Posted on May 15th, 2008%
A friend of mine (who is a reseller for Diamond Multimedia) forwarded me an email last night which shed some interesting insight into video card driver stability with Windows Vista:
ATI Provides Proven Driver Stability
Microsoft is currently involved in a class action lawsuit regarding problems with its “Vista Capable” marketing. As part of this trial, hundreds of pages of internal Microsoft emails were unsealed. If you want to take a look at them, here they are (pdf). Aside from providing some interesting insight into what goes on internally at Microsoft leading up to the release of a new OS, there is also a ranking of the cause of crashes logged with Microsoft.
The rankings, based on crashes logged with Microsoft in 2007, paint a very positive picture of ATI’s graphics drivers. For instance, 28.8% of all Vista crashes were caused by nVidia drivers, compared with 9.3% caused by ATI. When you adjust for market share, we still . . .
→ Read More: ATI video drivers may be more stable than nVidia drivers (but does it matter?)
Posted on February 6th, 2008%
On Friday, I received my iMac, bringing me back to the world of the Mac OS for the first time in about eight years. The iMac is not my main rig — I still use a “Wintel” PC running Windows XP for work — it’s a replacement for my home computer (though I eventually hope to expand its use beyond pictures, movies, and World of Warcraft).
So, what’s the initial reaction from a guy who was very entrenched into Windows, but has a solid Mac history?
What’s up with the mouse movement? One of the first things I do on any computer I use is turn the mouse speed up all the way. I want the slightest flick of my wrist to shoot the cursor across the screen. Doing this on a Mac made it, well, not as zippy as I’d prefer. Apparently, plenty of people agree, and the fix to the problem is to use some freeware hacks . . .
→ Read More: A Windows user’s first four days with a Mac
Posted on September 13th, 2007%
I frequently rebuild my computer once Windows starts to reach its half-life, formatting the ‘ol hard drive and starting from scratch. Unfortunately, this typically involves a hunt for the Windows XP product key, which typically was written down on a piece of paper and subsequently misplaced. This time, however, I decided not to hunt for that sticky note. Surely, Windows XP knows the product key that was used when it was installed… right?
Apparently, it does, and there’s a little piece of free software that can find it for you. KeyFinder by Magical Jelly Bean Software can identify the product key for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, Office 97, Office XP, and Office 2003 — on the local computer or on a remote computer (provided you have appropriate security permissions). Very impressive.
. . .
→ Read More: Forgot your Windows product key? It is recoverable…
Posted on June 5th, 2007%
I’ve been looking at the following window for about ten minutes, during which time it has gone unchanged.
It didn’t go away until I shut down Firefox. Go figure.
And just for the record, I don’t blame ReSharper for this one — I blame the Windows installer.
. . .
→ Read More: Time remaining: 0 seconds
Posted on March 12th, 2007%
For those of you who come to my site looking for help installing Linux on VirtualPC (quite a few, as it is the second most popular post on this site), you’ll know that the big problem revolves around VirtualPC only supporting 16-bit color and most Linux distributions supporting 24-bit color by default. (Why this limitation hasn’t been lifted in VirtualPC yet, I don’t know.)
Microsoft blogger Joe Stagner (who blogs at Joe on .Net) recently posted instructions on how to get an Ubuntu installation to install with 16-bit color — instructions which he in turn found on an Ubuntu blog. Considering the growing popularity of Ubuntu and the cost of VitrualPC 2007 (it’s free), this’ll undoubtedly be helpful to those frustrated by failed Linux installs on VPC.
. . .
→ Read More: Installing Ubuntu with VirtualPC
|
|
Uncategorized 
