Lenovo IdeaPad U550 Review

Introduction

Power when you need it, efficiency when you don’t. So goes the premise behind Lenovo’s new IdeaPad U550, a mid-size notebook with a CULV processor and switchable ATI graphics that could serve as both a desktop replacement, and a makeshift travel machine. Throw that together with a £521.98 price tag (as equipped) and the U550 makes an appealing pitch to computer buyers looking to make one purchase for all their computing needs. Can it follow through? We give Lenovo’s perfect porridge a taste test.

Features and Design

Patterns and texture have become a staple of the IdeaPad aesthetic, and the U550 is no exception. An extremely fine checkerboard pattern molded into the lid feels almost like the texture of knurled metal to the touch. Unfortunately, that’s about where the analogy ends. There’s no metal to speak of here, and a rap on the surface with a fingernail returns an cheap, hollow feel. And it is cheap. Closing the screen and carrying the notebook around, the lid bows visibly under the thumb. To its credit, the texture lends more visual appeal and resistance to fingerprints than a plain sheet of the same cheap plastic would, but we can’t abide by the otherwise flimsy feel of the whole display enclosure.

Inside, the checkerboard carries over to a thin stripe at the top edge and a diamond crosshatch on the speaker grilles, but the rest has been left clean and smooth. The plastic has a silky feel in between the rubbery texture of a ThinkPad and the polished, almost sticky gloss of a Sony Vaio. It works. The same can’t quite be said of the bizarre vents cut into the bottom, which look like decorative woodwork from a Chinese restaurant. However discreet, they give the notebook a confused sort of styling that makes us think Lenovo designer’s still aren’t totally sure what and IdeaPad should look like, short of covering it in patterns.

Ports

As a full-size laptop, the U550 comes equipped with the standard array of inputs and outputs you would expect on a notebook. No more, no less. The right-hand side offers a tray-loading DVD drive, a single USB port, Ethernet jack, and room for the DC power jack. Around the other side, you’ll find both VGA and HDMI connections for video, dedicated headphone and microphone jacks, and two USB ports, which are thoughtfully separated to front and back for easier access, and to prevent devices overlapping. The front has an SD card slot, a Wi-Fi switch, and a dedicated switch for activating and deactivating discrete graphics, which we’ll elaborate more on later.

Hardware Specifications

Buyers can order the U550 as cheap as £521.98 but at that level, you’re getting only Intel’s GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics. Our U550 came with the far more desirable ATI Mobile Radeon HD4330 and 512MB of dedicated RAM under the hood, along with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, 1.3-megapixel webcam, fingerprint scanner, and an 1.3GHz CULV Intel Core 2 Duo at the helm. Of course, true to the switchable graphics premise, the Intel GMA chip is still there and ready to play when you want to stretch the U550’s battery life for the long haul.

Despite the relatively beefy 15.6-inch screen and substantial 14.8-inch by 9.9-inch footprint, the U550 weighs a reasonable 5.3 pounds. While that doesn’t make it the most outstanding globetrotter, most owners should have no problem tossing it in a backpack or messenger bag without breaking a sweat, and the power adapter – which is about the size of a Wii controller – will tag along nicely, too.

Display

The U550’s 15.6-inch display uses a rather low resolution, 1366 x 768 panel. That’s the same number of pixels Sony managed to stuff into the tiny 11.1-inch screen on the Sony Vaio X, which means it starts to look a bit stretched on this much, much larger screen. For desktop applications, like surfing and word processoing, that means a smaller sandbox to fit all your applications in. However, as we’ll see in the performance section, it also makes an otherwise mid-spec machine more viable for gaming.

Software

Unlike Lenovo’s immaculate business machines, IdeaPads seem to come burdened with just about every type of software imaginable. From Cyberlink Power2Go to Lenovo ReadyComm 5, the desktop has been strewn with over a dozen shortcuts to pre-installed clutter. Some applications, like Lenovo Idea Central’s “Decision Center,” actually serve as hubs to even more garbage, barraging you with offers for online backup solutions, identity theft monitoring programs, and more. Some of it is useful. Most of it isn’t. In either case, we wish Lenovo had moved confined it to a single folder on the start menu, rather than spreading it all over the system and even building it into utilities. As a matter of personal preference, we would probably just reinstall Windows rather than attempting to disassemble the junk pile Lenovo has heaped into this machine.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Aside from feeling a bit generic, we have no complaints about the U550’s matte black keyboard, which makes good use of the notebook’s long form factor and even includes a (slightly condensed) numeric keypad. Backlighting would have made a nice addition, but most typists will find little or no learning curve. The same goes for the medium-sized touchpad: Its matte finish with subtle dimples elimates finger drag nicely, and a strip of orange dots provide a nice clue where pointing surface ends and scrolling surface begins.

Webcam

The 1.3-megapixel webcam built into the top of the display delivers acceptable picture quality for basic teleconferencing, but seemed to have a lot of digital noise even in well-lit situations, like an office, and colors seemed somewhat washed out and muted. However, it worked fine in conjunction with Lenovo’s own Veriface facial-recognition software for password-less logins.

Speakers

The Lenovo IdeaPad U550 uses two postage-stamp-sized speakers located above the keyboard, rather than the less practical down-firing arrangement (which can get pretty muffled when you use it in a lap). Together, they muster enough volume for a movie trailer and YouTube clip here and there, but like most notebooks, the complete lack of bass will have you reaching for earbuds as soon as it’s time for some music.

Performance

Continuing with the trend we’ve seen in most Windows 7 laptops, our U550 went from power-on to desktop in a little under 50 seconds, and managed to pop open a browser window about 20 seconds later. Average, but acceptable, and we can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t be better without all the bloatware.

After booting into Windows 7, switching from ATI’s Radeon to the power-saving Intel GMA chip can be done in about five seconds, which is an important aspect for any feature users will actually hope to take advantage of on the fly. A hard switch on the front of the notebook will switch the graphics manually after confirming with an on-screen OK, and also indicates when the ATI is blazing away with a white LED. You can also switch cards through software by right clicking and choosing “Configure Switchable Graphics.” Advanced options like automatically activating the Intel chip when running on battery power also make it easier to take advantage of power savings without investing much thought. However, keep in mind that all applications need to be closed prior to switching, so the process can be more tedious if you’re already wrapped up in something (nowhere near as bad as Apple’s MacBook Pro, though, which requires users to actually log off OS X and back in).

Around the desktop, users won’t notice all that much of a difference between the U550 running on four cylinders or running on eight. Even HD YouTube video and high-quality 480p content from Hulu played well without invoking power of the ATI. Fire it up, however, and you open up a whole new level of performance.

Like most hardware, we pushed the ATI to its limits with Crysis, which remains one of the most demanding PC titles available, even in 2010. With the game set to match the display’s native 1366 x 768 native resolution, it yielded perfectly fluid motion with all settings on low. Frame rates consistently remained in the lower 30’s and upper 20’s, although some brief moments of action or other intense effects could push it into the teens. Stepping everything to medium immediately dropped frame-rates unacceptably low, but players who want more compelling visuals should be able to bump certain settings up with the headroom available, without damaging playability.

Running PCMark Vantage, the U550 hit a score of 2905 PCMarks, a bit under similar laptops like Sony’s Vaio NW, which achieved 3,142. 3DMark Vantage refused to run on the system, but 3DMark06 returned a score of 2,653 3DMarks. That’s nothing to brag about in gaming circles, but considering it’s using a CULV processor and still deals with Crysis at minimal settings, we would say the U550 could make a fair-weather gamer happy enough.

What difference does all that swapping make in battery life? A fairly significant one. With GPU on and brightness all the way up, you can expect about three hours on the desktop, and of course, significantly less once you start tearing away at games. Switch to the Intel GMA chip, and that number soars to five-and-a-half hours, which should make all the difference for extended trips away from outlets.

Conclusion

As a do-it-all notebook in this price range, you could do worse than Lenovo’s U550. But where other notebooksstand out by paying attention to the details, Lenovo earns itself demerit after demerit by rummaging through the bargain bin in places it doesn’t think we’re looking. Cheap materials and confused styling make the outside something to be tolerated more than appreciated, and a low-resolution screen and pile of cruddy software waiting on the desktop for new owners carries that cheap feeling right over to the inside. The power and flexibility of switchable ATI graphics coupled with a CULV processor provide some redemption in both performance and battery life, but you’ll have to look past the rough edges to appreciate them.

Highs:

• Respectable battery life on Intel graphics
• Reasonably portable form factor, weight
• Easy-to-switch graphics
• Modest gaming performance
• Solid touchpad and keyboard

Lows:

• Loaded to the gills with bloatware
• Below-par webcam quality
• Low-resolution screen
• Cheap-feeling plastic lid
• Weak speakers

Lenovo IdeaPad U550 Notebook

Facebook is the new threat to Google

More people are coming to US news sites via Facebook and other social networking sites such as Twitter – supplanting Google News, which had been one of the primary sources of readers, according to research by the metrics company Hitwise.

During the past year, the proportion of traffic that Facebook sends to US media sites has tripled from around 1.2% to 3.52%, while that sent by Google News has remained roughly static, at around 1.4%, says Heather Hopkins, North America analyst for Hitwise.

The growing power of Facebook also means that publishers which want to demand money from – or alternatively to lock out – Google News because of claims that it “leeches” on their content could do so without fearing a dramatic impact on their reader figures.

With more than 400m users, Facebook forms the newest – and most unexpected – threat to Google, say some analysts. Last weekend the search engine spent $5m on a TV advert during the Superbowl, puzzling many who do not see a threat from rival search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing, which has less than half of its proportion of search queries.

But Hopkins notes in a blogpost for Hitwise that: “Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category. And with the Wall Street Journal already publishing content to Facebook, perhaps the social network can avoid the run-ins that Google has suffered recently with Rupert Murdoch. We will continue to watch this space.”

Murdoch’s editors and executives have repeatedly criticised aggregators such Google News, claiming it is leeching off their content by displaying snippets of their work. In the UK, the Murdoch-owned titles have gone as far as blocking access to their sites by Newsnow, a smaller news aggregator.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has argued that publishers should take advantage of the traffic that it sends them – pointing out that it sends about 4bn such links per year.

But Facebook provides the perfect counterweight, where publishers can choose how much of their content they display and view how well it is followed. Sites such as Facebook and increasingly Twitter contribute hundreds of thousands of visits every month to UK sites, according to analysis by the Guardian.

John Minnihan, the founder of the software code respositoryFreepository, warns that Facebook poses one of the biggest threats to Google on the web. “With recent data showing a large uptick in ‘Facebook as home page’, [Google] may well indeed need to remind emerging generation who/what it is. In that case, the [Superbowl] ad makes some business sense. Whatever the real reason, it has nothing to do with ’sharing video more widely’. If FB dev’ed an integrated web-wide search engine, think about how much traffic would evaporate [from Google] overnite. That’s nightmare stuff.”

Tellingly, Minnihan’s comments were made on Twitter — which Google is rumoured to be trying to compete with in a “social version” of its Gmail webmail product to be launched today. Google has already tried – and failed – to create a world-scale social network with its Orkut product, but been obliged instead to purchase access to Twitter’s search results to provide real-time insight into what people are talking about. Facebook’s content however lies beyond its reach – and that could be crucial in the forthcoming months as news publishers in the US and UK consider putting up higher paywalls or demanding money from aggregators.

Microsoft Office 2010 review

I’m writing this using the beta of Microsoft Word 2010, part of the Office 2010 suite due to hit the shelves later this year. You can try out the whole suite for free, too – the beta is available for download.

So what’s new in Office 2010? A hell of a lot: the reviewer’s guide that Microsoft helpfully provides for the likes of me runs to 174 pages, covering everything from the extension of the ribbon interface to Outlook 2010 to how to drill down and display data in Excel pivot tables. Other highlights include being able to slice and dice video into a Powerpoint presentation, and out-of-the-box PDF support, which Adobe isn’t going to like. Neither is Adobe going to like the fact that you’ll be able to edit images directly within Office apps.

What’s more interesting, however, is the determination of Microsoft to make Office 2010 as widely available as possible, including online and via mobile devices. There’s no need to buy – for large sums of money – the entire suite; you will be able to access via any browser and your Windows Live login pretty much full-featured versions of Excel, Word, Powerpoint and OneNote and use them to work collaboratively. If you’re a business, you’ll be able to host the Web Apps on your Sharepoint server and your minions will be able to access them via that.

This means, for example, if you’re at a conference with a Powerpoint presentation on a USB stick and no laptop, and suddenly some new data arrives via email on your mobile, you’ll be able to plug the stick into any computer and update the presentation using the online version of Powerpoint. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac and doesn’t have Powerpoint installed; and, unlike the current version of Outlook Web Access on Exchange 2007, it doesn’t matter what browser you use, either: the Web Apps are fully featured on any browser.

Clearly a riposte to the mighty Google and its Google Docs, Microsoft’s Web Apps are, for my money, a better and richer experience than Google’s offering. Like Google Docs, they will be free for the casual user. But why offer a free version of one of your biggest cash-generating suites of software? The answer is to expose as many people as possible to Office 2010, and to hope that they’ll love it so much they’ll shell out for the entire suite.

This version of Office is very much more focused on the world outside your PC. As well as the collaborative nature of the Web Apps, you’ll be able to keep on top of what your colleagues and contacts are up to, either via your company’s Sharepoint infracstructure or via the big social networks. So, via Outlook, not only will you be able to check up on whether Jack from Accounts has said yes to the meeting, you’ll also be able to see, via Facebook, if he’s still hungover from the weekend. Which would explain why he’s showing up in your People Pane in Outlook 2010 as “out of the office”.

As is usually the case with Microsoft, there will be lots of different flavours of the suite, ranging from the least eyewateringly expensive version aimed at students and home users – which, infuriatingly, won’t include Outlook – up to the all-singing, all-dancing Office Professional Plus.

Pros: richer multimedia tools, ability to use apps free online and to collaborate online.
Cons: Bound to be expensive, sheer size of suite and variety of tools can be confusing.
Office.microsoft.com

Facebook leads rise in mobile web use

A new set of audited figures for mobile internet use, the GSMA Mobile Media Metrics, reveal a landscape with one very tall peak

More than 25% of UK’s population – some 16 million people – accessed the Internet from mobile phones in December. And what were they looking for? The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics, published for the first time on Friday, provide an insight: on the mobile internet, people want to know what their friends are up to – and perhaps do a bit of flirting.

Facebook has a clearly lead in GSMA’s top 10 UK mobile internet sites, with 5 million unique users against 4.5 million for all of Google’s sites. (Mobile internet users want answers, too.)

And the domination is much greater in terms of times spend online and page views. Facebook had 2.6bn page impressions – nearly three times as many as Google, and more than a third of the 6.7bn total. Nearly half the total minutes online in December were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn, with Google on 400m in a very distant second place.

One fifth of UK mobile subscribers now tote smartphones, which is driving a rise in mobile interent use. In December, already 25% of UK’s population or 16 million people accessed the internet from their mobile phones and viewed a total of 6.7bn pages.

Besides Facebook and Google, the sites of the mobile phone operators scored well, with spots three to five going to Telefonica Mobile Networks (owners of O2, with all those iPhone users), Orange Sites and Vodafone Group.

Finally, the BBC site on the seventh spot indicates that people are reading the news on the go. Breaking news is also available on the mobile networks’ sites, and those of Microsoft and Yahoo at spots six and eight.

Regarding unique users, Apple’s and Nokia’s site come in last in the top 10 UK mobile internet sites in December. Once you look at page views and time spent online, Flirtomatic – which is integrated into most mobile operator portals – also comes into the picture.

Mobile minutes spent online:

1 Facebook 2.2 bn
2 Google 396m
3 Microsoft Sites 166m
4 Orange Sites 139m
5 AOL (and Bebo) 106m
6 Apple 104m
7 Vodafone 89m
8 BBC sites 84m
9 Flirtomatic 55m
10 Yahoo 49m

The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics report was commissioned by GSMA and comScore in partnership with five UK mobile operators: O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK. It is being audited by ABCe.

Richard Foan, managing director of ABCe, who also chairs the web media standards committee JICWEBS, called the new metrics “a great step forward for mobile media”.

The figures are based on irreversibly anonymised mobile Internet usage data from all five UK mobile operators, collected with consent from a representative sample of mobile users. In addition, Wi-Fi traffic, not seen in the mobile network traffic, is captured in the server-side logs of media owners and ad networks

Sony Ericsson Aspen: First to Run Windows Mobile 6.5.3

Sony Ericsson has just announced their brand new “Aspen” phone, the first Windows Mobile device running the new Windows Mobile 6.5.3 mobile operating system. The phone is the latest in the company’s eco-friendly “GreenHeart” line, which means it’s made from recycled materials, features energy-efficient chargers, offers a power-saving mode, and uses wateborne paint.

Designed for enterprise users and heavy texters, the phone has a full QWERTY keypad and includes Microsoft Office Mobile, Outlook Mobile, and a PDF reader.

As for what’s new with WiMo 6.5.3? The OS now offers improved support for capacitive-touch screens and multi-touch support, better navigation, horizontal scroll, and better touch controls so you can use the device without a stylus. You also drag and drop applications on the homescreen. There are other bug fixes and general improvements in the OS, too – ZDNet has a full feature list here.

Don’t expect a UK LTE network before 2011

NEWS

LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been widely regarded as the heir apparent to today’s cellular network standards for some time. But don’t hold your breath: any rollout of a next generation mobile network in the UK is still years away, says telecoms kit maker Ericsson’s UK CTO John Cunliffe.

“I would say probably the end of 2010 at the very earliest,” he told silicon.com. “Networks will be ready for rolling out – shipping in commercial quantities – next year and then the devices, we think, will start to come in 2010,” he added.

According to analysts ABI Research, multimode WiMax/LTE chipsets will be available from 2009 and, by 2013 the researchers believe 32 million consumers will be signed up to the networks.

There remain, however, many unknowns in LTE’s roadmap, not least how much it will cost to build a network – something likely to give operators pause for thought, especially in the current economic climate.

Cunliffe would not give an estimate on how much a commercial rollout of LTE in the UK might cost. “People need to do more modelling around rollout costs,” he said. “It’s a new equation.”

However, he claimed operators switching to LTE would reap the benefits of “total lower capex and lower opex” – provided they are willing to stump up the infrastructure cash.

However Cunliffe highlighted that any large-scale deployment of rival 4G technology WiMax would also require similar investment in infrastructure to that of an LTE deployment. “If you think about WiMax starting off as essentially a radio you need a much bigger ecosystem around it,” he said.

“By the time you actually deliver a service, the operators still have to pay for the infrastructure that goes around it and they’ve still got their opex – their people costs and so on – so the WiMax piece – the radio piece – is actually a small piece of the equation. In terms of the maturity of the 3GPP ecosystem, it’s well ahead of where WiMax is.”

Another aspect to consider when it comes to mobile’s 4G future is how much existing 3.5G services can be milked, as the potential speeds for HSPA is pretty impressive. Cunliffe noted: “We often forget that HSPA [high speed packet access or 3.5G] has a roadmap which will take it higher than the current speeds.

“The fastest being deployed in the UK at the moment is 7.2Mbps but our roadmap continues until 42Mbps. We can even see that it may be possible for the technology to reach as much as 80Mbps…so there is certainly a lot of mileage in HSPA…People maybe think that we’ve got to have LTE to get to the higher speeds but HSPA will go a long way before we need to get to LTE speeds.”

Cunliffe added the top speed of LTE currently being demoed by Ericsson in lab conditions is 160Mbps and a drive test has reached a maximum of 154Mbps, with an average of 78Mbps.

Once an LTE network is up and running, the Ericsson CTO said increasing demand for on-demand video services could mean some local media content caching could be required to keep up with users’ thirst for YouTube and BBC iPlayer.

“[On-demand video] does put a lot of pressure on the backhaul and the core networks – and will increasingly put pressure on them – but there are solutions which scale, which will accommodate it.”

What are the biggest hurdles to a UK LTE network being rolled out? Cunliffe believes they are timing – when operators will switch, especially those with significant investment in HSPA – as well as the inexorable issue of ROI: “Obviously there will be questions about return on investment,” he concluded.

Original Xbox Loses Live

On April 15th, Microsoft will pull the plug on the Xbox Live service for all original Xbox games—which affects both Xbox 1 games played on both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360.

So say you downloaded an Xbox Originals game onto your Xbox 360. That game will still play just fine, but don’t expect to go online with it. The same general rule applies to every vintage Xbox title no matter the grander Xbox platform.

But by cutting off these older titles (aka pissing off a bunch of Halo 2 fanatics), Microsoft will gain much more flexibility with the Live platform through announcements coming “in the next few weeks.”

Still Pining For An “iTablet”? UK Company X2 Has Named Their Windows 7 Tablet Just That

How the hell did X2 think they could name their tablet PC the “iTablet,” and get away with it? Sure, Apple may not be using the name, but did X2 think we weren’t paying attention to all those rumors?

Nonetheless, the iTablet—which hails from the UK—actually sounds very decent. For a tablet taking on the iPad, anyway. It runs Windows 7 (alright, naysayers, keep it down in the back), and is powered by a 1.6GHz Intel processor. It’s available in two sizes, of 10.2 and 12.1-inches (both 35mm thick, which sounds horrendously thick, given the iPad is 13.4mm deep), and each model contains 250GB of internal storage, a 3G chip and Bluetooth.

While the iPad was an oversized iPod Touch, the iTablet actually manages to be a proper computer by the sounds of it, with three USB ports and HDMI-out, along with a 1.3-megapixel webcam. Out in April, prices haven’t been announced just yet, but given some of the aforementioned components, I would think they’d struggle to price it lower than the iPad. [X2 via Electricpig]

Microsoft Warns of IE Bug on Windows XP

Internet Explorer continues to be a target of unpatched exploits as Microsoft released yet another security advisory for IE on Wednesday, mostly applying to Windows XP users.

According to the advisory, the software giant is investigating a new publicly reported bug affecting IE versions 5 to 8 on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. The fix applies to IE browsers that aren’t configured by default to run in “protected mode” or that have that function turned off.

Microsoft’s advisory also applies to IE 5.01 SP4 on Windows 2000 SP4, as well as to IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 SP4.

This vulnerability typically doesn’t apply when running IE on Windows Vista or Windows 7 because those operating systems use protected mode by default, according to a Microsoft blog. The blog noted that Microsoft has already issued a “Fix it” automated patch to help individual users enable protected mode on XP systems.

“Windows XP users, or users who have disabled Protected Mode, can help protect themselves by implementing Network Protocol Lockdown,” the blog explains. “We have created a Microsoft Fix It to automate this. The Fix It can be run on individual systems or enterprises can deploy it through their automated systems.”

The bug in question would still require that users be directed to a malicious Web site in order for the exploit to happen. A hacker could gain the same local user rights as the IE user if an attack is carried out successfully. Limiting user rights on the system thus can be a helpful way to lessen an attack’s impact.

Redmond may release a patch for this bug in its monthly security update, coming next Tuesday, or issue an out-of-band patch. Microsoft already issued an out-of-band fix for IE in January to address a remote code execution bug that led to attacks on Google and other companies.

Tuesday’s Patch Will Be a Windows Wash

Microsoft today signaled that a hefty batch of security fixes will arrive on Tuesday.

Microsoft’s has tended to break its own records of late. In the past six months, Patch Tuesdays have seemed more like “Fat Tuesdays,” at least in terms of the volume of fixes contained in the monthly patch. February’s patch looks to be no different. According to Microsoft’s advance notice, it will contain 13 fixes — five “critical,” seven “important” and one “moderate” fix.

“This amount of bulletins make this the busiest February we’ve seen from Microsoft, with only four [seen in February of] last year and an average of 11 to 12 [bulletins seen] in the three years prior,” said Sheldon Malm, senior director of security strategy at Rapid7.

“All eyes will be on Internet Explorer, given last month’s out-of-band update and the current zero day [bug] affecting older versions and instances where Protected Mode is disabled.”

Critical Items
The five critical security fixes will be targeted toward most Windows operating systems, according to Microsoft’s advance notice. Every fix will be associated with remote code execution (RCE) security implications across several as-yet-unspecified Windows components. The most pressing Windows component so far this year from a security perspective has been Internet Explorer, expert say.

While the critical fixes apply across most Windows OSes, there will be a couple of exceptions. Critical patch No. 2 will not affect Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008. Critical patch No. 4 only touches on Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Important Items
The seven important items will be a mixed bag of RCE, elevation-of-privilege and denial-of-service exploit patches affecting both Windows components and Microsoft Office applications. Every supported Windows OS is affected in some form or another.

For the Office fixes, only Office apps sitting on Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Mac will be affected.

Moderate Item
The lone moderate fix will only touch on the Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems as a patch for an RCE exploit.

It will be a busy day next Tuesday if the advance notice is any indication. Security experts anticipate no less than 20 vulnerabilities targeted in the February patch. All 13 security items may require a system restart.

“None of the operating systems escaped this month’s updates. Even the latest versions of Windows have been hit hard this month, with six updates for Vista, eight for Server 2008, and five for Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7,” Malm said in reference to the advance bulletin. “I won’t be surprised if Microsoft is playing catch-up on some lingering vulnerabilities from last year.”

If any IT administrators still have time for nonsecurity updates, they can check out this Knowledge Basearticle. It describes updates arriving via Windows Update, Microsoft Update and Windows Server Update Service.