At TheUltimateSteal.ca, the Windows 7 Professional Upgrade is listed at $39.99 (in Canadian dollars)! Granted, that’s only for the digital download but you can have them ship you the official DVD for $13 (includes shipping and you don’t even pay tax).

To order your copy, visit TheUltimateSteal.ca or through Microsoft’s longer URL: www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-ca/

Since this is an Upgrade, you will most likely have to have an existing genuine license for another Windows product (Windows XP and Vista only). There was a loophole with Windows Vista Upgrades where you would not need to enter in your existing key, but that they may be fixed in this new version. If in doubt, do a search for more information.

Enjoy the next step of PC evolution; thumbs up and thanks Microsoft.

From an updated version of Office 2007 SP1, it was 350.3 MB on my Windows Vista PC. That’s a lot of ones and zeros.

What’s great about this Service Pack is that it adds full support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and saving as Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS). No more having to download external add-ins for this. I’m noticing more and more that Microsoft is allowing a lot more open source interoperability in their products, but I don’t think it’s Big M “caving in”; on the contrary, they’re giving you more reasons to stay with their products.

Oh, and they also added an interface to program against to extend what formats Office 2007 is capable of working with. From their patch notes:

Extensible File Formats: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now include a converter interface that lets you plug third-party custom file formats into these Office programs. A developer can create a converter for files of a particular extension. When this converter is installed on a user’s computer, the custom file format effectively behaves like a built-in file format. Specifically, users can open files of this format and save them by using the Open or Save UI. They can even set the custom format as their default file format. For more information, visit the following MSDN Web site.

I’m interested to see where this goes.