Say hello to an orchestra of sound snippet in your instant messenger. The Windows Live Messenger 9.0 beta was released today sporting a handful of new features as already uncovered last week by LiveSide. One feature in particular called Signature Sound is giving users the power to customize the sound their contacts hear when they come online. However as annoying that might sound (pun), what’s more interesting and actually useful is the embedded sound editor used to customize your Signature Sound and every other sound in Messenger.

From here, you can select any sound files in WMA, WAV or MP3 format to edit. Once you click on a valid sound file, it will take a few seconds to analyze the file and display a sound wave spectrum for you to edit.

The interface for this editor is similar to any mainstream sound editor applications in which it displays a selection box with a start and end point to clip a segment of an audio track. Messenger restricts all of its sounds to a maximum of 5 seconds which might seem to restrict creativity, but you’ll be

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I know it is taged as Vista SP1..but I`m giving here the hack because of the growing Popularity…So Enjoy!

@echo off

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f

echo XPSP3 registry key has been set. Please check for updates in Windows Update

pause

Copy paste this in a Notepad and Save it as SP3.CMD. It will add some registry keys which will make Windows Update believe that you are a member of the private beta program. Then, you launch Windows Update (via Windows help) to download Windows XP SP3.

New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

Vista’s first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system’s performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.

Vista’s performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1–much lower than XP’s SP3 improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that although the

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