Today is the day fine folks — Kinect for Windows is here. The official, and commercial, version 1.0 of the SDK just hit the interwebs along with the accompanying hardware for a price of $250, or $150 for qualified educational customers. The tool has picked up a number of new features since the last beta, including support for up to four Kinects being used simultaneously and near mode for monitoring motion from just 40cm away. For more info and a complete list of improvements hit up the source link. Download from Microsoft

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Reinstall Windows: Introduction The process of reinstalling Windows on your computer is simpler than you might think. The very idea can often induce a mild sense of panic, but the benefits of reinstalling Windows far outweigh any perceived risks, particularly as you can eliminate those dangers simply by making sure you back things up as you go. Reinstalling Windows offers a number of benefits. It can revive a sluggish system by clearing out all the clutter and letting you start from scratch. You’ll be amazed at how quick your PC suddenly feels, and it’ll be more stable too, with corrupt [...]

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Youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Arfa Kareem, 16 years old lost the battle of her life while she was admitted at Lahore, CMH hospital on Saturday. Arfa’s funeral will be held at 10 a.m, Sunday in Cavalary Ground, Lahore Cantt. Arfa Karim was born in 1995, and when she was 9 years old got the honor of World’s Youngest Microsoft Certified Professional and Bill Gates invited her to visit Microsoft HQ, in USA. In 2005, Arfa Kareem received Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal in the field of Science and Technology by the Government of Pakistan, afterwards she was also awarded Salaam Pakistan [...]

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Microsoft has released final version of Silverlight 5, its web browser plug-in for multimedia programs. Silverlight 5 supports for four web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari over Windows and Mac. According to official blog: “New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain [...]

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Still tempted by the fruit of another? If you’re looking Microsoft’s way, but aren’t quite ready to toss your adoration for iOS or Android aside, the coders in Redmond are giving you an alternative to quitting cold turkey. By visiting http://aka.ms/wpdemo on one’s iOS or Android browser, you’ll be immediately tunneled into a emulation of Windows Phone 7. We gave it a test run here at Engadget HQ, and it seems that every tile and swipe save for Apps runs properly. Can’t say the fonts and such looked as smooth on our Galaxy S II as they do on the Radar, but it’s [...]

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Hello there, everyone! It’s time to do another post in our series of comparison posts in which, well, we compare stuff. In this comparison post, ‘stuff’ is the three major mobile operating systems – iOS 5, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and Windows Phone 7.5 Mango – and it is their feature-list which is compared. Although, yes, it is a bit unfair to compare two already-released OSes – iOS 5 and WP7 Mango – against an OS that is still somewhat in the making (Ice Cream Sandwich); please keep in mind that this is more of a comparison of features (which, we believe, are final) rather [...]

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Like Zune’s own Business Development Manager once said, all consumer electronics products have a lifespan, and today the (not so long) lineage of dedicated Zune hardware expires not with a roar, but with a promise to honor its warranties. Tucked away in the inner chambers of the Zune support site lies a page spelling out Microsoft’s final words on the device, “Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy,” it says, “we will no longer be producing Zune players.” The Zune HD is survived by the Zune music service, which will continue [...]

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With Microsoft unveiling its developer preview of Windows 8 Tablet this week, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable comparisons began to appear. Courtesy of WinRumors’ Tom Warren, we’ve a first look at Microsoft’s new mobile operating system pitched with the current daddy of the tablet market – the iPad 2 running iOS 5. The comparison begins with a basic overview of the lock screens, which are quintessentially identical, barring the fact that the Windows version is visually similar to the sort of interface present for years in the desktop version of Windows. The Windows lock [...]

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This post is part of a series of guides we’re doing today related to the recently released Windows 8 Developer Preview. In this guide, you will learn how to install Windows 8 DP from a USB flash drive. For the uninitiated, a Developer Preview version of Windows 8 was released recently for anyone and everyone to try out. It isn’t the complete version of Windows 8, but provides a nice glimpse at the future of Microsoft’s desktop operating system. Windows 8 Developer Preview is meant for developers to try out, in order to come to grips with how things work in Windows 8, but if you’ve got [...]

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Microsoft showed off the developer build of Windows 8 and we’ve already published our hands on: Windows 8 review.But what if you want to download Windows 8 and try it for yourself? The good news is that you can. To download the Windows 8 Developer Preview, simply head over to the Windows Dev Center and choose whether you want a 32 or 64 bit version. There’s also a 64-bit Windows Developer Preview with developer tools available for download, which also comes with the Windows SDK for Metro style apps, Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview, Microsoft Expression [...]

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