Optimizing system performance used to be about defragmenting every so often and limiting the number of applications you’re running. Unfortunately, today’s modern PC needs a whole host of support applications doing their own thing in the background in order to maintain a usable system.
You can’t blame a company for taking things slow when their technology is used by millions of people every day to view streaming content on the web even if it is horribly inefficient and causes a lackluster viewing experience.
Adobe’s Flash version 10.1 will be making usage of graphics card features to improve video playback by making the GPU do all of the processor intensive decoding and scaling. Handy in case you spend any amount of time on Youtube, Hulu, or any other site that makes extensive use of Flash to play videos.
Microsoft had a lot riding on their Windows 7 operating system, after all people weren’t exactly flocking to Windows Vista and XP has been getting long in the tooth as far as features were concerned. Their efforts seem to have done good but does all of the added newfangled-ness cause performance issues to pop up?
For Windows 7, Windows has been put on a diet in order to perform better on those machines. The most noticeable changes here are that Windows 7 eats less RAM and hard drive space out of the box than a comparable version of Vista did. There have also been some underlying tweaks to SuperFetch (it’s less aggressive on startup) and the kernel to improve responsiveness.
The tweaks are certainly there as can bee seen by the OS’ ability to eek out more performance from the same hardware.
There’s nothing quite as scary as a new operating system roll out for businesses especially when they’ve invested quite a bit of time and money in acquiring licenses for Windows XP applications. Fortunately for them, and us, Windows 7’s XP Mode will smooth things over.
The Windows Blog brings word that XP Mode has hit RTM status and will be available to download for Windows 7 Professional, an higher, users meaning your XP applications will run in a nice virtualized environment that should make things go smoothly.
You’ll be able to grab your own copy of the software when Windows 7 launches October 22nd.
Sometimes, through no fault of your own of course, things tend to go south really quickly on your storage medium due to the slip of a finger or yes even seemingly random corruption creeps up on you rendering your data unreadable. There’s usually a number of steps that go along with such a disaster anger, doubt, fear, and finally acceptance…fortunately there’s at least one last utility you can try that tries its darndest to recover your precious files.
Microsoft’s Windows 7 has experienced a relatively smooth development process, reaching RTM status without having major features dropped or widespread beta tester complaint is quite a feat given the massive code base they’re working with.
To clarify, Microsoft isn’t abandoning these users. The company is simply making it clear that for any user running a Windows operating system older than Vista, there is "no supported upgrade path." That means, of course, that you’ll need a clean install to run Windows 7. Look, our tests have shown that Windows 7 is one of the leaner Windows OSs in recent years. It can even run on sub-powered netbooks. So, it’ll likely run on your older systems (within reason, of course).
The amount of disk thrashing that would take place and the amount of cruft created by trying to upgrade a Windows XP installation must be so large as to be undoable. It’s best that individuals and, should there be any, businesses backup their important files and go with a fresh installation.
Of course most business computers connect to databases and other remote data sources so a fresh installation is their best course of action anyway since their administrators will be running tightly locked down system images…right?
Well you can’t blame the team behind Windows 7 for their exuberance, their supposed sign-off process/backstage look is a nice touch and heart warming….well as heart warming as an operating system can get of course but their efforts over the past few years will likely shine through once the OS launches October 22nd.
Platforms are built by developers, not so much by the ones hired by companies for the initial design but by the devs that decide to write programs for your brand new operating system or fancy gadget. Apple’s iPhone has been on of the most popular smart phones around which could conceivably net developers a fair bit of fame and some spending cash should their app become a hit.
So I guessed a bit, duplicated some of the users’ problems, and rushed out a bug fix. There was no need to scramble, though, because the App Store team took about two weeks to approve the dozen or so new lines of code I had added to my application. What was the holdup? Who knows, but users continued to be frustrated, and I couldn’t get the new code to them even if I knew who they were. Other developers report the same problems trying to fix bugs.
A maddening process to be sure, thankfully developers are usually a hard headed bunch so their pestering of Apple will no doubt bring about some change to the system.
Palm Pre had a nice little launch gift for Apple iTunes users in the form of displaying itself as an iPod once connected to a computer which allowed it to sync music onto the phone.
Apple hasn’t taken too kindly to Palm’s gesture so they’ve updated iTunes to version 8.2.1 in the guise of offering fixes to a number of bugs and it conveniently blocks the Palm Pre from using the software.
Is it a permanent fix or will Palm find a workaround in order to get Palm users back into their iTunes music stash?
Optimizing system performance used to be about defragmenting every so often and limiting the number of applications you’re running. Unfortunately, today’s modern PC needs a whole host of support applications doing their own thing in the background in order to maintain a usable system.
There’s nothing quite as scary as a new operating system roll out for businesses especially when they’ve invested quite a bit of time and money in acquiring licenses for Windows XP applications. Fortunately for them, and us, Windows 7’s XP Mode will smooth things over.
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