xpresszine|xpress magazine

In their monthly Windows Update offerings, Microsoft has announced a trio of speed and reliablity updates to be available this tuesday. These updates would be offered through Windows Update.

These fixes are anyway also gonna get added to the Service Pack 1, whcih the company announced would be release anytime in the first quarter of the coming year.

Now, this is the second time after august that Microsoft has included Vista performance and reliablity hotfixes with Windows Update offerings. Seriously, this looks great, as the proverb goes “With great competition, comes great products” (yep, i just made it ;)). With Microsoft losing another percent in the desktop market to Apple, they have really geared up and are already on their heels. I believe, we would be seeing some more reliability and sped-boosters before SP1 is out.

Well, other updates that would be offered includes a multi update that:

• Extends laptop battery life.
• Improves the stability of wireless network connections.
• Shortens recovery time after exiting hibernation or sleep.
• Deals with compatibility problems with some antivirus software.

There are other fixes too, related to USB issues and an update to the Windows Media Centre. According to Nick White(Microsoft Vista’s Product Manager), the USB rollup fixes problems that have caused 1% to 2% of all reported Vista crashes.

[Credits : ComputerWorld]

Microsoft has finally released a private SP1 beta build for Vista. It is yet to be made to the general beat tester community. As of now it is only an invitation-only testing.

As usual lot of tweaks and refinements have gone into the build. The system is made to work faster than before and the list of Vista certifier softwares has increased 10 fold.

Some key benefits are:

• The standalone service pack will include all languages. It can update all PCs running Windows Vista, regardless of language.
• Componentization brings benefits such as the ability to uninstall updates in any order more reliably.
• Windows Vista contains a significant amount of files shared with Windows Server 2008 and therefore benefits from the continual improvements made during the Windows Server 2008 development cycle.

For more information visit The Windows Vista Blog

1. Mac is Stable.

Of course the credit goes to the solid architecture of BSD Unix kernel, but Apple were among the first to develop a neat GUI for it to succeed in the market. Mac OS X is basically based on Darwin, an open-source implementation of BSD.

2. Best at audio/video/photo editing.

Mac comes bundles with out-of-the box photo/audio/video editing softwares which are of top quality and suffice from basic to advanced needs. Moreover Adobe(R) does have a version of all their products targeted for the Mac users.

3. Vista runs on a Mac

With Mac coming on the Intel platform, you could get the best of both the worlds and run Microsoft Windows Vista on the new Mac. This is not that easy the other way round, on a traditional PC(i’m not gonna post the hacks here now ).

4. .Mac

A mac comes with a subscription to a .Mac account, to save your files and data online. The retrieval is really simple and fast.

5. Fewer Viruses

Mac not being the top-selling OS, many hackers/crackers won’t take it as their first target. Even with Mac being their priority, the rock-solid Unix architecture is difficult(not impossible) to breach.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Apple