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Tired of staring at a cluttered Windows desktop filled with program icons, documents, and other shortcuts? There are two solutions: Give your desktop a thorough cleaning, or sweep everything under the rug. Emerge Desktop helps you do the latter.

In a nutshell, what Emerge Desktop does is replace the Windows shell. That means no more start menu, taskbar, or system tray. Those items are replaced with a clean, blank desktop. The only thing you'll notice running after installing Emerge Desktop is a replacement for the Windows system tray called emergeTray.

The built in search function that comes with Windows XP kind of stinks. It takes forever to find anything and often doesn't show what you're looking for. There are alternatives like Google Desktop Search and Windows Search 4.0. But they eat a fair bit of RAM, processing power, and use a ton of disk space to build an index.

In a bid to deter people from using pirate versions of Windows, Microsoft is now updating its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool to introduce a few uncomfortable niggles for users of pirated versions of Windows.

On the WGA blog, Microsoft explains that if a copy of Windows fails the validation process ‘users will discover on their next logon that their desktop has changed to a plain black background from whatever was there previously.’ You’ll be able to change the background back to whatever you want, but it will revert to a black screen again after an hour. As well as this, copies of Windows deemed to not be genuine will also have a translucent watermark above the system tray, which Microsoft calls a ‘persistent desktop notification.’

The software company is asking for testers to put the forthcoming IE 8 through it paces.

The team is pleased to announce that Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing (RTM) and is now available on the Microsoft Download Center!

The English version is available now and German, Spanish and French versions will be available on the Download Center soon. Windows Home Server customers who don’t download it on their own will receive Power Pack 1 via Windows Update in August, and the new Chinese and Japanese versions will RTM in August, too.

Coming to IE8 is a set of cross-site scripting defenses to defeat hackers looking to steal cookies and browser history, logging keystrokes, stealing credentials, or just evading phishing filters

Internet Explorer's getting a little bit safer. Microsoft Wednesday unveiled significant new security features that will be in the next version of the company's Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, currently in public beta testing. From Microsoft's standpoint, any improvement in security is a plus, and the company seems to be taking that to heart with Internet Explorer 8, which includes a slew of new or upgraded security features. In the past, Microsoft has been heavily criticized for its browser security, while its chief competitor, Mozilla Firefox, has been largely lauded.