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Windows 7 is the new Microsoft operating system that will be the successor of Windows Vista. The title is just a codename that is being used during development and Microsoft already confirmed that they will come up with another name once the release of the new operating system draws nearer.

Still a question to most users is why it is called Windows 7. The reason is really simple. It is called Windows 7 because Windows Vista is Windows 6 and Windows XP Windows 5. There is really no other reason behind the choice of the name

Microsoft is concentrating on the development of Windows Vista and is trying its best to keep the information about Windows 7 to a bare minimum to avoid hurting sales of Windows Vista.

Still some information are available and a great source for these information is the website Windows 7 News

Microsoft is working on a system that will allow users to run software and store system settings on USB flash drives.

The project is named as “StartKey” and Microsoft has landed to an agreement with Sandisk. The aim of project is to allow users for more integration with Windows than any other portable application technologies.

For example, you will be able to store your desktop settings, wallpaper, icons, customized theme and contact lists and when you plug that StarKey drive into any computer, you will be experiencing your familiar computer environment.

As a hope to topple Google Inc., Microsoft has been made $44.6B Bid for Yahoo. But Yahoo has decided to reject Microsoft’s takeover bid. The official announcement from Yahoo was;
proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders.
Many analysts expected a higher offer from Microsoft that would eventually lead to an agreement. But Microsoft intends to take its bid directly to Yahoo’s shareholders by authorizing a proxy campaign, instead of raising its bid.

Most of you probably knows, but this article is for those who haven’t heard about Compability Pack yet. Together with Office 2007 new Office formats has been added to the Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Default file format has been changed from doc to docx, xls to xlsx and ppt to pptx.

Unfortunately you cant open these files with earlier versions of office. For those who doesn’t use office 2007 but deals with docx (or xlsx, pptx) files, Microsoft has developed a Compability Pack.

Compability Pack can be downloaded from Microsoft download center. Right after installation you will need to restart your pc. Then you can open, edit, and save Office Word 2007 documents in previous versions of Microsoft Office.

Before installing Compatibility Pack, make sure that you have all updates installed for your Office version.

Since Windows Vista requires a decent hardware, you need to find out whether your hardware is compatible or not before upgrade. There are several ways to check compatibility of your computer.

As a quick solution you can check Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) website (Unfortunately you need to use Internet Explorer to open this link). This website contains a huge amount of computers and devices that have been tested to work with Windows Vista. The list contains bunch of categories and devices that you can search.

If you are an XP user, you can use Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to check if your computer’s hardware is compatible with Vista or not. Once you downloaded this tool there will be few more step to run out. You should make sure that all USB devices (printer, scanner, webcam, etc…) are connected to your pc, so advisor can check theirs compatitibility as well. Right after being sure that everything is ok you can install software.

A shortcut will be placed on desktop. Launch the application and click ‘Start Scan’. When the Scanning is completed click on see details to see compatibility test result.

The tool is also going to recommend you particular flavour of Vista that would suit and run on your computer.