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In the nature of Microsoft product updates, Windows 7 is entering its middle years. Generally, Microsoft comes out with a new update to Windows every three years and Windows 7 is currently 18 months into its game. In that time Microsoft has sold 350 million licenses to the operating system making it perhaps the fastest selling software of all time.

In a blog post on the 18-month mark of Windows 7, Microsoft says that nearly 90% of businesses are currently in Windows 7 migrations and that it is saving enterprises $140 per PC per year, a $131 return on investment. The operating system has made it to desktops, laptops, netbooks and yes, tablets. The growth has been spurred by the cheeky advertising campaign - "Windows 7 was my idea!" - and the mass of money that Microsoft has spent marketing the product. Yet, Windows 8 rumors have begun to surface and it looks like it will make its debut in the fall of 2012, right on schedule with Microsoft's three-year product cycle. What can we expect?

We were in San Francisco yesterday as Microsoft unveiled the latest beta of Internet Explorer 9 and, like many present, we were impressed. From everything we saw, it was all it was hyped up to be - visually stunning, fast and full-featured. Then came the one, big catch - it's only available for Windows 7.

The Register says that it got the official word from Microsoft and if Internet Explorer 9 is something you want, then Windows XP just isn't going to do.

Several sources have reported that Palm has ditched its Windows 7 tablet, Slate, and is now tuning up a new tablet that will run the Palm webOS.

The new tablet, to be possibly introduced in Q3, is code-named Hurricane and will run on Palm's mobile operating system. HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion last month.

Location-based services are definitely a hot topic right now, but sadly, Windows 7 doesn't offer an easy to use, built-in platform for detecting a computer's location. Due to this, the number of location-aware and location-enhanced applications for Windows 7 remains extremely low. Thanks to Geosense for Windows, however, which was developed by Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng and released today, it has now become a lot easier for Windows 7 developers to access location data and use it in their apps.

Connectify.me is a new service we just found out about. They've sussed out how to make any Windows 7 computer into a WiFi hotspot. Since we just installed Windows 7 on a spare laptop, we figured it was about time to make Windows do something cool, so we installed the app.

We were quite literally up and running with other devices connected in five minutes. In fact, this post is being published right now on a Connectify.me-powered connection. Windows 7 users have got to try this app. You never know when you'll get to save the day by letting other users share your Internet connection.

Thanks to mobile devices like the iPhone and recent efforts by numerous hardware manufacturers like HP, touch and multi-touch enabled devices are slowly becoming more ubiquitous. While Apple users have the mythical iTablet to look forward to, Windows users didn't really have a similar project to latch on to, except maybe for Microsoft's large and costly Surface table. Now, however, BumpTop has released the latest version of its innovative 3D desktop environment with support for multi-touch gestures.

Microsoft's Windows 7 development team yesterday confirmed that users will be able to remove Internet Explorer 8, as well as several other Microsoft applications, from Windows 7.

This appears to be a major step by the company in addressing the long standing anti-trust complaints of bundling their applications with Windows, and may account in part for the recent scaling back by the European Union in its monitoring of the software giant.

It's tempting to give Apple's iPhone credit for the birth of touch-based computing, but it was not the first touchscreen user interface - nor is it the only one in existence today. Long before the iPhone, touchscreen LCDs were common, as were touch smartphones from Palm, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and others. In addition, back in 2001 - long before the iPhone launch - Microsoft began work on Microsoft Surface, a touchscreen tabletop computer. Yet it was the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities along with its stellar design that really got the ball rolling for touch computing. The only question that remains now is what will come next?

When Steve Ballmer announced that the first public beta of Windows 7 would be available today, it was already clear that there would be a tremendous demand for the next version of Windows. The last we heard was that the beta will be available at noon PST today, even though the download link from Microsoft's TechNet site are already making the rounds on Twitter.