I am pleased with Microsoft's revision of MSN Live Search to the recently-renamed BING. The main search page has interesting daily images with short facts, and I unwittingly find myself spending 15-20 minutes at a time, reading about things that are completely unrelated to the topic that warranted my initial visit... LEARNING IS GREAT.

Also, the other really neat thing about BING are the result pages. The layout is very simple and intuitive, but the biggest improvment is the little page summary displayed on hover, which is found on the right side of each result. It displays a summary of the page content and extracts phone numbers, email and postal addresses.

It also displays your search history on the far right side. Kinda neat as well.

It's not a HUGE leap in search technology, but I like it overall. And the name is an improvement over the previous name (MSN Live Search).

Bottom line: I like it.

Just wanted to take a quick minute and mention that Microsoft Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is very nice. If you have some extra hard drive space, and you are comfortable with creating a primary partition on which to install the FREE download, I strongly suggest doing it (see bottom for download link).

NOTE: "The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010." -Microsoft

It had ZERO problems identifying and installing the drivers for all of my components. Seems 100% stable, as I have not had any crashes. And it runs about 20-30% faster than Vista (general estimate)...even on my high-end machine I could see a substantial difference in performance. Boot-up was about under 20 seconds.

I installed several applications, including Google Chrome, Adobe CS4 Web Premium, and Outlook 2007. All seem to run flawlessly.

One nice thing is that the new OS will come with both a 32 and 64-bit version on the same disc.

For more information on Windows 7, including history, features, and release dates visit the Wikipedia article here. And for in-depth information regarding the editions that will be released, click here.

The Windows 7 RC download can be found here --> DOWNLOAD LINK