Seven years ago, the browser wars seemed all but ended. AOL bought out Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer dominated the market, and the era of browser-based exploits began.

At an overwhelmingly popular session during Microsoft TechEd Australia 2009 this week, Reed Shaffner from the Office team provided among other things a brief but satisfying peek at the latest Office Web Apps experience that has yet to be opened up for public beta testing. Here’s a couple photos and notes on what he showed off.

Here is the RC of Embed for Windows 7 . It has the shell32 files to put the details panel on top for both 32 and 64

In Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a series of network improvements, such as Direct Access for Business users and Home Group for home users, which allow users to share musics, videos, documents and even printers among Windows 7 computers. However, not every one can take advantage of this cool feature. For those who regard this as useless, here is a way to turn it off, as well as remove the links in explorer navigation panel.

AMD-ATI released a new version of ATI display driver, Catalyst 9.9. This is a bug-fix driver, with a lot of bugs resolved in XP, Vista and WIndows 7.

Microsoft is backporting a range of features from Windows 7 to Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 installed. Now, don’t expect Windows 7’s Windows Aero or multi-touch Natural User Interface, but there are details in which Vista SP2 will be on par with the latest iteration of the Windows client scheduled for general availability on October 22nd, 2009.

Microsoft is beginning to backport Windows 7 features to Windows Vista, and as an integral part of the process, the company is also upgrading Vista’s graphics technology to the level of Windows 7.

Looking back, quad-core processors have had quite the run already. Intel's first quad-core CPU, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was released almost three years ago, with the much more popular Q6600 following up months later at a rather steep $850. As you may recall it was quite the luxury then to have one of these at your disposal.

Despite the infamous logo and hot red lid, Acer's Congo-based Ferrari One "ultrathin notebook" (read: netbook) managed to blend in rather well among a number of other laptops (at least 15, by our count) on display at AMD's VISION event yesterday.

Optima beta for Vista, obviously this is one of the best Wba themes that i have ever seen. Th whole desktop looks delicate and well-designed. And here comes the most shining point of this theme - the maximize/minimize/close buttons.