There is a lot to look forward to in the tech world over the next few months. Microsoft is launching the Windows 7 public trial next week and a tool that researchers claim “could be as important as Google” will hit the desktops in the middle of May. New Windows.

Remember the fun of early Vista? Microsoft promise they have learned their lessons from that launch and this one will not have the same flawed launch. Watch this space.

Wolfram Alpha is another matter. It aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query in the way current search engines do. The technology is known as “computational knowledge engine” and it grabs raw data from public and licensed databases. It also uses live feeds for information such as share prices and the weather. So if you put in a question you will get a straightforward answer rather than having to decide which webpage to click on.

Sounds good to me – like having an Egghead in your pocket. Let’s hope this works better than Vista did.