Article by George Norman

On 06 May 2011

Here are a few Microsoft-related news that I though you may want to know about. The first one is that on May 10, as part of the Patch Tuesday program, Microsoft will roll out two security bulletins. One bulletin carries the 'critical' rating and is meant to fix a Windows vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution. The second bulletin is rated 'important' and it is meant to address two Office vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution. An advance notification for the May 2011 Patch Tuesday has been posted online here.

Moving on, the second news is that Microsoft has launched an online video competition that comes with a cool grand prize: a trip for two to the Cannes Lions Festival in France and $8,000 cash. To win the prize you must come up with a 60 to 90-second long video that shows, in a creative and entertaining way, how a Windows 7 PC is at the core of a student’s life. All videos must be submitted by the end of the month. Additional information on this competition is available here.


And so we get to the third Microsoft-related news: according to figures released by Net Applications, IE9’s usage share grew to about 10% on Windows 7 in April. On the last day of April, IE9 usage on Windows 7 was of 9.95%. for the whole month of April, IE9 scored an average usage share of 7.5%, double than the average usage share for March which was of 3.6%

Moving on to the 4th Microsoft-related news, it seems that the company’s free security software solution, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) did not do all that brilliant in AV-Test’s Q1 2011 round of testing. During Q1 AV-Test loaded 22 security products on Windows 7 powered machines and saw how they faired up. AV-Test scored the 22 security products on a scale from 0 to 6. Here is how MSE did:

• Protection (static and dynamic malware detection) – 2.5
• Repair (system disinfection and rootkit removal) – 3.5
• Usability (system slow-down caused by the tools and the number of false positives) – 5.5

The 5th news puts the spotlight on the company itself – in a survey recently released by market researcher Harris Interactive, Microsoft did not make it to the top 10 most reputable companies in the US. If Microsoft ranked 7th in 2010, this year it did not make it to the top 10 – it ranked a lowly 16. Longtime competitor Apple ranked 5th in case you were wondering.

And we conclude this article with the news that several new Windows 7 themes are available for download:

Galapagos by Ryan Good theme



26Creative theme by Chang Fan-Hsuan



Serbian Landscapes theme (the updated version of the old Serbian Nature theme)



Diffusion theme






Tags: Microsoft

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