Like a lot of Windows Vista users, I couldn’t wait to upgrade to Windows 7 on my home PC. Finally, something from Microsoft that promised to make computing faster and easier. Since I was just moving from Vista Home Premium to 7 Home Premium I didn’t even bother backing up my files.

That was nearly a very big mistake.

The upgrade ended up taking more than a week, with multiple phone calls to India and five hours on the phone with Microsoft engineers. And I now have several more hours of work ahead to reinstall all my applications and sort out my personal files. I don’t think I’ve lost any data, but fast and easy it wasn’t. Continue reading "Windows 7 (nearly) ate my computer"

Maija Palmer reports in today’s Business Life section on the growth of mega data centres:

In the middle of a scrubby business park on the outskirts of Dublin, a hulking grey building has recently sprung up. It is protected by high, spiked railings and two sets of steel security barriers that are thick enough to stop a tank.

There is no name above the door, but this 303,000 sq ft industrial building is Microsoft’s new mega data centre, its first large-scale computing facility in Europe, representing an investment of $500m (£300m, €335m).

Continue reading “Where the internet lives”…

Top wired telecom provider AT&T is clearly doing something right with U-verse TV, its cable-like service delivering more than 100 high-definition television channels over internet pipes to what are now more than 1.8m living rooms.

On Thursday, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan and others came to San Francisco to show off what may be coming improvements to U-verse, among other things, from the research labs that claim 8 Nobel Prizes. Continue reading "AT&T says people still don’t want the Web on TV"

Paris Hilton must be breathing a sigh of relief.

Losing control of all the personal stuff on her Sidekick once was bad enough, without the threat that Microsoft would then just swallow it all. So for all the users of the “hiptop” device, the news on Thursday that the software company believes it can recover “most, if not all” of the data that was thought to have been lost after a data centre failure will come as a big relief.

It leaves some uncomfortable questions for Microsoft, though. Continue reading "That Sidekick data must be in here somewhere…"

Android phones loomed large at the CTIA show in San Diego this week, while the FCC chairman made the trip to the West Coast to warn the wireless industry’s convention of a looming spectrum crisis.

AT&T and others blamed heavy-duty data users and smartphones like the iPhone for a 5,000 per cent increase in data traffic over three years.

It has also been a big week for antitrust cases, as Europe finally ended its battle with Microsoft and the US began one with IBM.

We discussed all of this and more in our weekly FT techtalk - a live, multimedia chat with the FT’s tech correspondents. Read the transcript below and  join us again next week - at 0800 Pacific time (1500GMT, 1600BST) here on Friday. Continue reading "FT techtalk - Invasion of the data snatchers"

More than 10,000 user names and passwords for Hotmail and other Microsoft services were anonymously posted over the weekend at a free site for programmers, it was reported Monday, prompting security experts to recommend that users change their passwords.

Microsoft said it was investigating the posting to a coding site called pastebin.com, which hinted at a much bigger password collection: according to tech news site Neowin.net, the account names all started with A or B. Continue reading "Thousands of hacked Hotmail passwords posted"

While some cast yesterday’s news in the Google books saga as the death of the settlement that would have resolved the search king’s long fight with publishers, the bigger picture is that out-of-print books for all just got a lot closer to reality.

True, the New York federal court filing was officially a request to withdraw the deal Google struck late last year with publishers and authors, in the wake of objections Friday from the US Justice Department. But that version had a good chance of getting rejected by the judge, given that the regulatory concerns followed major objections from the non-profit world, other interested parties and the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Continue reading "Google to US: we can work it out"

For gamers who want to know what they will be able to play on the Xbox 360’s ‘Natal’ motion controller, here are a few more details from the FT’s interview with Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s games business.

There will be a ‘creator’s panel’ at the Tokyo Game Show on September 24 featuring three of Japan’s top developers discussing the possibilities of Natal. They will be Keiji Inafune of Capcom, the man behind zombies-in-a-mall hit Dead Rising; Sega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi, the creator of Super Monkey Ball; and Hideo Kojima, previously of Konami, the director of the Metal Gear Solid series.

Continue reading "Space Invaders on Natal"