I was upset that I wasn’t able to play Call of Duty 4 as much as I wanted, but that is certainly no excuse to file a lawsuit over.

If you received a new Xbox 360 or 360 game at Christmas, then you were probably disappointed at all the trouble you had connecting to Xbox Live during that time.  Over the holiday period Xbox Live had widespread issues reportedly due to the heavy increase in traffic.

In an effort to make gamers happy, Xbox Live GM, Marc Whitten wrote a letter that was posted on Xbox.com and Major Nelson’s blog.

“At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service.  And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge.  In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you. ”

Hopefully users of Xbox Live will be able to choose their game of choice, and not be handed something at XBL’s choosing.  We will have to wait for more details to see what will happen.