Two Middle Americans have sued Acer over its low-cost Aspire notebooks, claiming that the Taiwanese PC giant pre-installed Windows Vista on machines ill-equipped to run Microsoft's latest OS.

With a lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco, California, two residents of Fostoria, Ohio seek damages and relief from the world's third-largest computer maker after purchasing a sub-$600 Aspire notebook that included Windows Vista Premium and a gigabyte of shared system and graphics memory.

Microsoft updates WGA

SOFTWARE GIANT MICROSOFT is updating Windows XP anti-piracy technology to detect illegal copies installed with stolen or faked product keys, or with new activation cracks.

“They are planting some supportive information using a corruptible analyst (in this case about Vista 7) and then push links to it to the press, as revealed by Mary Jo Foley.”Microsoft is coming to realise that this business model of licensing an operating system through/to OEMs is reaching its end. The company has already experimented with subscription and it tries to prevent protocols and formats from being a commodity. It also tries hard to push companies into new lock-in such as OOXML. It uses the corrupted individuals at Gartner Group to do this right now (as shown early in the week) and as Roughly Drafted put it the other day, "PC market share numbers as reported by groups such as IDG and Gartner were invented in the 90s to flatter Microsoft and marginalize competitors, providing a quotable metric to€ prove that nobody could possibly compete against the monopoly, so why even try."

It is the same with TCO. € The genesis of this term is a Microsoft-Gartner deal that we uncovered before in a series of posts.

To be more specific, by "corrupted individuals" in this case we refer to Michael Silver, who is still acting in complete alignment with Microsoft's evangelism presentation. They are planting some supportive information using a corruptible analyst (in this case about Vista 7) and then push links to it to the press, as revealed by Mary Jo Foley. Microsoft did this with the Burton Group quite recently in order to advance OOXML.

Moving on and looking at news about Windows, the latest advertising campaign is being ridiculed and Microsoft has come under fire for its approach towards developers, whom it now charges to merely develop for Windows Mobile. Both reports are from IDG.

Microsoft's New Message: Windows Is For Losers?

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So, Microsoft, if this is the message you're pushing--that your prospective customers "aren't cool enough" to own a Mac, what does this make your users? Losers?

Microsoft may charge developers if they submit within a year more than five applications or application updates to the Windows Mobile Marketplace, a move that has some developers concerned that the store won't be able to compete with the iPhone App Store or the Android Market.