When it announced its plan to offer a Family Pack upgrade for Windows 7 three Home Premium licenses at a drastic discount , Microsoft said it would be a “limited time offer.” Last week, less than six weeks after it went on sale, online sources of the retail packaged product started disappearing. Is it gone for good?

When Microsoft launched its Family Pack deal for Windows 7 this fall, officials said the offer would be a limited-time one. They declined to say when the company would phase out the Family Pack offer, but it now appears that day has come, as first reported by Windows SuperSite blogger Paul Thurrott.

If you re thinking about moving to Windows 7 but dreading the migration, Windows 7 Migration Tool takes some of the hassle out of the process.

There’s a handy battery-preserving, energy-saving tool in Windows 7, but it’s nowhere near the shiny graphics or slick taskbar. Online Tech Tips shows us how to audit our computers’ energy efficiency using a simple command line tool.

Ordinarily, the operating system requires users to activate their copy of Windows 7 within 30 days. However, a recently outlined method allows the normal notifications to be turned off.

If Microsoft expects its customers to take license agreements seriously, it has a responsibility to communicate the terms of those agreements to its customers clearly and unambiguously. As I noted earlier this month, Microsoft does a generally poor job of explaining its complicated rules for how Windows licensing works. But I deliberately left one type of Windows license off that list, because it deserves its own special place in the Corporate Communications Hall of Shame.

Since Windows 7 launched on October 22, my e-mail inbox has been deluged with questions, comments, and pleas for help. I can’t possibly reply to them all personally, so I thought I would answer some of the most common/interesting/provocative questions here. So, without further ado…

Microsoft announced on November 13 that it has begun test pilots with a handful of advertisers for ads on Windows 7. The two “theme experiences” they are offering are known as the “Windows Theme Experience” and the “Windows Personalization Gallery.” The trial is set to run through October 2010.

Microsoft has pulled an update tool for Windows 7 from the Microsoft Store site after a report indicating that the tool incorporated open-source code in a way that violated the GNU General Public License.

Another day, another Windows 7 study. The latest comes from Retrevo, a consumer electronics shopping site, which asserts that users aren’t keen on Windows 7 netbooks running Starter Edition.