It had been claimed that neither title would be able to run successfully using the older DirectX 9 graphics engine, with Microsoft urging gamers to take the plunge and switch to the Vista.

The news is sure to irk Microsoft who may now face an increased delay in some consumers adopting Vista at this early stage. However, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Earlier this month Falling Leaf Systems said in a press release that it believed Microsoft was deceiving consumers by stating that the titles would only work on Vista, and announced its intentions to release compatability software to disprove the claim.

"Microsoft has, in typical Microsoft fashion, decided to launch their forced migration onslaught in full force with the release of two games that will only run on Windows Vista," said Falling Leaf Systems CEO Brian Thomason in the press release.

With two overlapping events, Microsoft admitted what we have been saying all along, Vista, aka Windows Me Two (Me II), is a joke that no one wants.

The second that Vista came out, Microsoft makes it very hard for you to sell anything other than Me II. It can't do this on the business side because it would be laughed out the door, but for the walking sheep class, well, you take what you are shovelled.

The other equally monumental Me II failure? Gates in China launching a $3 version of bundled Me II. Why is this not altruism? Well, it goes back to piracy and how it helped enforce the MS monopoly. If you can easily pirate Windows, Linux has no price advantage, they both cost zero.

If you fit Microsoft's somewhat convoluted definition of poor, it still wants to lock you in, you might get rich enough to afford the full-priced stuff someday. It is at a dangerous crossroads, if its software bumps up the price of a computer by 100 per cent, people might look to alternatives.

That means no Me II DRM infection lock in, no mass migration to the newer Office obfuscated and patented file formats, and worse yet, people might utter the W word. Yes, you guessed it, 'why'. People might ask why it is sticking with the MS lock in, and at that point, it is in deep trouble.

Software King of the World, Sir William Gates III told a throng of Chinese in Beijing that he wanted to double the number of computer users to two billion by 2015.

Vole plans to offer a software package called Microsoft Student Innovation Suite for $3 to governments purchasing and giving Windows-based computer to primary and secondary students.

This would be the alleged "past its sell by date" software that Vole wants the Western world to abandon in favour of Vista which it will not be issuing it at home after the end of the year. Orlando Ayala, senior vice president at Microsoft's emerging segments market development group said that the move was not philanthropic.

Vole was fed up with seeing its software pirated and sold at a fraction of the price of a genuine product, he said.

Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that’s the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing.

Security vulnerabilities which cause Word 2007 to crash and burn have been defended by the spinsters at Microsoft.

Apparently, Word 2007 was designed to crash like that and Microsoft is proud of this particular feature.

According to ComputerPartner, the 'flaws' were spotted by an Israeli researcher Mati Aharoni of Offensive Security who was surprised when Vole didn't get back to him on them.

When Word 2007 runs out of ideas about what to do with a malformed Word document it crashes and thus saves it the trouble of having to think about it.

Anyway it was 'no big deal', she said, as users can restart the application to resume normal operations.

In response to widespread chatter on blogs and forums, Microsoft has acknowledged the presence of hacks that may allow pirates to bypass the product activation security feature in its Windows Vista operating system.

According to a post by Microsoft Senior Product Manager Alex Kochis on the Windows Genuine Advantage developers' blog, Microsoft has identified two ways in which hackers have broken the product activation security feature on original equipment manufacturer PCs that come bundled with Vista. But the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant does not yet have plans to snuff out this threat.

Reports of a vulnerability in Vista's product activation began to surface last month with word of a crack called "Vista Loader 2.0," an enhanced version of the "Vista Loader 1.0" that was devised by Chinese hackers, according to a March 10 post on the My Digital Life blog.

According to APC by early 2008, Microsoft will oblige its army of box-shifers to ship Vista and ditch XP.

The mag talked to Frank Luburic, a ThinkPad product manager at Lenovo, who said: "The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January... At that point, they'll have no choice."

The market reaction to Vista has been luke-warm to say the least and computer buyers are quite happy buying XP machines, thank you very much.

But, since Microsoft rules the desktop, the only real competition there is to Vista is coming from itself. And that'll have to stop.

An update posted for Intervideo WinDVD 8 confirms that it's AACS key has been possibly revoked. WinDVD 8 is the software which had it's device key compromised, allowing unfettered access to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD content, resulting in HD movies being made available via many torrent sites online. This is possibly the first known key revocation which has taken place, and little is known of the actual process used for key revocation. According to the release, 'Please be aware that failure to apply the update will result in AACS-protected HD DVD and BD playback being disabled,' which pretty much confirms that the key revocation has already taken place for all newly released Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs.

Windows Vista can be run for at least a year without being activated, a serious end-run around one of Microsoft's key anti-piracy measures, Windows expert Brian Livingston said today. Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, said that a single change to Vista's registry lets users put off the operating system's product activation requirement an additional eight times beyond the three disclosed last month. With more research, said Livingston, it may even be possible to find a way to postpone activation indefinitely.

Analysts over at the German web site Heise Online have uncovered a curious behavior with the latest Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) update.

According to tests conducted with an Ethernet sniffer program, if the user clicks the close button to cancel the installation of this WGA update, Windows sends some information back to Microsoft over the wires.

This information includes version numbers of both Windows and WGA, the language of the operating system, some registry information, and a cookie. Some hackers are worried that Microsoft is going to use this information to identify potential pirates, but Microsoft claims that the data is only used to try and diagnose failures with the WGA utility itself.

The outgoing data can be blocked, if desired, by personal firewall software or hardware router.