Windows and Imaging News, Mid-May Edition

A Smarter, More Powerful, Virtual PC

Microsoft has rolled out Service Pack 1 for Virtual PC 2007, its free desktop virtualization environment. VPC 2007 SP1 weighs in at 31.7MB for 32-bit versions of Windows XP Professional; Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise; Windows Server 2003; it's a bit larger (31.8MB) in its 64-bit edition. So, what's new?

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  • Support for Vista SP1, XP Professional SP3 and Windows Server 2008 as guest operating systems
  • Support for Vista SP1 and XP Professional SP3 as host operating systems
  • 64-bit operating systems can now be used to host VPC 2007 SP1 (however, you cannot run 64-bit operating systems as guests yet)
  • Hardware-assisted virtualization (which takes advantage of the hardware virtualization features in the latest Intel and AMD processors)
  • Multiple-monitor support for virtual machines

For all the details, download the Virtual PC 2007 SP1 Release Notes.

Update for Virtual Server 2005

There's also an update for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, Redmond's server virtualization tool, to support Windows Vista  SP1, Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2008 as guest and host operating systems. Learn more and get the update from KB 948515.

Photoshop Express Gets More Social and Protects Your Originals

Adobe Photoshop Express, the online photo sharing and casual-editing web service we told you about in April, has just been enhanced with several new features. In a letter to users on Thursday, Adobe's Jennifer Stern announced the following updates:

Flickr integration We've officially hooked up with Flickr ;-) Now you can pull photos from Flickr into Photoshop Express, amp them up, then upload them back into Flickr to show them off to your vast and adoring fan base.

Embeddable player Take your photo slideshows to the wider webified world with the embeddable player, which lets you post your slideshows to Facebook, MySpace, and other sites where your audience awaits.  

Save as Go version crazy with the new Save As feature. With Save As, you can keep the original shot of your best friend alongside all the ones where you gave him a tragically oversized head. (Your work is genius—why not save it all for posterity?)

I used the Save As and Embeddable Player features to build a simple Flash-based slide show embedded below (you might need to permit your browser to open ActiveX code, depending upon your security settings):

 

 You can learn more about using Photoshop Express by checking out the free ebook from Kelby Training (a major Photoshop training and publishing resource) here.

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Virtual PC 2007, Photoshop Express, Adobe Photoshop

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