In what could be the company's only option for prolonging its complaint about Microsoft's deployment of its Windows Desktop Search component in Windows Vista, Google - which many believed had actually won a concession from Microsoft last week - has filed an amicus brief with the US district court overseeing Microsoft's compliance in its antitrust settlement with the US Justice Dept.

As first discovered by Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop, Google's brief asks the court to effectively compel the Justice Dept. -- which is charged with overseeing Microsoft's conduct with regard to compliance with court order -- to reveal more information about what Microsoft agreed to do.

When Microsoft's director of its Security Technology Unit Jeffrey Jones previewed a report that was soon to be published about the number of reported and addressed vulnerabilities in Windows Vista over the first six months of its consumer market shelf life, at TechEd in Orlando two weeks ago, the generally confused and negative reaction among attendees who ended up arguing with Jones for most of the session, prompted BetaNews (who was there) to decide that, amid the other news emerging that week, it wasn't worth covering.

The essence of the report is that Windows Vista had a far fewer number of reported security vulnerabilities during its first six months not only than Windows XP after its introduction, as recorded in the US National Vulnerability Database, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS, Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support Desktop, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

Within its recent response to the United States Department of Justice that stated it would modify Windows Vista to enable end users and OEMs to change the default desktop search it uses, Microsoft for the first time discussed Service Pack 1 for the OS, saying a beta will come this year.

Microsoft has remained unusually silent about its SP1 plans for Vista, encouraging users and businesses not to wait for the first major upgrade. With a beta slated for the end of 2008 2007, Vista users could see the final version of SP1 by the middle of next year. For the update, Windows Desktop Search will continue to run in the background, but other programs such as Google Desktop Search can replace Microsoft's results - if the user chooses to do so via a link. Few other details are known about Vista SP1 at this time.

Last February, a Microsoft Windows Vista client team product manager was quoted by the Associated Press as having said that his company actively considered canceling virtualization support in Vista after a Black Hat security demonstrator showed a tool that could leverage virtualization capabilities to make the operating system blindly run within a malware hypervisor. That claim has since been denied by Microsoft representatives who work more closely with, or who lead, its virtualization projects.

This morning, sources cited the same team product manager, Scott Woodgate, as having indicated his company would be announcing a licensing change to Windows Vista with respect to virtualization, perhaps today. Consumers were to expect Vista licenses adjustments to enable Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium editions to run in virtualized environments, perhaps supported by Mac OS X or VMware. When such an announcement did not come, and when the company issued a brief statement to reporters indicating it would not come, it was reported that Microsoft "flip-flopped" on virtualization.

In agreeing to make what could be described technically as a minor change to the way it handles its options for consumer desktop search, Microsoft last night may have made its most symbolically significant statement to date with regard to its current stance in the technology market: It backed down, in response to a complaint from Google that its placement of desktop search capabilities within Windows Vista constituted a breach of its antitrust settlement agreement with the US and states' governments regarding middleware.

The question centered around Windows Desktop Search, a feature built into Vista but which essentially competes with Google Desktop Search, which a user must download separately and install intentionally. Google filed a formal complaint, which it never formally acknowledged or even publicly mentioned, but whose existence was finally entered into the public record yesterday by the US Justice Dept.

For a great many large businesses, "the move to the next Windows" has been an ongoing, daily affair for at least well over a decade. And up until recently, the reasons why this migration tends to proceed so slowly have been, to Microsoft, a complete mystery.

If the company can just get Vista pushed out to the corporate desktop, its foot will be in the door just enough, it believes, to make enough of a clearance to push through its more profitable business services: SharePoint, BizTalk, Office Communications, Exchange, audio and video.

ORLANDO - Perhaps the closest thing to a rock star you find at a technology conference is a guy whose talks are so good, that the same attendees will attend their encore performances. If anyone makes a list of three "rock stars" at TechEd, one of them would have to be Mark Russinovich, the former SysInternals security engineer, now a Technical Fellow with Microsoft.

Russinovich's "Kernel Changes" talks are among the "must see" items on attendees' schedules, and is often the only place where you can find them walking up to the podium to shake the presenter's hand and introduce themselves...before the session begins. Each time, Russinovich mixes the talk up a bit. This time around, he used virtual XP and Vista sessions to demonstrate an interesting new set of priorities on the part of the operating system, as provided by Multimedia Class Scheduler Service.

Adobe on Tuesday released the first major update to both Acrobat and Reader 8.0, adding support for Windows Vista and remote printing capabilities through a partnership with FedEx Kinko's. Version 8.1 (download from FileForum) also brings integration with Microsoft Office 2007.

Acrobat users can now export Office documents to PDF files by right clicking, as well as preview multi-page PDF files from without Outlook 2007. Adobe has additionally added Flash movie playback for Mac users, removing the need to use QuickTime. The new "Send to FedEx Kinko's" toolbar button quickly sends a document to the company's remote printing service, primarily designed for business users when traveling.

Hoping to avoid a "Hot Coffee" type incident, Microsoft said Friday that it is delaying the Vista release of Halo 2 to the first week of June, approximately two weeks behind schedule. At issue is the discovery of partial nudity in one of the scenes within the game, the company says. The issue is not easily found during game play, and has since been fixed.

The rating on the game will not change as the first run of discs are the only ones to include the content. A warning label will be placed on those discs, and a patch made available to remove the offending content. Subsequent shipments would have the patch pre-applied at the factory.

LOS ANGELES - In a completely unanticipated announcement made quietly during a virtualization talk here at WinHEC 2008, Microsoft announced a completely new SKU of Windows Vista, to be entitled Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD). Its purpose will be to enable Vista to run within an enterprise exclusively as virtual machines, managed centrally using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Under the new system, a thin client logging on will request a VM image from SCVMM. Based on the user profile it pulls up from that logon, SCVMM will then locate the best server on which the image of Vista will be run. Applications licensed to that user will then be run from the VM, as well as the seat for Vista that's licensed to that user. But only a thin virtualization connection package will address that image remotely.

During his keynote at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference Tuesday, Bill Gates told an audience of developers that 40 million copies of Windows Vista have sold in the first 100 days of the operating system's release - a figure more than the install base of Windows' competitors combined.

The 40 million sales figure does, however, includes copies of Vista that were sold before the OS launched at the end of January through upgrade options on new PCs. Still, Gates said the rate of adoption of Vista is twice that seen for Windows XP in 2001. Premium editions of Vista account for 78 percent of sales, he added.

LOS ANGELES - The reason Microsoft puts on a PC hardware-specific hardware conference every year, even though it's technically not a PC hardware manufacturer, is to appeal to its single most important and influential class of customers: system builders. An unavoidable truth in the personal computer industry is that consumer PCs are designed to run Windows. The way they handle the PCI Express bus, the way they manage graphics drivers, the way they connect to peripherals are all directly connected to how Windows works.

This is where Microsoft capitalizes on its inherent advantage as a commercial producer of operating systems. Windows is the principal driver of the personal computer economy. If Linux had more than half the PC users in the world, this would still be the case: Windows is built to sell. For this reason mainly, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD, nVidia and ATI, and Asus and MSI take Windows more seriously than anything else.

Responding to a number of recent articles claiming that Vista's new "Aero" user interface causes laptops running the new operating system to drain their battery faster, Microsoft has published its own results. The company says Aero consumes only 1% to 4% more battery life than when the feature is disabled.

Vista is designed to turn off transparency effects when put into a power-saving profile, but Microsoft product manager Nick White says, "We don't turn off Aero wholesale because in the end, doing so is not going to save you much more power." White notes that a laptop display is the big culprit, consuming between 15% and 25% of the battery, while the graphics processor (GPU) uses only a small percent, even when being pushed to its limits with Aero.

VMware this week made available version 6.0 of its desktop virtualization product, which has set a standard for testing and development, and competes with Microsoft's now-free VirtualPC. New features in Workstation 6.0 include support for Vista, dual monitors, and USB 2.0 devices.

While the server world increasingly turns to virtualization to take advantage of the huge advances in CPU power with the advent of multi-core chips, virtual machines play a critical role in aiding IT administration, development and software testers. Users can quickly boot up a computer within a computer, as well as do cross-platform testing without multiple hardware setups.

Chinese computer maker Lenovo has inked a deal with Microsoft to buy up to $1.3 billion worth of Windows Vista and Office 2007 for the next year. A similar deal valued at $1.2 billion was signed last year, which was considered a big step toward fighting piracy in China.

Lenovo has been battling Taiwan-based Acer to be the world's number-three computer manufacturer behind giants Hewlett-Packard and Dell. In turn, the company has been forging closer ties with Microsoft, including a joint research center announced last month to be built in China. Details of the new Microsoft agreement will be finalized soon, the companies said.