I'm unsure where these ads are being shown - but they appear to be on far too frequently in the UK, to the point where some people will probably get sick of the sight of them. The thing that interests me the most, however, is that Microsoft feel the need to advertise these...I think I understand why they are, but it shows that times have changed from when Microsoft was almost guaranteed to be on any PC.

I believe that the IE8 advertising is probably limited to Europe. The reason I make this (fairly large) assumption, is because of the EU ruling which ruled bundling IE8 was unfair to competitors, only last week did Microsoft push out an update which advertised alternative browsers to those users who still had IE8 as a default browser. Admittedly, more than 1 of these was based on the Trident engine, the same as IE8.

As for Windows 7, I've got a strong suspicion that a slow (but steady) decline in the OS market share has Microsoft a little worried, and they're starting to push Windows 7 as much as they can, not to mention the catastrophe that came before 7...more commonly known as Vista

Also I think I'll be buying an Xbox 360 Elite sometime in the next 3-5 weeks my brother want's his own Xbox 360, so I figured I might buy an Elite (bigger hard drive + HDMI = happy Joe ) But I'm definitely waiting a little while, because just today, Microsoft announced a price drop in the Europe & UK Xbox 360 SKU's so that's good news for me!

UPDATE: I just noticed that when I have DreamScene running, if I unplug the laptop from charge, it pauses the video to conserve battery life! I think that's a clever little feature Especially because the background still looks good when paused.

Also they seem to be relating to Call Of Duty 4 again which seems more than a coincidence to me. If it carries on I'll be phoning Microsoft to see what I can get out of them for it, because I know that I'm not the only person that has been experiencing this problem.

I think it's really good, I'm not a fan of KDE anyway, but it looks very nice, and I think the widgets could help Mac users migrate to Linux. Problem for me is that it reminds me a lot of Vista...you know, that 'new' OS from Microsoft .

Anyway I'd still say that it was definitely worth a look

I'm hoping Microsoft get this fixed soon, because if they don't I'll be calling them to give me an extra month of Xbox Live for free...if it continues I'd like to think some of you would do the same