Microsoft announced that its “Games for Windows Live” service is now officially live and is ready to offer cross-platform matches between Windows Vista gamers with Xbox 360 players and best-in-class PC-to-PC multiplayer experience.

If you are using Vista and have young kids around then we recommend fiddling around with parental controls to block certain websites and/or media content but if you want it to be blocked you had better make sure you are using IE7 instead of Firefox.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs compared Windows to hell. There is no reason for Steve Jobs to like Windows, in fact there is no real reason for anyone to like Windows. I’ve come to despise it with almost every fiber in my being, that won’t keep me from using a Windows based desktop but as far as laptops go, it’s a Mac from here on out.

Microsoft has unveiled what it hopes to be a new multi-billion dollar product category called “Surface Computing”, which is designed to be completely intuitive, requiring no instructions or training to learn how to interact with the so-called “Surface”.

Most people or corporations interested in Vista are looking at it for its much touted increased security over XP. Others are just interested in it for DirectX 10 games that only run on Vista. For those looking at it for the security, there may not be any advantage to Vista over XP.

Microsoft and some PC vendors have been taken to court over the Vista labeling system, which was said to deceive consumers by letting PC makers promote computers as “Windows Vista Capable” despite the fact that the machines were not capable of running the “signature” features of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.

Some people like the way the Synaptic package manager works in Linux with its ability to download and install updates for everything installed on the system, including the OS and its ability to download and install other applications with a single click.

Faced with the problem of a $100 million funding shortfall over 10 years, the New Zealand Ministry of Education declined to renew a deal for Microsoft Office and has ordered the removal of the software from about 25,000 Apple Macintosh computers in schools.

Vista hasn’t exactly gotten off to a great start, despite certain sales claims by Microsoft. Now that Dell is offering Linux on some of their computers, Vista may even be a harder sell. I still don’t recommend installing Linux (especially Ubuntu) yourself but I see nothing wrong when it’s been installed by an OEM. A monkey could install Vista.

Microsoft this week shipped a pair of new tools designed to protect users of Microsoft Office 2003 and Office 2007 products from zero-day exploits. The tools allow administrators to block particular Office file types and convert Office documents into Open XML formats, respectively.

Microsoft has admitted that users of Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows Vista missed out on some of the security patches released this month, as its security update services had failed to deploy the fixes. But the software giant has addressed the problem with the release of a new update.

Some users of Windows XP have been experiencing PC lockups during automatic update scans for the last few months. In fact, this very site has an article about that and how to patch it. Some are not happy with the patch saying it does not fix the problem.

Microsoft has on a number of occasions claimed that its Vista is more secure than any other operating system it released. While acknowledging that Microsoft has done a lot to make the new operating system more stable and secure, researchers at software security firm McAfee warn users to be more careful.

With previous versions of Windows like Windows 98 or 2000 it was fairly easy to move back to them if you weren’t happy with Windows XP. This was back in the good old days when software didn’t require to phone home all the time to check for piracy. Things have changed and this is the world we live in now. Microsoft has made it exceedingly more difficult to move back to XP if you have Vista installed.

Despite Bill Gates disclosure last week at WinHEC that Microsoft has sold 40 million copies of Vista since the operating system hit the market, high-tech market research firm, In-Stat, says the demand for new PCs has not been impacted significantly by Vista’s delay and subsequent release.