Tami Reller, Windows chief marketing officer and chief financial officer at Microsoft, announced at the J.P. Morgan tech forum at CES 2013 that Windows 8 has sold 60 million licenses to date. As it appears, after Microsoft sold 40 million licenses in the first month of general availability, it took the software giant over 1.5 months to sell another 20 million licenses.

The cumulative sales of Windows 8 including both upgrades and sales to OEMs for new devices are now at 60 million units, which does not necessarily mean that 60 million PCs actually utilize the new operating system, considering the fact that enterprise and business customers have hardly installed the OS, even though they own appropriate licenses.

Windows Live Messenger will officially retire this March, Microsoft announced Tuesday in a mass email to the chat service's users.

On March 15, all users will be switched over to Skype, which the software giant acquired for $8.5 billion in October 2011.

"We are retiring the existing Messenger service globally ... and bringing the great features of Messenger and Skype together," Microsoft said, adding that Messenger will continue to be available in mainland China. Last November, Skype president Tony Bates confirmed in a blog post that Messenger would be shuttered in the first quarter of 2013.

To most Servers’ Administrator, managing the storage space maybe the daily work. When the system drive (c drive) or other data drive shows red, what should you do?

When you receive a system warning “low disk space”, what should you do? General speaking, optimizing use of storage space is a task for most common Server Administrators. Luckily, with today’s Giveaway software AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition, all of these problems can be solved in an easy way. 

AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition is full-featured server partition manager for Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008 (R2 included), Windows Home Server 2011, Windows SBS 2003, 2008, 2011. It provides you safe and efficient way to solve partition problems on Server OSs. 

One of the largest underlying changes to Windows 8 is the long-overdue shift from BIOS to UEFI. UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is superior to BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) in almost every way, except for one: At the moment, UEFI prevents Linux distributions from being installed on Windows 8 machines.

UEFI, in essence, is a light-weight operating system that your computer loads at boot time. (See: Demystifying UEFI, the long-overdue BIOS replacement.) Because it’s an operating system, UEFI has full access to your hardware, and it can be programmed to do just about anything (thus the Extensible part of its acronym). UEFI interfaces can be mouse-driven (pictured below), and can perform complex tasks such as surfing the web or backing up your hard drives.

The UEFI specification itself also introduces a few new features to improve performance, flexibility, and security. The feature that has received by far the most attention is secure boot, as it can be used by PC OEMs to prevent other operating systems being installed on their hardware. Dell, if it so wishes, could build a PC that only runs Windows. On the flip side, Apple could stop Windows from being installed on its hardware.