Bing, as we know, is slowly increasing their user base. You have experienced richness of Bing homepage due to background image which gets changed daily, and contains information about the place in the image .Bing also loads hotspots for images in blocks which describes story for that image.

Bing is engineered in such a way that background image,Bing logo,hotspots and explore pane which contains Images ,videos,Shopping,News,Maps and Travel  loads in stages which may not slow down your searching in Bing.

you can turn off the background images on Bing to help faster your search in Bing,so that Bing will be with Plain background

To turn off Background Image in Bing

click  http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

To turn on background images for Bing or to Show daily images for the Bing.

click  http://www.bing.com/?rb=1

In Windows Xp,

GO TO Start Menu –> Control Panel
Select- Add Remove Programs.
On the click of “Set Program Access and Defaults” you will probably see that you are using a “Custom” configuration.

Click on custom to see what is set for your “Choose your default Web browser” setting.

Select “Internet Explorer” and then click OK.
Now it should work…
You may  reboot after setting  to be sure.

Microsoft Corp is getting ready to unveil a long-anticipated free anti-virus service for PCs that will compete with products sold by Symantec Corp and McAfee Inc.

A Microsoft spokesman said on Wednesday that the world’s biggest software maker is now testing an early version of the product with its own employees and that it will “soon” make a trial version available via its website.

Shares of Symantec and McAfee, the top two makers of security software, tumbled in November after Microsoft disclosed plans to launch the service as investors worried that they will lose sales to the free product.

Microsoft has said that it will only include basic features for fighting viruses, which would likely make it comparable to the least-expensive products sold by Symantec and McAfee.

Their top selling products are security suites that come with features include encryption, firewalls, password protection, parental controls and data backup.

Microsoft has introduced a bundle of software applications that leverage Windows 7’s built-in support for touch-screen interfaces.

The Windows 7 Touch Pack includes Microsoft Surface Globe, a 3-D map of the Earth that users can navigate through with their fingertips; Surface Collage, a digital photo organizer and editing program; and Microsoft Surface Lagoon, an aquatic-themed screensaver in which fish and other creatures react to touch.

Other apps in the pack include the mechanical design game Blackboard and the pinball-like game Microsoft Rebound. Another app, Garden Pond, lets users create and control organic creations in a garden setting.

Microsoft introduced the package Wednesday at the D: All Things Digital conference in Dallas.

“The Windows and Surface development teams have been have been collaborating closely on bringing multi-touch to Windows,” wrote Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft’s in-house Windows blogger, in a post Wednesday. “We thought it would be fun to give you some applications that show what’s possible with this new way to interact with your PC.”

“The Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 is a great example of immersive experiences software developers can create for Windows 7 and multi-touch,” LeBlanc added.

Microsoft is set to release the first beta of its long-awaited Visual Studio 2010 tools suite next week.
The firm will first release the beta to its developer customers on Monday, followed by general release to the public on Wednesday, according to a blog posting by Microsoft developer tools solution specialist Jihad Dannawi.

On 18 May Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on 20 May through Microsoft Downloads.

When it was announced to much fanfare last September, Microsoft explained that the new version of its flagship developer platform would try to democratise the application lifecycle by allowing all contributors on a software project to participate throughout the lifecycle.

The arrival of Windows 7 should put the final nail in the coffin for Windows Vista, one of the most disappointing products in software maker Microsoft’s recent history.

That’s the opinion of researchers at IT consulting group Gartner, who are advising corporate customers who haven’t already made the leap from Windows XP to Vista to forgo the latter entirely.

“Microsoft expects to ship Windows 7 in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season. Organizations with a Windows Vista project well underway should stay the course, but most others should target Windows 7,” wrote Gartner researchers Michael Silver and Stephanie Kleynhans, in a report released this week.

The researchers said Windows 7 holds a number of useful features for business users. BranchCache allows workers in remote offices to tap information from headquarters more quickly and easily by caching that content on local networks. Another feature, AppLocker, gives IT managers control of which applications users can run. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft will make Windows 7 available to businesses and consumers in time for the busy
holiday shopping season in the fourth quarter of the year, according to company officials.

Windows Server 2008 R2, the server companion to the windows 7 operating system, also will be available at the same time. Microsoft unveiled the information to journalists just ahead of its keynote at its annual conference.

Microsoft also said it plans to release a technical preview of the next version of its other key software product, Office 2010, in July to all attendees of the conference.

Nice time ahead for new releases.

The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month.

Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications, released Monday. Mozilla’s Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing over three percentage points to 21.53 percent.

Microsoft’s browser has steadily lost ground to its competitors in the past year. Its share dropped sharply in both October and November 2008, when it lost over one percentage point in each month.
Apple’s Safari browser now stands at 8.29 percent, up from 7.13 percent in November, when IE dipped. Safari has gained share more quickly than Firefox in that period: Mozilla’s browser accounted for 20.78 percent of browser use three months ago, and now has 21.53 percent.

Microsoft Corp kicked off a $300 million marketing campaignon Thursday, aimed at improving the image of its Windows Vista operating system and strike back at Apple Inc’s “Mac vs. PC” ads.

The first commercial of Microsoft’s new marketing push, being created by advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, aired on Thursday featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld and company co-founder Bill Gates at a shoe store.

Despite selling more than 180 million licenses since its launch in 2007, Windows Vista continues to suffer from the perception that the operating system is clunky and hard to use compared with Apple computers.

That image has been stoked by Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads featuring a geeky and unfashionable PC guy unable to keep up with a better-looking, hip Mac counterpart.

“What the brand stands for, particularly in the case of Windows Vista, has been defined by the competitors. The time is now for us to get in and start telling our story,” said Brad Brooks, a corporate vice president at Microsoft.

Microsoft said on Monday that it now plans to offer its server virtualization product for free.

Ahead of a virtualization event in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft said that its Hyper-V Server 2008 will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web. The software maker had planned to charge $28 for the product.

Also on Monday, Microsoft plans to show off a live migration feature that will be part of the next version of its Hyper-V virtualization technology. Live migration allows companies to move a running virtual machine from one server to another.

The feature will be part of Windows Server R2, Microsoft said Monday. The software maker had originally intended to make Live Migration part of the first Hyper-V product, but pulled the feature in order to try to make its shipping deadline.

Microsoft also said that major computer makers note that nearly all of their customers who order Windows Server 2008-based systems are opting to include Hyper-V. Microsoft finalized the Hyper-V code back in June.

Source: Cnet