Windows 7 battery fix available for LG notebooks and more Windows news bits

Here's a round-up of Microsoft Windows-related news items of note from the past week:

Windows 7 battery-fix available for LG machines: Remember the dust-up earlier this year regarding Windows 7 and battery-life issues? Although Microsoft officials said at that time that there weren't any battery-related problems of note, it looks like there were battery problems with certain LG machines, including the R500 family of notebooks. Microsoft published a Knowledge Base article that points to BIOS refreshes now available from LG that will fix false "battery is low" reports. (Thanks to Ars Technica for the pointer to the KB article.)

Price cuts for Windows Anytime Upgrade coming next week: Microsoft and its PC partners have been providing Windows users with an "Anytime Upgrade" capability, via which they can pay to upgrade their operating systems on the fly. Starting the week of April 5 (and through July 3), Microsoft and its OEMs will be cutting the price of some of those upgrades on Windows 7 PCs sold at retail, according to a new post on The Windows Blog. Windows 7 Starter to Windows Home Premium upgrade prices will be cut from $79.99 to $49.99 (ERP) and Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional upgrades from $89.99 to $79.99 (ERP).

MDOP 2010 refresh now available: On April 1, Microsoft made available to business customers the promised 2010 refresh of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). The latest refresh includes the final version of Service Pack (SP) 1 of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-v) 1.0 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, plus localized client versions of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.6. The refresh is downloadable for free for existing MDOP licensees via Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center. Evaluation copies of the MDOP 2010 Refresh are available via MSDN and TechNet.

Microsoft readies updates to Hyper-V Linux Integration Services: Microsoft released a beta of an updated version of Hyper-V Linux Integration Services this week. These Integration Services are the source code Microsoft submitted and had accepted for inclusion in the Linux kernel (version 2.6.32) last year. The new beta adds SMP support for up to four virtual CPUs, integration shutdown, and Timesync, for keeping guest OS time synchronized with the management partition. Microsoft officials said they plan to submit the updated Integration Services for inclusion in the Linux kernel, as well.