Maybe you shut down your work PC at the end of each day but leave your home machine running 24/7, only shutting down during lightning storms and other rare occasions. Regardless of how you approach shutting down and starting up, Microsoft is making efforts to ensure that when you do perform a cold boot in Windows 8, you'll be up and running faster than ever before.
Waiting anxiously for Windows 8? We could tell you to mark your calendars for Fall 2012, except for two things. First and foremost, there hasn't been any official word from Redmond regarding Windows 8's release date. And secondly, you're likely to run out of ink filling in all the blanks on your calendar that comprise Fall. Nevertheless, it appears Windows 8 is destined for desktops around this time next year.
Birthdays tend to make a person feel old, and not just the person celebrating them, but those who remember when it all began. And since we mentioned that Windows XP turned 
Has it been a decade already? A little more, actually. Two days ago marked the 10-year anniversary of the day Windows XP hit RTM (release to manufacturing) status before graduating to retail on October 25, 2001. Despite the fact that it's a 10-year-old operating system, XP still powers more than half of all Windows PCs around the world.
Windows 7 does a lot of things well. File management isn't one of them. That's too bad, because according to Microsoft, copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files represent half of the total command usage for the average Windows user. Microsoft refers to these commands as "copy jobs," and of those copy jobs, 50 percent take less than 10 seconds to complete, and a full 20 percent take longer than 2 minutes. In Windows 8, the Redmond software giant is putting a heavy focus on improving file management.
We've given up badgering AMD and Intel to implement native USB 3.0 into their chipsets, in part because both have plans to support the SuperSpeed spec, and also because third party chips from the likes of NEC and VIA work so well without driving up the cost of motherboards. That's the hardware side. On the software side, Microsoft is creating a brand new USB software stack to better support the USB 3.0 ecosystem.
Canonical hasn't been bashful about backing ARM, injecting support for the alternative processor into its desktop Ubuntu platform nearly three years ago before tablets and 1GHz smartphones made ARM the talk of the town. Now comes word that Ubuntu Server 11.10 will support ARM processors and ship simultaneously with x86 and x86-64 platforms.
Itching to get your hands on a copy of Windows 8? You won't have to wait much longer, or at least that's the case if you're willing to roll the dice on beta software being stable. Microsoft announced in a blog post yesterday that a pre-release version of Windows 8 is slated to ship real soon, which likely means a beta build is just around the corner.
It's probably safe to assume that the vast majority of Maximum PC readers aren't on the fence about whether to go with a Windows machine or a Mac OS X rig for their next system. But maybe you've been mulling a move to Linux because you fear Windows just isn't secure enough. A new Kaspersky report should put your mind at ease.
Perhaps motivated by Duke Nukem Forever shipping after a decade-and-a-half of development and delays, Microsoft decided to finally patch a vulnerability dating back to the 1990s. Included in yesterday's Patch Tuesday bulletin bonanza is a little nugget listed as CVE-2011-1871, which according to ComputerWorld.com is a fix for the dreaded 'Ping of Death,' or at least it was dreaded some two decades ago.
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