| Can someone point me to the official MS XP / Vista groups / blogs or
| whatever they are called now?
|
You might find something here under the Windows* categories:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/categories/
Microsoft has stopped supporting their own newsgroups. Most
of them -- like this one -- still exist but many people are no
longer aware of them or have moved to the Web forums.
The new Web forums are not really discussion groups. They
are moderated, controlled forums that require one to sign up
for a Windows Live ID. (An e-tracking collar.) If you do not mind
that then you may find more help in the forums, as most of the
MVPs are there. On the down-side, a webpage-based discussion
is very clunky to use, and MVPs do not get their status by
criticizing MS products. Which is to say that the new forums
are really more a marketing gimmick meant to control "the message"
than they are a discussion venue.
There are MS blogs for some of their products, but again,
most of what comes directly from MS is marketing, not
information.
I usually find what I need by doing a search. Interestingly,
my searches still usually lead me to usenet-reposting sites, not
links to the MS Web forums. But on occasion I have come across
something useful from something like the MS IE "team" blog.