Firing upper management has always been expensive, but HP seems to have taken it to new heights. Carly Fiorina’s exit package was worth about $42 million, Mark Hurd got $12.2 million, and, after less than a year in the position, Leo Apotheker left with $25.2 million in severance pay. It makes you wonder what else they might have been able to do with that money.

Red Hat, and other Linux entities claim UEFI is being installed in a way that will prevent users from installing anything but a Microsoft operating system. Microsoft claims that isn’t true. However. If you buy a PC with UEFI enabled, you will need to get a secure key from somewhere before you can change the OS.

Win8 will allow you to log into your system using your Windows Live ID and connect to your SkyDrive. This page includes two short videos showing how SkyDrive and the Metro interface work on Win8.

In Win8 Server Hyper-V may be coming into a position to challenge VMware. There have been a number of improvements to the virtual systems and the change in server installation, core instead of GUI, may enhance multi-machine management.

Microsoft has released a first beta of its WebMatrix tool to testers. WebMatrix Version 2 offers support for .Net, PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

With Win8 Microsoft is leaving BIOS (Basic Input Output System) behind in favor of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). While the change is overdue there is some misunderstanding about how it works.

Number one reason: WinXP support will probably expire before Win8 ships. The learning curve for workers might be daunting. Finish your Win7 migration before starting a Win8 migration.

Silanis Technology announced the release of e-Sign Desktop 7.0 (formerly known as ApproveIt Desktop) with support for Microsoft Word and Excel 2010. e-Sign Desktop supports IBM Forms, MS InfoPath, and Adobe Acrobat as well as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Microsoft is re-writing the operating system and user interface with Win8. This is a big job, so parts of it should be expected to "fail". One item targeted in this list is the Metro interface, which may be about as useful as "Bob" and as welcome as "Clippy".

In the name of security, to prevent root-kit malware installation, new PCs will use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot specification. But, if the vendor doesn’t provide you with the key, you can’t change the OS, ever.