Puget Systems says PC buyers are "reluctant" to step up to Windows 8.

Depending on where you look, Windows 8 is either off to a scorching fast start or it flopped out of the gate with little interest from consumers. There doesn't appear to be much middle ground. Obviously, Microsoft is promoting the former, claiming it sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the first month. Yet companies like Asus are saying that the demand for Windows is "not that good," while PC OEMs in general are refusing to take the blame for soft sales. What's the real story? To help answer that question, Puget Systems posted some interesting data and thoughts about its own Windows 8 versus Windows 7 sales figures.

Give Dell credit for wading into open source waters with "Project Sputnik," a pilot program to build a developer solution based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. After six months of exploration and feedback from testers, Project Sputnik has now landed and is renamed Dell XPS 13 Laptop, Developer Edition. It's a thin and light 13.3-inch Ultrabook powered by Intel's Core i7 3517U processor and driven by Ubuntu, though you could potentially end up paying more versus a similarly spec'd Windows 7 model (with slower processor) or Windows 8 model (with half the storage space). Let's look at the hardware.

Imagine if a car thief walked into a dealership and was handed the keys to a new automobile, no questions asked. That would be too easy, right? Well, that's essentially what Microsoft did with Windows 8 Pro when users went to claim their free copy of the Windows Media Center upgrade. One of the unintentional side effects of applying the upgrade is that it permanently activates Windows 8, Venture Beat reports.