A couple of days ago, my old wireless desktop set (mouse and keyboard) had its receiver die on me. So I had to go out and grab another wireless desktop set for my PC. Microsoft offers some great wireless desktop sets but I decided to go with Logitech's Cordless Desktop S 510.

The Logitech Cordless Desktop S 510 is Certified for Windows Vista and has some great features:

• Fast 27 MHz wireless performance.
• Programmable F-Keys that can be set to open favorite applications, websites, or files.
• One-Touch Controls that let you access music, video, volume, email, and the Internet.
• Power Management lets you go longer with a low-battery light and auto-off.
• Tilt Wheel plus Zoom allows you to go side to side or in and out on photos, websites or even spreadsheets.

I took some Unboxing shots to share.

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If you’re a little confused to why and how Microsoft makes acquisitions, Tina Wood at Microsoft’s On10 community has kindly produced this video debunking some of the Microsoft myths, in which, she demonstrates the thought process behind these acquisitions. Here’s a quick snippet.

Life At Microsoft - The Truth Revealed

It should also be noted that two of the updates are not required if the user is already running Service Pack 1.

• Critical Update for Windows Vista: KB947890

• Important Update for Windows Vista: KB946456

Download: 32-bit | 64-bit

• Critical Update for Windows Vista: KB946026

Download: 32-bit | 64-bit

• Critical Update for Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista: KB944533

Download: 32-bit | 64-bit

• Important Update for IIS in Windows Vista: KB942831

Download: 32-bit | 64-bit

Set a fixed size Page File

In Control Panel the System applet has different tabs where you can manage these settings. The recommended size for a fixed Page file is shown at the bottom of the Virtual Memory tab. Choose this size as both the minimum and maximum under “Custom size”.

For A speedy networking
In Networking, Turn off Qos Packet Scheduler

On many machines, this will speed up networking. You can also Uncheck “IPV6″ since you probably don’t need this just yet.

Turn off the “chrome”

Turning off the fancy Aero interface, turning off the sidebar, and otherwise disabling the features that make Vista look and feel unique will help speed up performance. Free programs like CCleaner (”Crap Cleaner”) have features that let you manage the startup programs and clean up unneeded files off your hard drive.

Welcome to "The Quest for the Holy Desktop WMI Filter”, this is a global search for what you could call "The Perfect Desktop WMI Filter". A WMI filter which, by using WMI Query Language (WQL), should be able to spot DESKTOP computers only. It should be a general query - meaning it should be possible to use the filter in most Active Directory environments around the globe for Group Policy filtering.

So, what is a desktop really? Well, actually in this case we'll say it's the opposite of a laptop. Hmm, then what is a laptop? Easy enough: a computer with a battery! We've got the WMI filter for finding laptops already:

Select * from Win32_Battery  - don't you just love the simplicity in this query?

This filter will make a computer with a battery respond back with "TRUE" (because the WMI class instance is present), meaning a GPO with this filter will apply to computers with batteries. Simple right? And you might think it's easy to just "turn it around" to find desktops, like:

Select * From Win32_Battery Where Availability != 2
  or
Select

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Most if not all the attention surrounding Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has been around performance, reliability and compatibility, but you probably didn’t know SP1 also makes short strides in terms of Vista’s power efficiency. And by short, I really do mean short because we’re talking about improvements in the magnitude of only a couple percents. That in the context of 5 hours battery life is a mere additional 6 minutes. Having said that, some is better than none.

The first of two improvements is in the display subsystem. As you are probably aware of, the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) in Vista utilities the 3D rendering capabilities of your graphics card to draw the desktop and windows.

If you’ve ever played 3D games, you might have come across a graphics option called VSync. In a nutshell, VSync makes sure the output of the graphics card is synchronized with the refresh rate of your monitor. This prevents moving images from an effect of being teared. By design, Vista enables VSync to prevent a glitch free experience.

The side effect of VSync however is that it requires an interrupt to the CPU to maintain its sync. The default VSync rate

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