Windows Vista, the new operating system currently under development at Microsoft, will eventually replace Windows XP in a majority of games-oriented PCs. In this preview you’ll see how modern graphics hardware performs under Windows Vista Beta 2.

There’s a terrible performance hit in Far Cry: about 40% for the senior models in the Radeon X1900 family and 30-35% for the Radeon X1900 GT. In Windows XP, you can run this game on a Radeon X1900 XTX or XT with 4x FSAA in every resolution, including the exotic 1920×1200, but Vista Beta 2 limits you to 1600×1200 or even to 1280×1024 (on the Radeon X1900 GT).

Read the rest of the story at X-bit labs     

The first post-RC1 build of Windows Vista reveals few surprises. Find out what’s new–and what isn’t?

From Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite

Windows Vista Build 5728 Screenshot Gallery

Windows Vista Build 5728 Screenshot Gallery 2: Clean Install

Windows Vista Build 5728 Screenshot Gallery 3: System Repair Features

Windows Vista Build 5728 Screenshot Gallery 4: Windows Vista Basic User Interface

Windows Vista Build 5728 Screenshot Gallery 5: Windows Classic User Interface

It’s free and it’s better than ever. This past summer, Google acquired Picasa, our favorite photo-management tool, and a week later, in keeping with its usual business strategy, the company quit charging for the application. Now, for the first time since the acquisition, Google has released a new version, Picasa 2.0, and we like it even more than before.

With this release, Picasa is even easier to use for organizing, editing, and sharing your digital photos. Without leaving Picasa, you can now move photos across your Windows file tree, add captions to your pictures, pan and zoom, and use 12 new lighting and color effects. You can also save photos to an external drive, burn them to a disc, or upload them to popular photo-sharing Web sites. It also offers built in support for Google’s Blogger software and makes creating a blogger entry easier than ever.

When you install Picasa 2.0, it scans your system for photos and collects them into it’s library. By default, Picasa scans your entire hard drive, but if your system is particularly cluttered, you might opt for a scan of just your Windows desktop, the My Documents folder, and the My Pictures folder. The app collects not only JPEGs and GIFs, but all sorts of other image formats—even video files.

With previous versions of Picasa, this photo library acted independently of your Windows file tree, but now the two come together quite nicely. One section of the library, dubbed Folders On Disk, shows how your photos are organized within Windows, and you can easily move photos from folder to folder.

You can still organize photos into virtual albums or “labels” that don’t correspond to your Windows file system, and you retain the ability to use the same photo across multiple albums. Picasa’s nifty Timeline still lets you instantaneously scroll through a chronological catalog of your photos. If you aren’t already using a photo manager with such a timeline interface—Adobe Photoshop Album also offers one—you might try Picasa for this feature alone. It may be the best way to browse large numbers of photos.

As you organize your pictures, Picasa also lets you change filenames, key in captions, and add ratings to your favorites. Then, as time goes on, you can easily track down old photos with the app’s improved search tool, which lets you locate files by keywords, ratings, and dates.

The real news, however, is the long list of photo-editing tools available with Picasa 2.0. You can instantly adjust highlights, shadows, fill lights, and color temperature. You can add all sorts of effects, including sepia, black and white, and soft focus. You can crop, straighten, remove red-eye, and more. And if you don’t like an edit, you can reverse it with no more than the click of a mouse.

Picasa even provides new ways to share your photos. In addition to sending pics via your local e-mail client or Picasa’s built-in client, you can now send images via Google’s new Web-based e-mail service, Gmail. You can also easily upload pictures to popular photo-sharing sites, including Shutterfly and Ofoto, or burn photos onto CD or DVD. Plus, the app still integrates with Picasa’s photo-sharing client, Hello, which works a lot like instant messenging software, and as mentioned above, you can still upload pics and posts  to Google’s popular blogging tool, Blogger.

Unlike Adobe Photoshop Album, Picasa doesn’t offer dedicated tools for transferring photos to handheld devices, cell phones, and digital video recorders. But this is a minor quibble. With its latest release, Picasa stands toe to toe with Photoshop Album, and unlike ACDSee, it’s intuitive enough for even the greenest of computer newbies. Novices may be intimidated by the breadth of tools on offer, but when they get over that hump, the app is wonderfully easy to use. Once again, Google’s done it right.

Here’s a trick that I don’t think many people are aware of. Right-click on any folder on your Windows Vista machine while holding down the shift key. You’ll see an extra context-sensitive menu item there: Open Command Prompt here. Just click on this menu and a command window will open with the current working directory set to the folder’s actual location.

Figure: folder context-sensitive menu, with and without the shift key modifier.

In the past there was a Windows XP powertoy that did this; now it’s built into the operating system (albeit hidden away to protect the unwary from themselves). What’s really cool about this is that if the target folder is a network location, Windows Vista silently maps a network drive to that location before opening the folder (so that your command prompt has a valid path containing a drive letter) and then deletes the network drive once the command prompt is closed.

Source:  http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/09/18/761092.aspx

ATI: https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=5712

nVidia: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_96.33.html

HP: http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html?pageDisplay=drivers

MS TechNEt Forums: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=526292&SiteID=17 for dealing with Vista Driver issues

MS TechNet Application Compatibility: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/appcompat/default.mspx

Source: In House

The Windows Recovery Environment (aka Windows RE aka WinRE) team would use this blog to share information, tricks and tips about WinRE with support professionals and end-users of Windows. We would also like to use this blog to get feedback from the community.

So what is WinRE?

Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is a recovery platform based on Windows Preinstallation Encironment (WinPE). WinRE provides two main functionalities:

1. Automatic diagnosis and repair of boot problems using a tool called Startup Repair.

2. A centralized platform for advanced recovery tools.

We will explain more about these two functions in upcoming posts.

WinRE is new for Windows Vista and completely replaces the recovery console in Windows XP. You should be able to perform most tasks of recovery console from WinRE.

How can end-users get access to WinRE and Startup Repair?

For Vista RC1 release, WinRE is available on the Windows installation DVD. To access WinRE, boot using the installation DVD, choose your language settings and hit “Next” and then click on “Repair Your Computer” link at the bottom of the screen. This will launch WinRE. After choosing an OS to repair, you should see all the recovery tools available in WinRE.

After Windows Vista releases, WinRE will be available via other convenient means as well. For example, OEMs may pre-install WinRE on the hard disk and corporations (SA) can make WinRE available for network boot via a WDS server.

So that’s WinRE in a nutshell. Watch this space for information on how to use WinRE and Startup Repair to fix unbootable computers.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/archive/2006/09/18/760295.aspx

http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/

Just found this, a great interface, lots of storage space, tabbed messaging, built in RSS reader, etc.

This is on par or possibly better than the upcoming Outlook 2007 and I do not make that comment easily.

Ok, the ad supported interface is a little annoying. The ads are so BIG. But beyond that….

Source: In House

This is a very cool web based picture resizing tool.

I did 3 pictures top test it and they came out great.

You must try this.  ResizR

As you may have heard there are going to be a “few” versions of Microsoft Vista when it is finally released. Redmond this week start to lift some of the details for retailers. Some interesting ones to note are that all versions of Vista will be on the same DVD. This will enable upgrading by customers (and I imagine reduce costs). All customers will do is buy the version they want then and then if needed buy an additional upgrade license as they will already have the DVD.

Due to the confusion already showing of what version is what, all versions of Vista will be color coded.

Light Green-Home Basic
Dark Green-Home Premium
Blue-Vista Business
Platinum-Ultimate Version
Europe will get 2 extra versions Home N and Business N offering no media player per the 2004 legal ruling against Microsoft.

The much awaited aero glass makes its debut in the Home Premium Version, Business offers faxing and other features but NOT Media Center. Microsoft is targeting the premium version to have 50% saturation.

Source: Bink.nu

The time comes in the life of software when it must say goodbye, it boards a plane, and with sad music in its ears and tears in your eyes, you fly away to another time, another day. That is what Windows Live has done, after living in Beta for a while, it has boarded the plane and flown to another place and a new life. A place called Live. So its official, Windows Live has said goodbye to Beta. Microsoft’s Live services are now live (small ‘L”), believe it or not. Live search will also replace MSN search as the Microsoft search of choice. Anyone want to bet that MSN in its entirety won’t be around much longer, or will be rebranded? That would be my guess.

News Source: ArsTechnica