I can tell you the MD5 and SHA-1 hashes, so you can at least make sure you can get a copy that hasn't been tampered with if you're that keen on using it.

There's three installers:

mssefullinstall-amd64fre-en-us-vista.exe (3.72MB) which is the installer for Windows Vista and Windows 7 64-bit, its hashes are as follows:

MD5: D460B3A5116FF1DB2CFA69ACA80DF8C0
SHA-1: B5E7FC24FCD646EFCAE3457DB7D7FC48E648AE23

mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-vista.exe (4.72MB) is the installer for Windows Vista and Windows 7 32-bit.

MD5: 4C9AC845F5FD5547FC522035FA251F00
SHA-1: 7986596458E37EF8875A9DDAC0AE9AAC9A41E936

mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe (7.51MB) is the installer for Windows XP 32-bit.

MD5: 7F9D0DE36B6673974D4D6BD6F5731D89
SHA-1: F273DA4CC2EECFBF0C97B2B0701399A20EC5B7AA

So if you are going to go to any lengths to get hold of it, at least get one which hasn't been modified to include any unwanted surprises.

You can press P to toggle the point cloud/images on and off. I've just got a 4GB CF card, weather permitting I'll start work on the biggest Photosynth ever. :)

From the BBC:

"Early reviews of the beta are showing that it under-performs when compared to existing freeware products, and well below paid solutions," said security firm Symantec in a statement.

I'm not sure what reviews Symantec are talking about, but I haven't read any data on MSE's performance yet, nor should we expect any for weeks, if not months as that's how long it takes to actual do proper scientific tests.  It does however use the same core engine and definitions as OneCare and Forefront, so the logical thing to do would be to use data evaluating OneCare's performance.

The latest tests by AV-Comparatives, rank OneCare second in detection of new malware, but also importantly it scores the lowest false positives by far, meaning it won't detect genuine files as being malicious.  Which is what led AV Comparatives to award it the highest ranking.  Here's the data for new malware detection rates.  Where's Symantec, oh right down the bottom with a dismal 35%.

For a good couple of years now OneCare/Forefront has been well above average on detection rates for new malware and on false positives.  MSE using the same engine will continue this trend, and if anything improve it as it will give Microsoft a larger sample size to create new definitions on.

What else do Symantec have to say?

"Referring to Microsoft's basic anti-virus and anti-spyware product as an essential security solution is misleading. Consumers need firewall protection, web protection, anti-spam and identity safeguards"

1) Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a built in firewall which is turned on by default. :-)
2) Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and Firefox and other browsers have web protection, i.e. blacklists of known malicious or phishing/identity-stealing websites. :-)
3) Everyone's e-mail, either web-based like Hotmail or Gmail, or their e-mail clients, Windows Mail, Outlook etc all have built in spam filters nowadays. :-)

Seriously Symantec, you're not doing yourself any favours.  Microsoft Security Essentials is the most non-annoying consumer anti-virus ever, not only that it also has one of the best detection engines out there.

Highly recommended.

You can clearly see how this was built upon the excellent anti-spyware software Windows Defender that Microsoft included with Windows Vista (and made a free download for Windows XP), you can see it even more clearly in earlier builds.

Hopefully this will be everything the PC ecosystem needs it to be. Windows Defender + anti-virus. Windows Defender was really a breath of fresh air, it showed anti-malware manufacturers how the job should be done. It's fast, it doesn't complain about updating itself - it just does it. It doesn't blast open windows telling you its running a scan - it just does it. The only remotely annoying thing would be a tray-icon appearing after three days if the computer hadn't been on to run a scan - a tray-icon that doesn't even exist the rest of the time.

Compare that with the likes of Norton and McAfee who just put bucket loads of junk all over your system, Norton toolbar in IE, Norton this and that in the Control Panel, all over the Start Menu and in the system tray. Let's not even talk about the performance hit - which is extreme and how they're constantly bugging you.

It looks like Microsoft Security Essentials will basically disable and replace Windows Defender on a system, it will take up the job of anti-malware in general - another good thing, having two separate scanners for anti-virus and another for anti-spyware is a bad performance hit. Having one resident scanner scanning for everything is much better.

Hopefully they keep things that way and continue to follow in the steps of Windows Defender, and not fall along the path of OneCare, Norton and McAfee, of being more annoying than the malware they're supposed to protect you against.

So far so good. Now I just need the beta so I have time to complain about things before it ships to the world, and if done right, massively shakes up PC security forever.

Windows 7 is everything Vista was not: Sleek, stylish and speedy.

Sleek and stylish?  It looks pretty much the same as Windows Vista.  If it wasn't for the new less-efficient taskbar it would be almost indistinguishable.  Speed is hotly debated.  On my high-end systems there's no noticeable difference between them, even on low-end systems like my Tablet PC there's no difference.  Sure it might have a lower memory footprint, but who has any systems with 512MB of RAM in them these days?

[A]n easy-to-use screen magnifier, snipping tools [.] lots of ways to view the data on your disks

All the same as Windows Vista.

But it's also got features that, frankly, make OS X start to look a little dated. Some are big, like the many ways you can handle your digital media in Windows Explorer (hint to Apple: I know you want me to use iTunes to manage all my music and movies, but I really want to be able to do meaningful file management in Finder, too).

Identical to Windows Vista.

There's a vastly improved Windows Media player

Up for debate - its got some nice new features like internet streaming and remote play.  But the new interface isn't as smooth, there's an awkward jerk between the now-playing mode and the library, the rip tab has been hidden and you have to hunt around to see how to rip a CD, the advanced tag editor is gone as is the mini-player for the taskbar.  I'd kill to get the advanced tag editor and mini-player back - I'd probably even trade internet streaming for them.

better movie- and dvd-making

There is no movie making, Movie Maker was removed as was Photo Gallery.  You're expected to download the Windows Live Essentials pack to get all that stuff back, the Live version of Movie Maker is still in beta and even worse than Movie Maker was 10 years ago.

re's one example that I stumbled upon that seems so intuitive: Grab a window by the title bar and pull it to the top of your screen, and it maximizes. Pull it back away from the top, and it returns to its original size. Drag it right or left and it auto resizes to a width about a third of your screen's width

Yeah that's nice.

Oh, and unlike Finder (still, Apple? Really?), you can still grab and resize a window from any edge or corner you might like or need to grab.

How Windows has worked for as far back as I can remember.

Minimize a browser window, and you get a nice preview when you hover over its button

In Windows Vista.

Minimize a browser window with multiple tabs open, and you get a preview of each tab and the ability to pick which tab you want opened when you un-minimize IE.

Yup that's nice.

Windows Explorer, the venerable file manager, has new ways to quickly get to commonly used folders and places and, for the first time in a long time, actually works quite well with my home network. XP was always a little spotty in its ability to communicate with my other PCs, and Vista was downright hostile in its overbearing and underperforming ways.

Windows Explorer is the same as in Windows Vista, the only difference being the colour of the button menu, and how the navigation pane is laid out, which is a bit neater.  Networking is the same.

When Vista came out, I had just a short period of time to give it a test drive. But Windows 7? I get a year. A whole year.

Not quite.  Firstly you don't have a year, in March the RC will start shutting itself down automatically every 2 hours, it won't bomb out until June, let's call that 12 months minus the annoying constant shut downs which will drive you insane, and is really only there to enable you to get any data off before it time-bombs.  For Windows Vista however, Beta 2, RC1 and RC2 all time-bombed on the 1st of June 2007, the Beta 2 version was released in May 2006, so again about 12 months.  Comparing pre-release versions to trial versions is also unwise.

All in all a pretty positive article, its just a shame that most of the features he liked we had three years ago in Windows Vista which gets dismissed off the bat as being terrible.

Well last night at around 3:00 I checked my phone and bam a solid HSDPA signal. But this morning it had gone back to GPRS, but later in the afternoon HSDPA was back with all its speedy goodness. Sweet.

Here's the thing sat next to the old server. Much smaller, and much more likely to survive the journey to Guildford - I've actually decided to use screws to hold this one together, not cellotape and blu-tac. Although I'm sure I'll be swearing at it when I need to swap out some disks.

The only real downside to using such a smaller case is the number of disks it can support. There are only two 3.5 inch bays with this particular case, and one DVD-ROM drive bay - which I play to use to put an extra disk in, as having a DVD-ROM drive would be a bit pointless. But if push came to shove Windows Home Server is quite happy using USB drives too.

Here's the exact build for those interested:

Asus T3-P5G31 barebones
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Low Profile Fan
OcUK 4GB 677 DDR2
Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB

Other drives were harvested from the old server, but I'll probably end up adding a 1.5TB drive at some point. The new Western Digital drives are pretty quiet, but they're still farely loud while seeking. Not as quiet as my Hitachi P7K500 I use in my desktop, which are pretty much silent while doing anything, including seeking.

Temperatures aren't bad considering it only has one fan other the one in the PSU, which is on the CPU - no chipset fans (which always get worn out after a few years). The two cores float between 36° and 44°, and the two drives in there at the moment float between 39° and 43° the CPU fan happily runs at around 1400 RPM, I've only twice heard it spin up to about 2000 RPM and then only for a couple of minutes usually when the server is munching through some backups.

This will be replacing my 9 year old system which has faithfully been running almost nonstop based on a 1.4Ghz Athlon Thunderbird, with 1.5GB of RAM and a collection of aging hard disks, this has been running Windows Home Server and a Virtual Machine running Small Business Server flawlessly, so hopefully the new system will be just as reliable.

All together it came to about £400, including Windows Home Server. On the plus side it should be using 25-50% of the energy of my existing server. Meaning it'll pay for itself in just a couple of years.

Considering how cheap hardware is nowadays this really is a fantastic time to be replacing older energy-hungry systems with new, smaller, faster and more efficent systems, something businesses should really be looking at to reduce their energy bills.

If everything goes to plan, my old server will be retired sometime tomorrow.