Fixing Windows Vista again
In the three previous installments of this series, I discussed ways to improve the performance of Windows Vista by changing some settings (especially those installed by an OEM PC maker).
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19.5.2008 Resurrect Windows Vista After It Crashes and Burns
Right... Windows Vista crashing and burning is the worst case scenario, but a scenario nonetheless, and even more than that, a viable possibility.
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11.8.2007 Fixing Windows Vista: Taming UAC
The User Account Control feature in Windows Vista has been known to drive normally level-headed people over the edge with frustration. If you find it annoying, you might be tempted to turn it off.
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1.5.2008 Fixing Vista: Faster, smarter search
In previous installments of this series, I discussed the virtues of a clean Vista install, some useful User Account Control workarounds, top tools for troubleshooting, and the wisdom of shutting off Windows system services.
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6.6.2008 New attack code crashes Windows XP & Vista
Security researchers have released attack code that will crash Windows XP and Vista PCs that are susceptible to a recently patched bug in the operating system.
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19.1.2008 Fixing Windows Vista 3 - Top Troubleshooting Tools
Do you think Windows Vista is slow, crash-prone, or unreliable? Join the crowd. Over the past year, reviews of Windows Vista by mainstream media outlets, the technical press, bloggers, and ordinary users have been, for the most part, scathing.
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7.5.2008 NVIDIA Releases WHQL Vista RTM Drivers
On January Nvidia finally released the long-awaited final graphics drivers for Windows Vista.
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8.1.2007 Nvidia ForceWare for Windows Vista 100.64 (BETA)
Nvidia has released yet another beta set of video drivers for Windows Vista. As usual, only English flavours (both 32bit and 64bit) are available.
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16.2.2007 NVIDIA ForceWare v162.22 WHQL for Windows Vista
There is a new Windows Vista WHQL driver release available to download from NVIDIA, v162.22.
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28.7.2007 Nvidia Hit With New Class Action Threat Over Windows Vista Glitches
A New Yorker is seeking support for a class action suit against the video card manufacturer because he says drivers for the company's high-end 8800 card have caused him problems.
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25.4.2007 Samsung Pays $300m for Price Fixing
Samsung accepted terms of a plea agreement Thursday that finds the electronics company guilty of conspiring with other manufacturers to artificially inflate the cost of computer memory, thus unnecessarily increasing the prices consumers paid.
As part of the agreement, Samsung would pay a $300 million fine in exchange for prosecutorial immunity for both the company and most of its employees. Seven people, including president of the semiconductor division Y.H. Park, were excluded from the settlement and could still face prosecution.
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1.12.2005 Reports: IE 7 Crashes While Accessing Windows Updates
Some users of Internet Explorer 7's beta are reporting problems accessing crucial update sites, but Microsoft denies any system-wide glitch.
Some users of Internet Explorer 7's beta are reporting problems accessing the crucial Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites, but Microsoft denied any system-wide glitch.
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20.2.2006 New Zero-Day Bug Crashes Internet Explorer
Because the vulnerability can be exploited by a single malicious HTML tag, IE could be brought to its knees if its user simply surfed to a nasty Web site.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser crashes when attacked through a new unpatched vulnerability, security companies warned Friday.
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18.3.2006 Microsoft drops 6 bulletins, fixing 11 vulnerabilities
Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday train arrived today with six bulletins covering at least 11 vulnerabilities, most carrying the company’s highest severity rating.
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11.7.2007 Chinese Windows 2000 attack crashes PCs
Security researchers have spotted malicious code that triggers a critical vulnerability in the Chinese version of Windows 2000, and warned non-Chinese users to expect attacks.
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16.4.2008 Windows Movie Maker Crashes on XP SP3 with Over 100 Video Transitions or Effects
A range of fixes from Microsoft aimed for Windows XP Service Pack 3 are illustrative of the fact that you can indeed have too much of a good thing.
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5.7.2009 NVIDIA Forceware 163.75/6 for Windows
It was just over a day ago that 163.74 was leaked for Vista and now NVIDIA have released new drivers for both Windows XP and Windows Vista in 32bit and 64bit flavours.
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14.10.2007 NVIDIA Unleashes Big Bang II
A few months ago, NVIDIA announced its plans to release a GeForce R180 series of drivers meant to bring new features and technology innovations to its graphics cards.
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23.10.2008 ATI Radeon X1650XT vs. Nvidia GeForce 7600GT
The next generation of mid-range graphics cards are just around the corner, so should you even consider purchasing a GeForce 7600GT or Radeon X1650XT graphics card?
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7.12.2006 Nvidia’s High-End Chipset Under Fire for Problems
Nvidia Corp., a leading designer of graphics processor and core-logic sets, is about to face criticism from enthusiasts for the problems that occur with the company’s latest premium-class chipset.
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16.12.2006 Nvidia GeForce Forceware 163.71 Beta
Nvidia has released Vista & XP drivers for the Geforce 6, 7 & 8 series. This is not a WHQL release, is in beta form and available in 32bit and 64bit flavours.
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22.9.2007 ATI Radeon X1650 Pro vs. Nvidia GeForce 7600GS
As much as we love testing and talking about the latest innovations in PC graphics, it's only a fraction of the gamers market that can truly enjoy these high-end products as soon as they come out of the oven because of its high prices.
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31.10.2006 Nvidia Launches DirectX 10 Graphics Card for $299
Partners of Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest supplier of standalone graphics processors, have unveiled a 320MB flavour of the GeForce 8800 GTS (the other flavour has 640MB memory onboard).
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13.2.2007 How to Install Vista Language Packs MUI on all versions of Vista + video tutorial
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, and Vista Business versions of the Microsoft licensing restrictions can only preserve a language!
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23.9.2008 The Vista Built-in Super Administrator Account Has Survived in Vista SP1
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is designed to evolve the RTM version of the latest Windows client from Microsoft, made available in November 2006 to business customers, and in January 2007 to the general consumers.
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15.2.2008 Vista SP1 Is Out, XP SP3 Old News, the Pink Edition of Vista Is In
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is now nothing more than water under the bridge, now that the service pack was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, shipping to general users on March 18.
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27.3.2008 Tell Hasta la Vista to XP - Time to Upgrade to Vista SP1
Like it or not, this is the right time not only to upgrade to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 but also to tell hasta la vista to Windows XP.
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30.6.2008 Instant Change Vista Product ID with Vista ProductID Changer
In past we have reviewed number of application to recover product key like Product Key Finder, WinGuggle, Windows product Key Finder.
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1.11.2009 Vista SP1 RC1 Flies Past Vista RTM and Windows XP SP2
Despite the fact that Microsoft has expressed its official position regarding testing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 ahead of its finalization, there is simply too much of a hunger for the service pack.
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27.12.2007 Vista SP1 Won't Resolve the 4 GB RAM Limitation of 32-bit Windows Vista
32-bit Windows operating systems, and Windows Vista makes no exception whatsoever to this rule, are limited in terms of the amount of system memory that can be addressed to no more than 4 GB.
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4.1.2008NVIDIA Drivers Crash Vista
Were you one of the many early Vista adopters who experienced crashing? Well don't go out and point your finger at Microsoft just yet. A recent study
has shown that nearly 30% of Vista crashes(28.8% to be exact) in 2007 were due to NVIDIA drivers. That is an estimated 479,326 systems crashed due to
the drivers.
Microsoft crashes came in second place with 17.9%. While NVIDIA's competitor; ATI, came in fourth in the single
digits with only 9.3%. This is really going go pressure Intel because they have to support the incompatible chipsets. Hopefully in the near future we
can see some improvement on the drivers compatibility.
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29.03.2008NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007
Nearly 30% of logged Vista crashes were due to NVIDIA driver problems, according to a Microsoft data included in the bundle. That's some 479,326
hung systems, if you're keeping score at home, and it's in first place by a large margin -- Microsoft clocks in at number two at 17.9 percent,
and ATI is fourth with 9.3 percent.
The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to
break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by
month and then graphed, we'd presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver
issues under control.
The data clearly indicates that NVIDIA had a driver problem, but it's impossible to quantify the scope of that
problem given the numbers above. NVIDIA holds a greater percentage of the market than ATI, which means that there will inevitably be a higher
percentage of NVIDIA driver crashes than ATI driver crashes; however, the degree to which such market share considerations have affected the results
above is hard to determine in the absence of more data. There's also the matter of data collection; Microsoft's charts do not clarify if
multiple crashes from a single system each counted as separate events. In theory, NVIDIA's proportion of total driver crashes could be inflated by
a relatively small handful of systems with severe driver issues.
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28.03.2008'Vista capable' suit sheds harsh light on Nvidia
Damon Poeter: <...> According to a list of driver crashes in Vista compiled by Microsoft that was unsealed by U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman in
late February, Nvidia was responsible for nearly 29 percent of all such crashes. The timeframe for the list is hard to pin down. It's given as simply
"Period: 2007" on page 47 of
the unsealed discovery.
Whether that represents all or just part of 2007 is unclear. Also somewhat ambiguous is how the crash list was generated. Sources told ChannelWeb it
was a safe bet that the numbers were gathered from users sending prompted reports to Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft following driver-caused
application or system crashes in Vista.
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25.03.2008Nvidia Faces 51 Suits With Price-Fixing Claims Over AMD Deal
Nvidia Corp. on
Thursday said 51 civil
complaints have been filed
against it as of May 14
alleging price fixing and
anti-competitive agreements,
among other things, between
Nvidia and Advanced Micro
Devices Inc. (AMD).
Nvidia, of Santa
Clara, Calif., makes
programmable graphic
processors. Advanced Micro
Devices entered the graphics
processor market with its
acquisition of ATI
Technologies Inc. last
October.
As reported
last December, Nvidia and ATI
Technologies account for the
lion's share of graphics
chips that are sold as
independent products, with
sales leadership regularly
shifting back and forth
between the companies. ..
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24.05.2007Gritty Nits - Fix Internet Explorer 7 Crashes in Vista
A lot of you may have seen Internet Explorer crash "Internet Explorer has stopped working" when closing the browser in Windows Vista. It happens all
too often and while it no longer takes the operating system out with it, it is still annoying.
There are a lot of reasons why Internet
Explorer will do this, but one we have found that really stands out is Adobe's Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX
control. Seven (7) of
ten (10) IE 7 crashes I have personally seen, are related to the Flash Player plug-in.
Read full story.....
neowin.net - 30.01.2008
Hubble Space Telescope crashes again, and fix may not come until February
And you thought fixing your PC was tough? After beaming in pictures from outer space for the past 18 years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope now needs
to be repaired. But that might not happen until next week, or possibly even next year...
betanews.com - 18.10.2008
Emails allege ATI-Nvidia price fixing conspiracy
New details have been released on the evidence backing a civil lawsuit against Nvidia and ATI (now owned by AMD) - evidence that allegedly indicates
the two companies participated in a graphics card price fixing cartel.
In June 2007, at least 51 separate complaints were lumped
together and amended into a single class action lawsuit against the GPU vendors in the US District Court of the Northern District of California.
The complaint was filed on behalf of everyone in the US who has bought a graphics card from either ATI or Nvidia from December 2002
to the present. It alleges the companies "conducted numerous secret meetings and communications in which they conspired to fix, raise, maintain and
stabilize prices of GPUs sold in the United States."
winbeta.org - 04.09.2008
Nvidia ForceWare 96.33 For
Windows Vista RC1 now
available
NVIDIA has released the
following Beta drivers for use
with Windows Vista RC1 that
will enable you to test the
basic features and
capabilities of the new
operating system.
Release Highlights:
* These drivers are only
compatible with Windows Vista
RC1 build
5600.16384.060829-2230 and
higher, and should not be used
with other versions of Windows
Vista.
* Includes the
new NVIDIA Control Panel.
Please visit the NVIDIA
Control Panel website for more
information.
*
Includes OpenGL driver for
compatibility testing.
* Improved application
compatibility and
performance.
* For a
full list of fixes issues,
please view the Release Notes...
windowsvistax.com - 04.09.2006
Vista SP1 causing random app crashes for some users
On the Microsoft TechNet forums, a handful of users began reporting (in early April) that after installing Vista SP1 various applications would stop
launching and instead gave the error "Not a valid Win32 application." Users found that Excel would often spit this message out and if they tried
running it under administrative rights, the error would change to "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service."
winbeta.org - 23.04.2008
NVIDIA jumps onboard Windows 7 bandwagon early
Long Zheng: Popular hardware vendor NVIDIA who has been rightly criticized for their
buggy Windows Vista graphics and chipset drivers is now one of the first third-parties to commit their support for the next version of Windows.
It comes at little surprise the job advertisement NVIDIA published
last week is for a Senior Quality Assurance Lead on Windows 7, perhaps to ensure the same mistakes aren’t made again. It writes...
winbeta.org - 24.05.2008
Sharp, Hitachi investigated for fixing price of Nintendo DS screens
Sharp and Hitachi said Thursday that their LCD display businesses were probed to look for evidence of price fixing in portable game console displays...
betanews.com - 28.02.2008
ATI & nVidia Windows Vista
Beta 2 Drivers
To coincide with the release
of Windows Vista Beta 2, both
ATI and nVidia have released
updated drivers for the new
beta 2 build of Windows Vista.
The new nVidia driver includes
the new nVidia Control Panel.
Both drivers can be downloaded
from the links below.
jcxp.net - 24.05.2006
Why you can't have Vista SP1 yet: Microsoft fixing driver problem
Despite being released to manufacturing last week, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is not being made available to all customers because Microsoft is
trying to resolve an issue in which hardware devices may stop functioning after SP1 is installed...
betanews.com - 12.02.2008
Nvidia: DirectX 10.1 'won't make difference'
A senior Nvidia figure has said that DirectX 10.1 "won't make much difference when it comes out."
Nick Stam, director of
Technical Marketing for Nvidia, also admitted making products compatible with Windows Vista had been difficult. He made the comments at a briefing in
London yesterday.
"Vista out of the chute was hard, but we weren't the only ones caught in that," said Stam, citing Adobe and
Creative as other companies who experienced significant Vista compatibility issues. Nvidia has also been criticised for not enabling SLI compatibility
on the platform quick enough. "Microsoft were changing things... impacted the driver team in a big way."
And since then?
"We've worked really hard to get Vista and XP on a par," explained Stam. "In some cases Vista gives better performance." Mentioning that drivers
were historically a pain, Stam pointed out that there could be up to 20 million lines of code for a single thread.
winbeta.org - 09.11.2007
LCD Price-Fixing Probe Widens
A probe into price fixing of
LCD displays is expanding,
according to press reports on
Tuesday. Three countries are
investigating the actions of
companies that include:
LG.Philips, Samsung, Sharp,
and a joint venture between
Seiko Epson and Sharp...
betanews.com - 12.12.2006
Crysis PR: "Vista is far from stable as a gaming platform"
Crysis has already garnered
lots of attention and is one
of the most anticipated game
titles due out this year. No
specific release date was
offered when I asked when we
could buy it. However, it
would be very surprising if
the game didnt show up for
Christmas.
Interestingly, one of the
PR types showing the game off
and I talked a bit about Vista
and the problems that still
plague some gamers, myself
included, with Vista running
NVIDIA graphics cards. I still
experience frequent lock ups
and crashed when gaming on
Vista with my SLI 8800 Ultra
cards, and while less
frequently still have crashes
running a single card as well.
Mr. PR Guy looked me
right in the eye and said
"Vista is far from stable as
a gaming platform". This
comment left me with the
impression that the delay in
Crysis coming to market had
more to do with Crytek waiting
for stable drivers, rather
than tweaks of fixes needed in
the game itself.
winbeta.org - 17.07.2007
Fifth Samsung Exec Pleads Guilty in DRAM Price Fixing Probe
Reuters and the Associated
Press are both reporting that
a fifth senior executive of
world #1 DRAM manufacturer
Samsung has agreed to plead
guilty in connection with the
US Justice Dept.'s
investigation into memory
industry collusion and price
fixing...
betanews.com - 22.12.2006
Samsung Guilty of Memory Price
Fixing
Samsung has plead guilty to
charges of price fixing
computer memory and will pay a
$300 million fine to settle
the case, the U.S. Department
of Justice said late Thursday.
The decision revolves around
the company's actions from
1999 to 2002 to keep prices
artificially high...
betanews.com - 15.10.2005
NVIDIA launches new GPUs, ATI lies in wait
Today was originally scheduled to be the date that both NVidia and ATI launched their next-generation graphics products, but NVidia had the only one
that made it out the door in time...
betanews.com - 18.06.2008
Nvidia launches Ion netbook chips, new notebook drivers
Beyond rolling out a new graphics chipset for netbooks this week, Nvidia launched the beta edition of updated drivers for Windows XP and Vista
notebook PCs outfitted with its graphics processors...
betanews.com - 19.12.2008
