Dell has finally released their Vostro A860 laptop in the United States. It had previously been available in other parts of the world since August. The unit starts at just $379 when you factor in Dell’s instant savings. The Vostro A860 features a 15.6-inch screen and weighs 5.4 pounds. It comes with either a Celeron or Pentium Dual Core processor. The Vostro also features a GMA X3100+ integrated graphics card, 2GB of memory, up to 160GB of storage, WiFi and optional Bluetooth. Vista is the pre-loaded OS of choice for the unit..

According to it’s corporate bigwigs, Microsoft will releases Windows 7 in early 2010. That’s not the whole story, however. Ina Fried at CNET has heard from Microsoft Director Doug Howe that Windows 7 should be ready for general consumption by the 2009 holidays. Answering a question from Fried, Doug Howe said "Definitely the holiday focus is going to be on 7."

Using the Vista launch as a template, this would put the Windows 7 OS in the hands of OEMs and big business IT staffers by the middle of the year, just three months shy of consumers. Now we play the waiting game.

According to tests conducted over at Lifehacker, Windows 7 is already booting 20% faster than Windows Vista. In tests on identical systems, Vista Ultimate took 37 seconds to fully boot while Windows 7 came in 10 seconds faster at 27 seconds.

I’m already impressed. I run Vista Ultimate on my main machine and don’t really mind it much, for the first time in a while, I think I can actually say that I am looking forward to this new release of Windows.

The idea that Microsoft has achieved boot times of just 15 seconds is mind blowing as well as being able to run the OS on an Eee PC. It looks like Microsoft is "back to basics" and hopefully this time they’ll deliver.

If you don’t know much about Windows 7, check out the walk through at Gizmodo.

Microsoft has finally discontinued licensing for their seminal Windows 3.x platform. Believe it or not, consumers have still been snapping up licenses for the system. It’s used primarily in cash registers and with airline entertainment companies. Still, after 18 years, Microsoft decided to call it quits.

Requirements for the, now dead, OS included a 8086/8088 processor with a clock speed of 10MHz, 7MB of storage and 640KB of RAM. To put that in perspective, Vista requires a minimum of a 1GHz processor and 20GB of storage.

It’s only been six months since Vista’s SP1 hit the Internet, but Microsoft execs have already begun to tout SP2. They’ve unveiled some of the improvements the second service pack will bring to the table. Vista SP2 will add Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy. It will also come packed in with the Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack. Finally, they’ve announced SP2 will also have the ability to natively record data on Blu-Ray media and Windows Connect Now (WCN.) This would allow users to simplify their WiFi configurations.

The press release did not divulge a release date for the service pack nor did it offer up any details on the company’s forthcoming Windows 7.