We have already mentioned how Vole has tried to be helpful and released a little program that scans your system and tells what you need to get an upgrade, and over the weekend we saw another one from ATI here.

The ATI Vista says to get it all running smoothly I will need to buy a card that supports a PCI Express bus type that would offer greater bandwidth at higher frequencies over AGP or PCI bus types.

The VoleWare version is clunky, it requires you to download .net, but it does tell you which types of software will not work under Vista at the moment too. In my case Nero 7 Premium Nero will have to be uninstalled as well as a little thing called Sun J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 6.

The question is, which one is right? It seems that ATi want me to dump my Nvidia card and Microsoft wants me to abandon Java. We wonder what they are really trying to say?

Sources at ATI confirmed that seventy per cent of people who took the test are not ready for Premium. The only thing I failed to meet was the minimum disk space - you need to have at least 15GB free and I don't.

This is what ATI said: "Sorry, your video card does not meet this recommended requirement. Upgrading to a more powerful video card will make all your applications look better. Click the 'We Recommend' button to see some great options." The company recommends a $400 card to make us all happy, something like X1900 XTX. Surprise, surprise.

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM.

Since 2003, Microsoft's strategy to balance these costs and benefits has been to batch patches: instead of issuing them one at a time, it's been issuing them all together on the second Tuesday of each month.

Last week, a hacker developed an application called FairUse4WM that strips the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files.

Now, this isn't a "vulnerability" in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: "Oh no. I can now play the music I bought for my PC on my Mac. I must install a patch so I can't do that anymore."

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on Microsoft's DRM.

It should surprise no one that the system didn't stay patched for long. FairUse4WM 1.2 gets around Microsoft's patch, and also circumvents the copy protection in Windows Media DRM 9 and 11beta2 files.

The almighty vole has decided that guitarist Robert Fripp's work on the opening tune for Vista is so good, it will be compulsory and won't be able to be switched off.

Steve Ball, group program manager for the Windows Audio Video Excellence team told punters that Windows Vista should present a "common, and beautiful, face to the world." In other words, Microsoft has spent shedloads on its corporate image and you are darn well going to appreciate it.

Ball said that there will be a pre-wired sound that plays when the system is ready for you to logon which will be non-customisable, just like the X-Box. He said that there was no big deal about it. Sony and Toshiba both have compulsory sounds.

Apple fanboys laughing at Microsoft's DRM being cracked by software called Fairuse will be strangely quiet today after it has been revealed that an Apple version has been made available.

QTFairUse6 strips the DRM from iTunes music and allows you to do anything you like with it. The crack will probably do more damage to music sales because iTunes music is more popular than Windows Media files.

The software adapts original code from previous attempts at cracking Apple's DRM and the result is somewhat complicated. It requires the use of Python 2.4 and several other tools and uses the information that is buffered after iTunes/QuickTime decodes the file.

It is also proof that hackers can bring down Apple's stuff if it is economically significant, it is just that Windows generally is a better target.

On July 18, Microsoft's WGA team promised to send me a disk with a product key from their blocked list. It was supposed to arrive via overnight service, but it was never sent. After several follow-up messages, I was assured on July 26 I would have something by the end of that week. The package finally arrived the next week, on August 1. It contained a CD-R with a handwritten label that read "Windows XP SP2 – VLK," and a 25-character product key on a small slip of paper.

Over the weekend, I hoisted the Jolly Roger, cleared a partition on a test machine, slid the CD into the drive, and prepared to join the ranks of Windows pirates. Unfortunately, the product key that Microsoft had sent me didn’t work.

No problem, I thought. I'll just do what any red-blooded pirate would do and Google for a working product key. It took me about 15 minutes to find a web page containing five volume license keys that had reportedly been posted on September 9 2004.

My bootleg key worked perfectly. I went back to Windows Update and downloaded a series of Optional Updates and drivers that are only available to Genuine Windows users. I went over to the Internet Explorer homepage and downloaded the latest beta of IE7, passing a validation test twice – once on the download and again on the installation. And five minutes ago I went over to the Windows Defender page – this is another free utility that's only available to Genuine Windows users – and the validation check waved me right through.

They haven't managed to identify a stolen product key that's been floating around the Internet for nearly two years. I'm reluctantly running a pirated version of Windows and can't get caught no matter how hard I try.

Some of Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Vista its most stable and secure operating system ever could cause instability and new security flaws, according to a Symantec report.

Researchers at Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec examined the new networking technology in recent test releases of Vista, Microsoft's next major operating system release, according to the report. They found several security bugs and determined that Vista's networking technology will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP's, the report said.

"Microsoft has removed a large body of tried and tested code and replaced it with freshly written code, complete with new corner cases and defects," the researchers wrote in the report, scheduled for publication Tuesday.

Following an outcry from corporate customers, Microsoft is removing an add-on feature to Windows that allowed users to create password-protected folders.

The feature was introduced as a free download last week. Almost immediately, people raised questions over how businesses would grapple with the ability of individual workers to encrypt their data.

"Oh great, have they even thought about the impact this could have on enterprises. I'm already trying to frantically find information on this product so that A) I can block to all our desktops and B) figure out how we then support it when users inevitably lose files. I can see the benefit in this product for home users, but it's a bit of a sloppy release by Microsoft," Stuart Graham said in a posting on Windows Server-related site MSBlog.

We all know about Microsoft's WGA initiative that started last July. Most of us were troubled to learn that the WGA has been 'phoning home' to Microsoft at every boot. Well, get ready, because eventually Microsoft may be turning off copies of Windows without WGA installed. According to a Microsoft technician, 'in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.'

Games publisher Take-Two Interactive Software, said it received grand jury subpoenas requesting more information about its infamous Grand theft Auto Hot Coffee scenes.

The company said it has been requested to reveal just how much its officers and directors really knew about "the creation, inclusion and programming of hidden scenes" in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The New York DA also asked for information relating to the submission of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to the Entertainment Software Rating Board for a rating, and the company's disclosures regarding the hot coffee 'mod'.