Month: August 2007

It is not the first OS service pack ever, but is eagerly awaited by many as a panacea to all Vista ills. It won’t be, of course, any more than Windows 2000 or Windows XP SP1 was. Windows 2000 saw four service packs in it’s life, and so far there have been two for XP with a final ‘roll up’ SP3 appearing at the same time as Vista SP1. Service Packs roll up all previous updates into one neat package, and include as many fixes and patches as have been found to be benign. Before release, the SP has to be tested … Continue reading Vista SP1..

The nVidia video driver situation appears to be finally getting ‘beta’ with this latest release. I ran Age of Empires III last night, and while I did not notice more detail necessarily, the game ran smoother than it has done since making the transition from XP to Vista. I still only get a 3.5 game performance rating from my GeForce 6600, but it is good enough for me presently. I may even reload CFS 3 if only to see if it too runs better. My flying ability is not governed by video performance, I can assure you. I am no natural flyer … Continue reading nVidia Video drivers 163.44 Beta..

Just recently, I noticed that sound through my speakers and headset was a little ‘buzzy’. I don’t remember doing anything to make it so, no updates or anything like that but, suddenly listening to music was not a pleasureable experience.  So I set off in search of drivers. The RealTek website is presently sporting version 6243_Vista_APO which, if downloaded and run, should clear up your ‘buzzy’ sound just as it did mine. http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=23&PFid=23&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#AC

There are two Vista updates available now in the wild that, at the time of writing, have yet to appear in WU. The two KB’s, 938194 and 938979, cover performance and stability issues, one in particular being file copy/transfer speeds across local drives and networks. Re. copying files, the situation has improved somewhat. My timings are based upon copying the same block of 55 video clips totalling 2.16gb to a second drive on the local computer, and to a drive in one of the other computers attached to the home network. The drives are all WD 80gb IDE types. Drive to drive (local) = … Continue reading Vista Updates..