Dave Thorp's Blog

Pre orders are now available for windows 7. Windows 7 is the latest operating system from Microsoft and is a huge step up from the hugely criticised windows vista. For a limited period pre orders are available at a discount making the home premium edition £44.97 from amazon and the professional edition £89.97

In a good move as well you no longer have to choose whether you want 32 bit or 64 bit discs as both are included.

We’ve been running the release candidate version for a while now and are pretty impressed with it compared to vista. European customers will need to obtain a web browser and put it on a disc or a memory stick before installing windows 7 as Microsoft have removed internet explorer from the european editions in line with competition law. There are many people who would view the absence of internet explorer in the OS as a very good thing!!

EDIT The limited price discount offer seems to have finished now. However pre orders are still available just at the full price (however with amazon and their price guarantee you will pay the lowest price between your pre-order and the release)

And it’s starting to get ridiculous! Yesterday this site received 20 hits referred from live search with the hits coming from Microsoft owned IP addresses searching for such wonderful topics as “email” “gateway” “community” and “christmas”. So today I sent them the following e-mail

My website (http://www.dave-thorp.me.uk) is currently receiving a high amount of search traffic coming from live search and coming from IP addresses owned by microsoft 65.55.165.xxx). Quite often this search traffic is searching for mundane items such as “email” “community” “christmas” or other terms that could not possibly be terms that would cause my website to show up in search results. This traffic is playing havoc with my search logs and other logs on my site as well as being a pointless use of my bandwidth.

Mr D Thorp

Which was sent to their abuse@microsoft.com address. Just one problem. It has just been returned undelivered to me because and I quote “Your e-mail was rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (131.107.115.212). Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter”

It’s not even funny anymore

Funny but true. For the last few weeks I’ve been getting weird hits in my search referrals. For those not in the know this blog, as with a lot of websites, logs statistics about visitors to the site such as IP address, what browser you are using, where you have come from and if you have come from a search engine, what you searched for. The what you searched for bit is of particular interest to me as it is nice to know what search hits are generating traffic to my site.

However recently, in the search hits I’ve been getting hits from live search searching for mundane topics such as “email” “awareness” “police” “today” “yourself” etc etc etc. Initially it wasn’t too annoying but now it is getting to the point where it is happening several times a day so I did some digging. The IP addresses used were always in the range of 65.55.165.xxx which a look up tells me is owned by microsoft. A google led me HERE where it seems this is part of some quality test by microsoft.

Quite what they are checking the quality of I am unsure but they really need to do it on their own bandwidth. People are already blocking the IP range from accessing their servers and if microsoft aren’t careful they will find themselves unable to access any of the internet in order to index it