One of the many unanswered questions about Windows Phone 7 Series is what the application development situation will be like. A few details have started to emerge; through both official and unofficial channels (via WM PowerUser).

We already know that Windows Phone 7 Series will look and feel completely unlike Windows Mobile. We know that it will support applications and that those applications will be for sale through the Marketplace.

It was claimed yesterday that Windows 7 machines are "alarmingly low" on memory, with 86 percent of Windows 7 machines using 90-95 percent of their physical memory. Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software, a company developing performance monitoring software, cited data from his company's XPnet community. Community members use a freely downloadable tool that periodically uploads performance data to the XPnet servers, and it's this data, from a few tens of thousands of computers, that was used to justify the claim.

Having used Windows 7 in one form or another for more than a year, this struck me as a little surprising. The laptop I use most of the time is no powerhouse—the 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor is positively anemic, and the 64GB SSD cramped—but excessive memory usage (with all the consequent performance problems caused by excessive paging) has never been one of them. Sure, the laptop has a full 4GB of RAM, and since I'm using 64-bit Windows, all of that 4GB is available to the OS, but even under heavy usage, memory just hasn't been a problem.

After announcing the search deal in July 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft have finally received regulatory clearance from both the US Department of Justice and the EU. Under the agreement between the two companies, Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search platform to power its search results and paid search listings. Yahoo! will handle customer relations with high-volume advertisers for both companies. Self-service advertisers will continue to deal with Microsoft directly. A similar deal between Yahoo! and Google was abandoned after the Department of Justice threatened an antitrust lawsuit.

For Yahoo! users, the visible difference will be that Yahoo! search results will be identical to those of Microsoft's Bing. Yahoo! will continue to offer its own content to web users to provide more than just search results. The companies believe that this partnership will enable them to better compete with the dominant Google.

Google's dominance is indeed the reason that this deal was permitted where the Yahoo!-Google deal was not; with Yahoo! having only 7.4 percent of the search market and Microsoft's Bing only 3.2 percent, the tie-up will not make the search market substantially less competitive. Bing's market share has been increasing, especially in the US, but much of this growth has occurred at Yahoo!'s expense. The ten-year deal will provide Microsoft with considerably more access to the search market, and the company will also take on some 400 Yahoo! employees.

For its part, Yahoo! will receieve the lion's share of the advertising revenue—88 percent for the first five years—as well as cash payments totaling $150 million from Microsoft to help pay for the transition to the Bing technology. Yahoo! predicts annual operating profit growth of up to $500 million as a result of the partnership.

The technical aspects of the integration are likely to start within days. Yahoo! US should be using Bing by the end of the year; a full global transition will take longer, and is not expected to be complete until early 2012.

Earlier in the week, Microsoft showed off its attractive new mobile platform. The new operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series, promises a radical change in the world of Microsoft-powered phones, but one thing that remains the same, the company confirmed, is that phone manufacturers will still have to pay to license the software. With Android (and now Symbian) open source, and the BlackBerry and iPhone software not available to third parties at all, this means that Windows Phone will be the only major smartphone OS available on a paid basis.

With strong competition from Android—which costs manufacturers nothing—the decision to retain this policy has surprised some. All things being equal, a license makes Windows Phone less attractive to manufacturers than a free platform, and coupled with the delay Redmond has suffered in bringing to market a credible alternative to iPhone and Android, Windows Phone could be starting at quite a disadvantage. Given that Windows Mobile is not believed to account for any substantial amount of revenue for the company, forgoing the license fee would eliminate one Android benefit for little real cost to Microsoft.

That said, all things are not equal; Windows Phone offers a unique—and apparently high-quality—user interface, as well as built-in applications with no direct equivalents on other platforms. The handset manufacturers appear to have no qualms about licensing the current Windows Mobile platform, and the major manufacturers are claimed to be on-board with Windows Phone 7 Series too.

Further, those manufacturers then spend additional money developing and supporting custom front-ends for Windows Mobile phones. Such front-ends will be prohibited on Windows Phone, curtailing future expenses. Similarly, the improvement of the built-in Internet Explorer browser might similarly put an end to licensing and customization of third-party browsers like Opera (a common feature of many Windows Mobile handsets), further reducing costs relative to its predecessor.

As such, the decision is not so surprising after all. Many things stand in the way of Windows Phone 7 Series succeeding in the marketplace—like Microsoft's ability to deliver something fast, stable, and on-time—but a license fee is probably not one of them.

The recent Google hack has brought security to the top of every IT admin's mind, if it wasn't there already. But securing a network is a huge investment of time and money, to the point that many best practcices are out-of-reach for many small and medium businesses. Nonetheless, there is hope. Windows shops can get a good, cheap head-start on security by simply ensuring that their domain security policy is solid. In this article, Ars shows you how to create a group policy that will secure Active Directory (AD) according to current best practices, while keeping it open enough to ensure that operational headaches remain at a minimum.

Note: For reference, all policy settings discussed in this article can be found under Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings in the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

A statement isssued by Microsoft revealed that the company is looking into reports that some users of its Hotmail service were accidentally shown other users' inboxes when attempting to access their mail through their mobile phone. The Windows Live sign-in service was down for an hour yesterday; whether the two events are related is as-yet unknown. The sign-in downtime was purportedly due to a server failure, and left many unable to log in to any Microsoft service dependent on Windows Live IDs, including both Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.

In its statement, the software giant said "Microsoft takes customers' privacy seriously, and immediately upon learning of these reports, we started an investigation. We will take appropriate action once we have completed the investigation."

Reports of the nature of the security breach suggest that it did indeed coincide with the sign-in service failure. Users with the problem describe being presented with an inbox that was not their own; subsequent logins presented a different inbox each time.

With Google in hot water for privacy issues relating to adding its new Buzz service to Gmail, it seems that February has been a bad month for web mail users who want to keep themselves to themselves.

Let's look back at the week that was in Microsoft news. Here were the top stories:

Windows 7 stability fix breaks stability, puzzles Microsoft: A stability and reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 reportedly breaks the stability and reliability of the operating system for some users.

New, voluntary Windows 7 antipiracy update coming: Next week, Microsoft will offer an optional update for Windows 7 that closes a number of activation exploits that counterfeiters have used to bypass Windows Activation Technologies (WAT).

Microsoft has been tracking some odd issues that occur on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. These bugs are not typically fixed via Windows Update, because these hotfixes should only be applied to systems that are experiencing specific problems. So if you are not severely affected by either of them, wait for the relevant service packs. Here are the four most prominent issues, listed in order of decreasing severity.

The first manifests itself when the computer crashes after it runs for some time, with the user seeing the following BSOD (the four parameters vary depending on the computer):

STOP: 0x0000000A (parameter1, parameter2, parameter3, parameter4)
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Microsoft explains that the issue occurs because Power Manager opens an Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) port and closes another port instead of closing the ALPC one, resulting in a successive memory leak, leading to an eventual crash. If you're affected, this is for you: Hotfix Request.

Few users realize the second issue is a bug. As described in KB958685, it affects all versions of Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7. If the user puts the notebook to sleep while its lid is still open and then afterwards closes the lid while the computer is still asleep, Windows will only display a blank screen and a mouse pointer upon wake. This continues until a key is pressed or the mouse is clicked. You can wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix (SP1 on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, SP2 on Vista) or you can click this: Hotfix Request.

The third issue is described in KB978789 and specifically applies to computers with chipsets from the Intel 5 Series or the Intel 3400 Series families coupled with Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate. Using a USB bulk storage device that has pending control and bulk traffic with such a Windows-based computer will result in the device becoming unresponsive, with the iPhone mentioned as a culprit.

Microsoft doesn't have a hotfix for this problem, suggesting that the user contact the computer/motherboard manufacturer for a BIOS update.

The last problem is explained in KB975360 and affects all editions of Windows 7. It is only evident with computers that have a quad-core processor and support multitouch, and involves the Microsoft Rebound game from the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 not responding if you try to launch it. Since this is entirely a Microsoft problem, here's the solution: Hotfix Request.

Microsoft is expected to offer SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 this fall.