Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

There is a lot of talk going around the Web regarding Vista’s Aero interface eating up precious battery life on laptops. Today the Windows Vista Blog responded to the concerns that a lot of people had by saying:

First off, yes, as Dwight correctly points out, the Aero theme drives the GPU harder and therefore uses more power.  But in the big picture, it’s really not that much more.  For example, the display on most laptops will consume somewhere between 15-25% of your “power budget” when you are running on battery.  Nevertheless, in our testing we’ve seen that turning on Aero consumes only about 1-4% more of battery life.  In terms of making your battery last longer, turning off Aero will not go very far while at the same time costing you some of the cool features that make Windows Vista fun to use, such as Flip 3D, taskbar previews, window transparency and so on.

So they do admit that having Aero enabled does cause slightly more of a battery drain, but they planned ahead and implemented something to reduce the battery consumption in Vista. If you put your laptop into Power Saver mode (left-click on the battery icon in the System Tray), and then unplug the computer you’ll notice that Vista automatically disabled the transparency feature. All of the other Aero features still remain in tact, such as the Flip 3D and Taskbar previews, but some of the eye candy has been removed. It might not be much but this does indeed save battery power.

If that’s still not enough for you there is an application that someone made to help even more. Whenever this program is running it will disable Aero all together (no Flip 3D, Taskbar previews, transparency, etc…) as soon as your computer switches to battery power. This is supposed to maximize your battery life, but from my personal experience it doesn’t really help that much.

I definitely recommend switching into Power Saver mode if you are ever trying to conserver battery power. When I do that with my PC I end up with more battery life than when I run XP on it. Of course there is always the High Performance mode that you can switch into if you really want to see how fast you can drain your battery. 🙂

Note: With a fully charged battery in Balanced mode (and running dual-monitors with full screen brightness) I get an estimated 3 hours and 18 minutes of battery life. Switching over to Power Saver mode, still with full screen brightness, I am estimated to get 4 hours and 4 minutes.

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This article was written on February 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

The default wallpapers that come with Window’s Vista are without a doubt some of the best that have ever been offered with an operating system. And what’s more amazing is that a portion of them came from amateur photographers. Thanks to Digg, I came across a page on Flickr that has several photos that someone took hoping that Microsoft would select them to become default Vista Wallpapers.  Two photos actually made it, but all of them are simply amazing.

• 2/3 of the collection came from licenses stock houses
• Some of the photos came from Flickr photographers
• 5 of the images came from Microsoft employees
• Microsoft evaluated over 10,000 images during the first round of the selection process.

Another great source for wallpapers is a Spectacular Landscapes  group over at Flickr.  Images are posted by invitation only.  The selectiveness means that images tend to be high quality, and worth taking a look at. With 6,180 photos to choose from, there’s bound to be something you’ll be interested in.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

… or so that seems to be the general consensus among many of the reviewers out there. The latest buzz is in regards to CNet UK’s Top Ten Terrible Tech Products, where they place Windows Vista at number 10. Is it deserving of such a pitiful ranking?

Personally, I don’t think it is. My experience with Vista has been rather good, but I strongly believe that every operating system has its own benefits:

• Windows XP – It’s small in size and requires little in terms of system requirements. It’s also been out for over six years and has two Service Packs under its belt, which attributes to the wide compatibility and stability it has to offer.
• Windows Vista – Whether you want to believe it or not, Vista utilizes system resources better than any other version of Windows. If you constantly monitor the memory usage in Vista you’ll quickly see that it eats up a lot of your RAM, but that’s because it wants to use it! It’s not that it requires 2GB of RAM to run, but it will use as much as it can to increase the performance of the system. One of the ways it uses your memory is to preload the most used applications so that they launch almost instantaneously. If another application needs the memory, however, Vista will release what it can to meet the needs of the application.
• OS X Leopard – I’ve never had much hands-on experience with Mac’s, but I know one of the reasons that people love them is that they work without needing a lot of configuration. A large reason why things just work is that the selection of hardware is limited in comparison to what’s available for PC’s. The near idiot-proof technology does come at the expense of your pocketbook though.

And guess what, Vista’s reception is no different than XP! Six months after XP was released here’s what CNet had to say in 2002:

Microsoft’s latest operating system just turned six months old, and most would say that it’s neither a failure nor a raging success. While XP promised the latest and greatest multimedia, security, and ease-of-use features available, many users have not yet upgraded, fearing the hefty system requirements and potential compatibility disasters inherent in a major OS upgrade.

If you replace the instance of “XP” in that article with “Vista” you would essentially sum up what people are saying about Vista right now. Kinda funny, huh?

There are over 88 million people already running Vista (as of October 2007), which is double what XP had in the same time frame. Microsoft has also said that there are tens of millions of corporate volume licenses out there that have not been included in the 88 million users mentioned above. It’s estimated that 13% of businesses have already adopted Vista, which is quite good considering many enterprises will wait until Vista SP1 is released next year.

I think it’s safe to say that people are getting sick of all the Vista-bashing that is going on. I know Ed Bott is, and many of the readers over at Neowin are as well, so I think it’s time to bring an end to it.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the things that people complain about the most in Vista is that transferring large files is painfully slow compared to previous versions of Windows. Thanks to a post over at Neowin, both users of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista are able to install a performance and compatibility pack that will address this issue as well as several others.

Some sites appear to be thinking that these patches will be released on Patch Tuesday (a week from tomorrow) via the standard Windows Update system. I’m not so sure about that, and if you look at the bottom of this post I outline all of the things that these patches fix. It’s quite a lengthy list, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft held them back for the release of Vista SP1. So I would say that this is kind of like the Beta version of Vista SP1 that we never got.

As soon as I saw this I couldn’t wait to download the fixes, but the problem is that they haven’t been officially posted by Microsoft yet. Have no fear, these updates have been leaked (download links posted below), and I’ve already installed the 32-bit versions on my Vista Ultimate installation. There are just two installation files included that you need to install, and then you’ll reboot your computer. If something does go wrong your System Restore should have automatically made a restore point before proceeding with the installation of the updates (I checked and mine had made the restore point automatically).

What’s the result? The file transfer times are dramatically reduced, and it no longer takes forever for Vista to calculate the remaining time! AeroXP has even gone as far as to say that the transfer times are half of what they were.

If you decide to try these out you should remember that they have not been officially released by Microsoft. In fact, they could be some sort of beta version that isn’t even complete. I’ve had no troubles with either of the updates on my 32-bit version of Vista, but your experience may vary.

IMPORTANT: One thing that a Neowin user pointed out was that the 64-bit version will require that you disable driver signing each time your computer starts, which can be done by pressing F8 during the boot process. This includes everyone that’s using Rivatuner, atitool and/or Peerguardian on Vista 64-bit.

Download from MediaFire: 64-bit and 32-bit
Download from MediaFire (requires 7-Zip to extract): 64-bit and 32-bit

Here are all of the details regarding the two updates:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
• Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
• Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
• Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
• Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
• Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft’s Windows Vista has been available to consumers now for 10 days. Results from the first five days of Vista sales are available with nothing really too surprising to reveal.

The first thing which the analysis report shows is that the sales of PC’s for the week ending February 3rd increased 173% which is certainly an impressive number. However, think about what that number could have been if Vista was launched before the holiday season.

It was all about Vista Home Premium for the first five days of sales.  Home Premium alone made up 70% of sales for  PCs with Vista.  This of course does not factor in that many computers come with Home Premium as the pre-installed version.  It is not know how many Home Premium sales came from upgrades.

Vista Home Basic, the simplest version that you can buy made up 22% of the sales, and Windows Vista Ultimate made up 1.2 percent of the sales. Microsoft is probably disappointed in the Ultimate number because this is obviously where they’re going to make the most profit.Samir Bhavnani who wrote the report says that “”You can expect over time that Ultimate will become a bigger part of the overall mix.”

Only time will tell how the sales of Vista Ultimate will play out.  One of the biggest factors that will keep people from upgrading to the Ultimate version is price.  When buying a computer with Vista Home Basic, you can upgrade to home-premium for just $50 more, but an upgrade to Vista Ultimate from Vista Basic would cost $150.  Consumers are going to be much more willing to spend an extra $50 versus $150.

Also included in the report was the percentage of sales from PC Vendors.  In the first week, Hewlett-Packard accounted for 54% of Vista Home premium sales and 53% of Vista Home Basic sales.

Clearly, Vista Ultimate is not a 1st choice for consumers. Home Premium appears to be the “go-to” version that will satisfy the needs of most people and comes in at a much more affordable price when compared to Vista Ultimate.

I’d be interested in knowing how many PC’s and copies of Vista were actually sold.  The percentages give you some perspective to how Vista is doing, but if there was an overall number that these percentages were derived from, it would be much more insightful. It would also be interesting to see how many people are going for the much more affordable OEM edition.

Source: InfoWorld

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