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First, on MBS and Reviews… It’s review season at Microsoft and I spent the last two days with our MBS team, specifically the people dedicated to improving customer and partner satisfaction. (OK, a caveat here: really, just about everyone in the MBS/Dynamics business group is super involved — it’s hard to find a more dedicated group anywhere interested and passionate about providing the best product and business experience for our customers.)

More about that as I come up for air, and out from under two days worth of email… thankfully, I had my Windows Mobile Smartphone with me that allowed me to keep up on urgent mail and schedule changes. But in short, it was great to be around a group of the satisfaction leaders from Dynamics and hear about our relationships with our customers and partners. And when it comes to connecting with our customers, Dynamics really works hard, esp with their page on how to connect with Business Solutions, ranging from on-line support to a “call me back” request form.

Now, on to OneCare: If you’ve seen the news, you know that yesterday we announced more details around OneCare, the new Windows PC security service. The team outlined the annual cost ($49.95) and commercial availability (planned for release in early June). If you sign up for the beta test by the end of April ’06, the is $19.95. Ever since I have been able to back up to an external and off-PC drive (in addition to CD and DVD), my back-ups are happening when they should and my little OneCare icon in the lower right corner is green (or so I’m told, as I’m colour blind).

Check out the forums at http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsonecare/, And more details on OneCare and other Live services can be seen at http://ideas.live.com/.

From the “it’s just wierd enough to include as a Friday afternoon posting” files, this was sent to me on IM…

Spacesuit floats off to become a satellite – Space News – MSNBC.com

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A worn-out spacesuit, stuffed with trash and radio gear, was pushed away from the international space station on Friday to become the world’s strangest-looking ham-radio satellite.

Complete with helmet and gloves, the spacesuit floated past the Russian section of the international space station, 220 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth, before rotating away feet first and beginning its orbit around the globe. The sight was an eerie echo of science-fiction nightmares dating back to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Do svidaniya … Goodbye, Mr. Smith,” Russian flight engineer Valery Tokarev said as he and U.S. commander Bill McArthur began a six-hour spacewalk to perform maintenance and photography tasks.

Tags: microsoft, vista, Windows, CTP, Community Technology Preview.

Over the weekend, CNET published their Thursday discussion with Jim Allchin, the co-president of the platform products and services division. Interestingly, they brought along a number of questions submitted by CNET News.com readers.

A number of people asked about requirements for Windows Vista, and if it will run on today’s PCs, especially when considering the graphics requirements. Jim said…

“We gave general requirements earlier, and this is going to take me a little bit longer to explain. The general requirements we say are 512 megs of memory or up. And I can’t remember the actual processor level. And that we would run in scale the functions of the operating system based on the power that was there. My general view is the more memory, the better. I would say that’s independent of Windows Vista. XP runs better that way and Vista will continue run better. Processor performance isn’t as much as an issue on any of these systems.

“Today’s product that you’re buying, in general, has sufficient processing power. We are pushing the graphics on these systems, and we haven’t finalized exactly how low a system will be able to have the Glass effect on. Hopefully within a few months, we’ll be able to say exactly how low. But if you have gaming systems today, those types of gaming systems will certainly run all of the Vista system on it. The concept: We’re going to try to scale the features to the system that’s there. So if you’re buying the system today and you have a reasonable amount of memory, then Vista will run on it. If you add more, you’ll just get more capabilities.”

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