Microsoft is offering Windows Vista users the means to take Windows Vista compatibility, reliability and stability up a notch ahead of the release of the first service pack for the operating system. In this context, the Redmond company has been hammering away at Vista, since the client hot the shelves in January 2007 with constant refreshes served through the Windows Update infrastructure. Although Windows Update is not yet a fully fledged substitute for the service pack release practice, Microsoft has hinted that small and incremental updates are the way of the future, in contrast to large and bloated refreshes.

Starting with its debut on the market, Vista has had quite a rough ride, experiencing a plethora of issues, mostly centered around software and hardware incompatibilities, as well as performance. (more…)

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Microsoft released a number of updates for Vista on October 2nd. One of them was quite vague in it’s description: “An update is available that improves the compatibility, reliability, and stability of Windows Vista“. Of course the other updates had these same goals in mind, but they had a number of fixes related to the same feature. This one is a random gathering of fixes.

So what can you expect from this update?

• It extends the battery life for mobile devices.
• It improves the stability of portable computers and of desktop computers that use an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).
• It improves the reliability of Windows Vista when you open the menu of a startup application.
• It improves the stability of Internet Explorer when you open a Web page.
• It improves the stability of wireless network services.
• It shortens the startup time of Windows Vista by using a better timing structure.
• It shortens the recovery time after Windows Vista experiences a period of inactivity.
• It shortens the recovery time when you try to exit the Photos screen saver.
• It improves the stability of Windows PowerShell.

This update also resolves the following issues in Windows Vista:

• A compatibility issue that affects some third-party antivirus

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Every once in a while you notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason. A background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes. Your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What are you to do?

The solution is simple, although a little tricky at times: identify and stop the process that is killing your drive. There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process. (more…)

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