Windows 7 has been out now for nearly a year. With the release of Service Pack 1 coming next year, how many of you are still on Windows XP or older and plan to upgrade to Windows 7?  I have computers that will stay on Windows XP despite the lure of Windows 7.  The reason?  Certain peripherals just won’t do 64-bit and the use of the virtual machine can be limited.  So will you wait?  Or are you ready to pull / have pulled the trigger?

Want to watch Netflix on your XBox 360?  Or what about playing the latest multiplayer games?  For that, you’ll need a subscription to XBox Live Gold.  For a limited time, through Dell, you can get a year’s subscription for only $30.  You’ll want to buy two in order to get free shipping.  It’s not that often that these subscriptions go for only $30 a year…but it’s sure to happen again…sometime in 2 years….have fun!

Goto Dell to take advantage of this deal.

I do enjoy eBay.  I’ve bid and I’ve sold ever since I was just a freshman in high school.  Now, according to Forbes [via WMExperts] , eBay will have an app available by the time Windows Phone 7 launches this coming Fall.  eBay is also playing around with a Half.com application which would allow one to use barcode scanning to help one find things.  Ah, finally, barcode scanning takes off – so much for the CueCat – but this is certainly larger.

ZDNet reports of a paper from Microsoft Research titled “User Experiences with Activity-Based Navigation on Mobile Devices”.  From this paper, the “Menlo is a prototype mobile device with a capacitive touch screen (4.1‖ diagonal, 800×480) running Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 which incorporates a Bosch BMA150 3-axis accelerometer and Bosch BMP085 digital pressure sensor (barometer).”  It utilizes a Silverlight application called “Greenfield” which allows users to retrace their steps to find their cars.  I’m fascinated at what type of possibilities will open up with Silverlight development.  Microsoft failed miserably with their previous phone….but one thing’s for sure, don’t quit…just keep trying.  Failure comes, but success follows!  When I read Bill Gate’s book on “The Road Ahead” he had quite the vision of technology including mobile devices.  There will always be more to research and innovate.  All it takes is one great innovation properly executed to topple over existing technologies or at least gain a good amount of market share.

Today marks the final Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) platform preview before beta testing commences in September.  IE9 supports HTML5 and features the new Chakra JavaScript engine.  Test scores now give it a whopping 95 out of a 100 for Acid  3’s test renderings.  Looking at the new platform examples, one of particular note was the Hamster Dance Revolution game.  Using Google Chrome, the game lagged considerably and was virtually unplayable especially in the later levels.  Using the IE9 render engine however, the game was a pleasure to play.  Of course, this particular example is geared towards IE9.  Going to other sites, I did find IE9 to be very quick and responsive.  There are still many bugs to squash however as Outlook Web Access would not load in this test version of IE9.  I like what I see so far – I’ll continue to use the IE9 preview platform to surf my favorite sites for a while.  For now, I’ll need to use CTRL+O to open each site and no back or forward buttons exist yet – but what do I expect from just a platform preview?

Download the new IE9 preview and get a glimpse of the future.