I've had similar issues with my Dell Studio 1555 laptop. Even in maximum performance mode and everything in windows power management settings tweaked to the max my CPU constantly is running at 25-50% max. Even when running cpu intensive tasks like video encoding it will rarely jump to the actual frequency. I have a Core 2 Duo T9600 6MB cache 2.8ghz max but likes to run around 1.1ghz.

Last year MS released a new language and IDE called Microsoft SmallBasic. It was intended to help teach beginning programmers the basics while giving them a more modern interface and framework. Kids can easily write graphical programs and games.
Assembly, scheme, C, C++ are all great languages in their own right but for a beginning program they will not be enjoyable at all. The whole reason many of us became programmers was because it was fun and rewarding. This is one reason why many people started out with BASIC, it makes it easy to get that reward, that payoff. So many people started with Apple Basic or QBasic. SmallBasic fills that role. In a few lines someone can make a desktop background slideshow of images from flickr or write a program to make a ball run from a mouse. I've already taught a few kids smallbasic and they found it fun and it gave them the desire to learn more and expand their knowledge. If I had started out having to learn assembly I would have ran away fast from the programming world.

MCTS or MCPD would be the ways to go for Microsoft Certification. MCSE is no more and was only for platforms.

This may just be copying some of the vista bits. I hope not but still it may be what we get. Consumers in the US will probably never see Starter. It is just for developing countries.

I wish they would just get rid of Home Basic and just go with Home Premium as "Home" so then we would have 3 versions, Home, Business and Ultimate.

Every time I help someone that has Home Basic my first advice is to upgrade to premium and the normally do and are rather happy with it.