Vista News

Announcing Windows Vista SP2 Beta Posted 12/2/2008 by Steve Sinchak - Total Views: 180 - Views Today: 180 Today Microsoft is releasing the Windows Vista SP2 Beta for Technet and MSDN Subscribers to download. Service Pack 2 includes dozens of improvements that will help security and performance. Among the improvements the most notable are Bluetooth 2.1 feature pack, Windows Connect Now wireless configuration, Windows Search 4 and increased reliability. Detailed List of Changes: Support for new technologies: SP2 contains Blue tooth 2.1 feature pack supporting the most recent specification for Blue tooth technology Ability to record data on Blu-Ray media Adds Windows Connect Now (WCN) Wi-Fi Configuration to Windows Vista SP2 exFAT file...

Desktop CPU Comparison Guide There are so many CPU models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different models or even remember their specifications! Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications of the various desktop CPUs in the market, as well as those already obsolescent or obsolete. Currently covering 673 desktop CPUs, this comprehensive comparison will allow you to easily compare 18 different specifications for each and every CPU. We hope it will prove to be a useful reference. We will keep this guide updated regularly so do check back for the latest updates! To make it easy to compare the...

I have had a Digital Locker Account for more than 15 months and this advisory was received today. For Users with DL Accounts that retain records of Software Licences and Purchases etc, it is recommended that you print off copies of licence information and backup any software to CD. This service will close in August 2009. :shock: FULL TEXT OF THE E-MAIL FROM MICROSOFT IS AS FOLLOWS; From: "Microsoft" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: ACT NOW: Closing your digital locker account Date: Thursday, 11 December 2008 13:03 Your Digital Locker Account Will Be Closed in August, 2009. Dear Digital Locker Customer, This is to notify you that on November 20, 2008 Windows® Marketplace...

Download Vista SP2 Beta via Windows Update Written by Ryan October 30th, 2008 If you like to stay on the bleeding edge of technology (and you’re running Vista) you may want to consider modifying two registry keys on your system so that you can participate in the Vista SP2 Beta program. To join the program all you have to do is download this batch file, and run it on your Vista machine as an administrator (right click - Run as administrator). Then just check for available Windows Updates (it may take 30 minutes or so for it to show up in the Windows Updates). Think carefully whether you want to do this or not. There will likely be some bugs that could cause problems with your system, but at the very least it will cause Vista to...

It seems like everywhere you turn on the Web these days, there’s another article bad mouthing Microsoft Windows Vista and telling you to stay with Windows XP — arguing that XP is the greatest Microsoft OS ever. It also seems like there are just as many articles praising Windows 7 as our OS savior — and it’s barely even a twinkle in Bill Gate’s eye at this point. While reading these types of articles recently, I’ve begun to recall other points in the history of Microsoft operating systems and draw parallels with what happened then with what is happening today with Vista. In this edition of the Windows Vista Report, I’ll explore some of these parallels. Read More .... Stop unfairly comparing Vista to its predecessor and its successor |...

In late October, Microsoft gave its beta testers the first beta build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. On Tuesday, the company pushed out a later build to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The five languages currently supported are English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese, in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. Today, the company has made this SP2 build available to the public on the Microsoft Download Center: for Vista and Server 2008 32-bit (388MB), for Vista and Server 2008 64-bit (614MB), and for Server 2008 ia64 (416MB). The public beta release is available as part of a Customer Preview Program (CPP), which is aimed at technology enthusiasts, developers, and IT Pros who would like to test SP2 in their...

When Vista's boot screen was revealed in an early beta, many were confused by its simplicity. This is the best Microsoft could come up with? Microsoft's explanation was that it wanted to keep things as simple as possible in order to encourage OEMs to stop including their own logos during the boot up process. If this video isn't a fake, that approach seems to have gone to out the window (pardon the lame pun). Full Story: Is this the new Windows 7 boot screen? j7oDvY1-XeY

Following the last quintupling of storage from 1GB to 5GB in February and a few features added in May, Microsoft is planning to do it again in the next few weeks when it updates Windows Live SkyDrive. In addition to updating the service to the new Wave 3 look, the company will make it available in more countries and regions: Arabia, China, Hong Kong, Israel, South Africa, and Vietnam, as well as 13 new languages: Basque, Catalan, Guajarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Kannada, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Serbian-Cyrillic, Tamil, Telugu, and Vietnamese. Full Story: Windows Live SkyDrive to quintuple storage again to 25GB

The Department of Justice said in a November 5 press release that its investigation showed Google was "by far the largest provider" of Internet search and advertising, as well as Internet search syndication. The agreement with Yahoo, had it gone forward, would have accounted for 90 percent of those markets, the release said. Litvack says by publicizing Google's current market share in the press release the department "may or may not be" trying to put the company on notice for possible future antitrust actions. Brief Story: Google Was Three Hours Away From Being Charged As A Monopolist Full Story: Hogan's Litvack Discusses Google/Yahoo

On December 1, Microsoft announced that the Windows Live Wave 3 beta was closing down, and that the company would begin moving its Windows Live users to the final version of its web services. A Microsoft employee confirmed that as of Tuesday night, all the users have been moved over to the Wave 3 version. All services sport the new Wave 3 header and interface and allow you to customize your theme (including dynamic ones) across them all. Full Story: A look at all the new Windows Live Wave 3 web services

On Friday, Microsoft gave computer makers a six-month extension for offering Windows XP on newly-shipped PCs. While this doesn’t impact enterprise IT — because volume licensing agreements will allow IT to keep installing Windows XP for many years to come — the move is another symbolic nail in Vista’s coffin. The public reputation of Windows Vista is in shambles, as Microsoft itself tacitly acknowledged in its Mojave ad campaign. IT departments are largely ignoring Vista. In June (18 months after Vista’s launch), Forrester Research reported that just 8.8% of enterprise PCs worldwide were running Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have put Windows 7 on an accelerated schedule that could see it released in 2010. That will provide IT...

Nehalem by the numbers: The Ars review By Joel Hruska | Published: November 13, 2008 - 01:05AM CT Introduction Nehalem hit the ground running last week, as benchmarks (both our own and others') showed that Intel's new Core i7 chews through most workloads in record time for a one-socket part, often besting dual-socket/octal-core Xeon configurations. The new performance gap between Nehalem and pretty much everything else of comparable cost is the result of upgrades to both the CPUs core architecture and the platform on which the multicore chip now runs. Because the Core i7 isn't just a "Penryn" Core 2 Duo with some L3 and an integrated memory controller, the present review focuses primarily on measuring how well...

PDC attendees got the Windows 7 pre-beta build, and Microsoft told them that a public beta would be available in early 2009. But you don't want to wait until then, right? You want Beta 1, right now. Well, I can't give you that, but I can tell you how you can get your hands on a physical copy of the Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD. You'll need $100 and a desire to visit one of the upcoming episodes of the MSDN Developer Conference (MDC). Here are the dates and locations you can register for: 12/9/08 - Houston, TX 12/11/08 - Orlando, FL 12/16/08 - Atlanta, GA 1/13/09 - Chicago, IL 1/13/09 - Minneapolis, MN 1/16/09 - Washington, DC 1/20/09 - New York, NY 1/22/09 - Boston, MA 1/22/09 - Detroit, MI 1/26/09 - Dallas, TX 2/19/09 - San Francisco, CA...

Adobe previews 64-bit Flash Author: Gareth Halfacree Published: 19th November 2008 Comments (13) Email to a friend Stumble The new 64-bit build of Flash Player 10 for Linux allows users running 64-bit OSes to browse the web using purely native code. Fans of Adobe's Flash will be pleased to hear that the company is looking to bring a native 64-bit version of the popular rich media technology to Windows, Mac, Linux users in the near future – along with a fully-fledged mobile version. According to ITWire, Adobe took the stage at the Adobe Max conference in San Fransico this week to announce that it is making a pre-release version of its native 64-bit Flash plugin available for Linux users immediately, with Windows and Mac version...

In August, Windows Search 4.0 (WS4) was released to the masses. According to recent tests, the performance improvements were significant: 26 percent faster for Windows XP and 84 percent for Windows Vista. We already know that WS4 will be bundled in Vista SP2, so it's natural to expect that the Windows 7 Find and Organize team is using WS4 as the base for further improvements. But the team won't be limited to performance tweaks. When Vista was released, its search features were significantly better than XP's. It's time to take a look at what Microsoft is planning to do for search for Windows 7; according to information Microsoft has released to developers, search in Windows 7 can go beyond a local network: Windows 7 supports searching...

Check Point to Celebrate 15th Anniversary by Giving Away ZoneAlarm Pro Software Written by Paul Lilly 11/17/08 at 08:18:19 AM Given the widespread availability of free solutions, we know how power users hate to pay for security software. If you fall into this category, your options will become slightly more robust this Tuesday, November 18. According to a spattering of reports, a company spokeswoman for Check Point said the company plans to celebrate its 15th anniversary by giving away a 1-year subscription to its ZoneAlarm Pro software security suite. For those not familiar with the program, ZoneAlarm Pro expands on the company's popular firewall solution by throwing in a spyware remover, protection against rootkits, ID theft...

In a very surprising move, Microsoft has announced today that Windows Live OneCare customers will be getting the shaft next year. The software giant has decided to replace OneCare with a free security solution (codenamed "Morro") to be released in the second half of next year. The yet-to-be-announced product will be a realtime anti-malware protection solution, whereas OneCare offered that plus backup and management features. Sales of the Windows Live OneCare subscription service as well as Windows Live OneCare for Server on SBS 2008 will end on June 30, 2009. If your subscription is about to run out, I'd suggest looking for an alternative instead of renewing a product that is on its way out the door. Sure, OneCare will continue to be...

What Microsoft Got Right: The First 30 Years Microsoft is one of the most successful companies in modern history. It revolutionized the way companies use IT to do business and helped elevate the importance of IT in terms of corporate strategy. Since its inception 33 years ago, Microsoft has made many mistakes both large and small. But it also got a few big things very, very right. As the post-Gates era takes shape, we look back on five things Microsoft got right and what they teach us. Software Is King Microsoft was among the first companies to see software as the business, not just an add-on sale to hardware. It acted on that insight in a big way. Before the PC, all software tended to be custom, written for and tied to a specific...

A flaw in Vista's networking has been found that can crash the system, but no fix is expected until the next service pack A flaw has been found in Windows Vista that could allow rootkits to be hidden or denial-of-service attacks to be executed on computers using the operating system. The vulnerability was found by Thomas Unterleitner of Austrian security company Phion and was announced Friday. Unterleitner told ZDNet UK on Friday that Phion told Microsoft about the flaw in October but that he understood a fix would only be issued in the next Vista service pack. According to Unterleitner's disclosure of the flaw, the issue lies in the network input/output subsystem of Vista. Certain requests sent to the iphlpapi.dll API can cause a...

New Forceware 180.48 Drivers Released, Claims up to 80% Improvement, Enables SLI Multi-Monitor Support Written by Paul Lilly 1/20/08 at 12:30:55 PM Nvidia has released new WHQL-certified videocards driver for GeForce 200-series, 9-series, and 8800-series GPUs only (owners of older videocards need not apply). The approximately 73MB download enables finally brings to fruition a license agreement between Nvidia and Intel by enabling SLI on SLI-certified Intel X58-based motherboards. The new driver also supports multi-monitor support in an SLI-configuration, which previously had only been available with beta drivers. PhysX acceleration is also enabled when installing the new driver. On the gaming front, Nvidia claims double-digit...