SOLUTION: Starting Photoshop without problems

PROBLEM: Photoshop CS3 midway loading will give you “could not initialize Photoshop because the file is locked. Use the properties command in the windows explorer to unlock the file," and then it does not start (!)
SOLUTION: You might as well forget about trying to follow the above instructions. Browsing the web I found the quickest solution: press CRTL+ALT+SHIFT while double-clicking (or clicking on the quick launch) Photoshop icon. Bingo! This shortcut will fix the problem. It will basically replace (only if you decide to do so) the .PSP preferences file named Adobe Photoshop CS3 Prefs.psp located in the folder C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Adobe Photoshop CS3 Settings. Search in C:\ or in the drive or partition where you have Vista installed.

An extraordinary historic moment in the U.S.

...registered in an interactive mosaic, using Silverlight technology, showing 672 newspaper front pages from all over the world, collected originally by the Newseum, in Washington, "a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — (that) offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." Assembled by Scott Hanselman and Scott Stanfield, this mosaic can be seen once you install the Silverlight add-on and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Windows 7 = The Mojave Experiment II

In my view, that's probably true and it's amusing; kind of. Only that the 'unsuspecting' users did not attend a special session in a controlled environment but the 2008 Professional Developers Conference or through any other distribution channel, and willingly accepted and installed a pre-Beta version of Windows 7 to test it and, oh, marvel at it... We are now hearing good comments from the 'experts' who most likely have previously scoffed at Windows Vista. This time they were "struck by how fast Windows 7 is" and how "brilliant" and how it "runs well" in the now popular little brothers of the laptops, known as netbooks, priced at less than $500. The media abounds with positive reviews. Yet, what you see in Windows 7, both visually and under the hood, is mostly Windows Vista. I'm going to repeat myself: the best analogy is that Windows Vista is to Windows 2000 as Windows 7 is to Windows XP. This analogy will not escape those who are able to see the big picture.

Just the new Laptop I need!

...and make sure is a Dell™ LatitudeTM E6500 Laptop with a MATTE SCREEN (this is very important!). I learned that some bloggers were getting new and free laptops in an article of Microsoft Watch™ of 31 Octuber reporting that "Microsoft handed out the laptops on Oct. 26 during a reviewers' workshop held before the official start of the Professional Developers Conference, held Oct. 27 to 30. The bloggers, along with analysts and reviewers, received notebooks loaded with Windows 7 Pre-Beta." But then, again, I did not even attend PDC 2008, to my chagrin. Anyway, I hope someone is reading my wish list :-)

You are seeing the "new" Windows 7 desktop

However, this is, in essence, an enhanced Windows Vista desktop with some new functionality in the taskbar, Start menu and other elements. Some previous skeptics of Vista even like it (!), the whole OS. Let me say this: Windows 7 may be "the Mojave experiment II" for a discriminating audience, and it seems to be working. Not bad for a pre-Beta release! Watch the session of PDC 2008 where the new desktop was presented.

Vista brand is alive. The New York Times may be wrong

Last Tuesday's edition of the NYT claimed, in an article reviewing the pre-release of Windows 7, that Microsot "unceremoniously [dropped] the brand name Vista for the new product" only to add in the second paragraph that "the new version will instead be branded Windows 7..." All right, let's see. First of all, is debatable to say that Microsoft "ended" the Vista brand, when it is alive and kicking and will continue to be around for some years to come (look, for instance, at Windows XP). Brands are not dropped, they evolve. Vista is just a step in the Windows saga and a new OS architecture on which the future versions of Windows will most likely be based. So I would have to disagree with the NYT. Secondly, the new version will not "instead" be branded Windows 7, rather the new version is the next logical and consecutive version of this OS. Check the chart above. It shows the MAJOR Windows versions, and milestones. Note that XP does not appear, since it is simply an enhancement to 2000 and as such it was marked as version 5.1.2600. Now, whether Windows 7 is just an update of Vista is just another issue.