Windows Vista and SP1 focus on delivering greater performance and overall system responsiveness. By striking a balance between speed and responsiveness, windows vista and SP1 deliver a level of performance that has the greatest positive impact on the system’s usability.

This guide looks at the following areas of performance improvement:
• Making configuration changes that help a computer feel more responsive when you use it.
• Using hardware to boost the actual physical speed of a computer.
• Making configuration changes that help a computer to start faster.
• Making the computer more reliable may help increase performance.
• Monitoring performance occasionally so that you can stop problems before they get too big.

Improve Performance Quickly and Easily.
This guide focuses on performance improvements on a single computer, but also takes a look at some of the tools used in enterprise environments to help make performance tuning manageable on a much larger scale.

Download: Windows Vista Performance and Tuning

In the last video, Esther told you all about how Instant Search makes her day-to-day life easier. Today, she's going to talk to you about Live Icons, which makes searching even faster by letting you see a preview of the files you're searching for. If you're a visual person you'll especially appreciate seeing icons instead of file names or folders, and not having to open each file individually, which saves a ton of time.   

Video: Windows Vista Demo: Live Icons

There appears to be a shift taking place in the PC industry: the move from 32-bit to 64-bit PCs. We've been tracking the change by looking at the percentage of 64-bit PCs connecting to windows updates, and have seen a dramatic increase in recent months.


The installed base of 64-bit Windows Vista PCs, as a percentage of all windows vista systems, has more than tripled in the U.S. in the last three months, while worldwide adoption has more than doubled during the same period. Another view shows that 20% of new Windows Vista PCs in the U.S. connecting to Windows Update in June were 64-bit PCs, up from just 3% in March. Put more simply, usage of 64-bit Windows Vista is growing much more rapidly than 32-bit. Based on current trends, this growth will accelerate as the retail channel shifts to supplying a rapidly increasing assortment of 64-bit desktops and laptops.

64-bit PCs running 64-bit editions of Windows Vista typically have 4GB of memory or more. Compared to 32-bit systems, which top out at around 3GB of memory, 64-bit PCs can offer added responsiveness when running a lot of applications at the same time and have...

Moving onward from windows xp service Pack 3 and windows vista Service Pack 1 to Windows 7, Microsoft is gearing up for the death of 32-bit versions of the Windows client. On the server-side, Window's transition to 64-bit only architectures is almost complete, with Windows Server 2008 being the last server operating system from Microsoft with support for 32-bit CPUs.


On the client-side, the evolution from x86 to x64 is still a long way from the finish line, but the Redmond company is starting to witness the first signs. According to the software giant, the adoption of x64 Vista is growing at a pace superior of x86, a trend which is predicted to accelerate.

"We've been tracking the change by looking at the percentage of 64-bit PCs connecting to windows update, and have seen a dramatic increase in recent months. The installed base of 64-bit Windows Vista PCs, as a percentage of all Windows Vista systems, has more than tripled in the U.S. in the last three months, while worldwide adoption has more than doubled during the same period. Another view shows that 20% of new Windows Vista PCs in the U.S. connecting to Windows Update in...

Trojans are the main culprit for recent spyware and malware infections.

Reports and studies have confirmed that most malware comes from Trojan infections or Trojan files instead of other means. Trojans make up the main cause for the installation of malware or rogue anti-spyware programs on PC’s. BitDefender, a security vender, claimed that 80 percent of malware that infected computers worldwide came from a form of a Trojan on a computer. We know from our many parasite removal guides that malware comes in deferent forms that perform many malicious functions. In some cases it is not the Trojan that steals your personal information or create popups. It is usually the malware that is installed from a Trojan.

Malware may not be very difficult to remove in some situations compared to a Trojan infection. The Trojan that originally installed the malware may hang out on your system and further infect your computer after you remove or attempt to remove any malware. Because Trojans, for the most part, do not actively run process or stand out in the crowd as much as malware, it can go undetected for a long time.

Did you

…

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian Linux. Different Linux distributions target different functional niches. The goal of Ubuntu is to bring Linux into the desktop workspace. To do this, it needs to provide a stable user interface, plenty of office tools, drivers for a myriad of peripherals, and still be user-friendly. Although different groups manage nearly every open source project, Canonical Ltd. provides a central point for development and support. Canonical, along with the Ubuntu community, can answer most of your technical (and not so technical) questions.

Different Linux distributions fill specific needs. For example, although RedHat started life as a unifying distribution, it primarily supported English applications. SuSE was a popular internationalized distribution. Many distributions were maintained by modifying other distributions. For example, Kheops is a French version of RedHat, and the Beowulf clustered computing environment is based on RedHat.

Although RedHat has seeded many different distributions, it is not alone. Debian Linux is another distribution with a significant following. As with RedHat, Debian has been used to spawn many different niche distributions. Although Ubuntu is based on Debian, it is also seeding other distributions.

Different distributions of the Linux operating system are sometimes...